这里面好多都没听说过！  你知道几个？

 

Sony’s foray into the VCR business is a classic example of why it’s not always best to be first.

Sony helped launch the industry with the 1975 introduction of Betamax, a home VCR system with picture quality comparable to today’s DVDs, according to a BusinessInsider.com report. On top of that, Sony had distribution deals with hardware companies and retailers including Toshiba, Pioneer and Radio Shack.

By the next year, none of that mattered. JVC came out with the rival VHS tape technology, which had lower quality and cheaper tape but which could play much longer videos. By 1977, four other companies were selling VHS-compatible machines

If you think Apple invented the first widely available personal computer that used cute little icons instead of text commands, you’d be right. If you guessed that computer was the Macintosh, you’d be wrong.

Before the Mac, there was the Lisa, the first commercial PC with a graphical user interface and the first computer to use a mouse.

Apple spent four years and $50 million developing the Lisa, which was intended for business users and debuted in 1983 with a Motorola CPU, 1 megabyte of RAM and two 5¼-inch floppy disk drives, according to the Mac History website. One reason you may never have heard of the machine is its price tag: a whopping $9,995.

By the late 1970s, the combination of reasonably priced VCRs and Hollywood studios releasing films on videotape led to a new entertainment phenomenon: renting movies to watch at home. (Yippee, no commercials!)

It didn’t take cinephiles long to complain about the poor quality of videotapes or for consumer electronics makers to come up with an alternative: a large-format, two-sided optical disk that stored analog video, and stereo or digital audio sound -- perfect for transferring the magic of the big screen to a TV. Initially the disks were sold under several different names; by 1980 one name stuck: LaserDisc.

LaserDisc had a lot going for it. Besides superior picture and sound, the 12-inch platters were segmented into chapters so viewers could jump forward and backward, and they included commentaries and other special features.

But LaserDisc players and movies cost a bundle, and platters could hold only 60 minutes of material per side. Unlike tape, LaserDisc was read-only, meaning you couldn’t copy anything. By one estimate, only 2% of U.S. households ever owned a LaserDisc player. By the mid-1990s, the format had been overtaken by DVD technology, which borrowed a lot of its better qualities, though devotees still run LaserDisc fan sites and sell movies on eBay

Before there was ever a World Wide Web, the French were looking up information and chatting online on Minitel. Starting in the early 1980s, France’s state-run telephone company gave away the clunky, dun-colored terminals with a built-in monitor and keyboard that connected to dial-up phone lines as a cheaper alternative to printed phone directories.

In the decades that followed, thousands of Minitel services popped up, everything from retail and ticket sales to chat rooms and porn. By the late 1990s, Minitel had 17 million users and 25,000 services, according to one report.

In the late 1980s, Minitel test-marketed a U.S. version as a competitor to then-popular online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online. “Public response was OK at best,” former Minitel sales rep Randy Farrow writes on the DigiBarn computer museum website

Today, first-person shooter games that put players smack dab in the middle of the action are par for the course. In the 1990s – not so much.

That made first-generation virtual-reality game systems a big deal, and none was bigger than Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, introduced in 1995. The Virtual Boy – whose name came from the Japanese company’s popular Game Boy portable game system – consisted of a hand-held controller and an orange-red headpiece that slipped over the wearer’s eyes to immerse him in a virtual-reality game universe.

As ubiquitous as the Web is today, in the mid-1990s it was so new that companies hadn’t figured out the best way to get people to log on. Desktop computers and Internet service providers were OK for early adopters, but what about everyone else?

Well, everyone else already owned a TV, so in 1996, three Silicon Valley entrepreneurs came up with  WebTV, the first noncomputer consumer electronic device to hook up to the Internet. WebTV connected an existing TV and dial-up phone line to a set-top box, receiver and wireless remote control or keyboard, all for about $350 plus monthly service fees for email and Web browsing.

In 2002, a year before Mark Zuckerberg had the idea for Facebook, another social network was already going gangbusters: Friendster.

Within months of its release, Friendster had amassed 3 million subscribers, leading Google to offer $30 million for the company the following year. Convinced he’d be better off going it alone, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams said no, a decision now held out as one of the biggest mistakes in the tech business. “It’s become the iconic case of failure,” venture capitalist David L. Sze told The New York Times.

Years before the iPhone, Apple unveiled a pocket-sized device the company said would revolutionize personal computing. The device was the Newton, which Apple described as a “personal digital assistant,” or PDA.

Introduced with much fanfare by then-CEO John Sculley at the 1993 Consumer Electronics Show, the Newton was a nonstarter. Early models were clunky, cost $800 and ran on short-lived AAA batteries. The device’s handwriting recognition was so bad that “Doonesbury” cartoonist Gary Trudeau famously devoted an entire week of the strip to skewering it.

One of first online social networks to take off was Second Life. Established in 2003, the 3-D virtual world let subscribers create avatars to socialize, play games, buy land, sell things, even gamble until that activity was banned in 2007.

By 2006, Second Life had 2 million “residents” – though far fewer were on the service at any given time. Companies such as IBM set up a Second Life presence, Reuters and CNET opened news bureaus, and Sweden set up a virtual embassy.

As an online gathering place, Second Life’s popularity waned as Facebook's and Twitter’s grew. The 3-D world was also hamstrung by “an overly complex interface and pervasive usability problems that still hamper it today,” writes longtime Second Life chronicler Wagner James Au, in a 10th anniversary remembrance on GigaOm.

As a venue for multiplayer games, Second Life also has seen its star eclipsed, first by the Farmvilles and Angry Birds of the online world, and more recently by the megahit Minecraft. “There’s little point in creating an innovative product if its innovations are too frustrating and confusing to use,” Au says.

So much for 3-D TV. ESPN, one of the few major networks to dip a toe into the 3-D TV waters, will shut down its 2-year-old service by the end of 2013.

ESPN introduced ESPN 3D in June 2010 with the World Cup. The cable network started airing regular programming and live events the following February to customers of Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV and a handful of other systems.

But TVs capable of airing the programming never took off, and today only 2% of U.S. households own 3-D TV. As a result, ESPN 3D never gained enough fans to even register on the Nielsen Co.’s measurable viewership threshold, according to an Associated Press report. The network said viewership was "extremely limited and not growing," according to the AP.