Silicon Valley Insider has listed some of Tech's forgotten brands --25 software and services that were very popular at the time, but which have been forgotten.
The list (with my comments):
- 1. AltaVista -- THE search engine before Google came along. First online translator with Babelfish.
- 2. Amiga -- Very popular home computer.
- 3. Atari -- The top gaming system for a number of years.
- 4. Broderbund -- Their software was everywhere. Where in the world are they now? Probably in the Print Shop.
- 5. CDNow -- The amazon.com of CDs; now just amazon.
- 6. Commodore -- VIC 20. 20 K memory! What power!
- 7. Compuserve -- Information service; killed by AOL & the Internet.
- 8. CueCat -- One of the stupidest ideas ever.
- 9. Cyberian Outpost
- 10. Divx
- 11. Egghead Software -- Your mall computer store.
- 12. eToys -- Amazon.com of toys. Or tried to be.
- 13. Geocities -- Everyone's first web page.
- 14. Inktomi -- Search engine software. Googled.
- 15. Iomega -- Drive maker. Their Zip drive external drive was going to be the next big thing. Stock was big until hard drives became bigger and the bubble burst.
- 16. Lotus -- The most popular business software of the 80s. Best selling title for years. Botched the changeover to Windows and let Excel take over.
- 17. Lycos -- Nice search engine, but no match for others.
- 18. Netscape -- First serious web browser. MSIE overwhelmed it; became irrelevant once Firefox was introduced.
- 19. Packard Bell -- Cheap (and lousy) computers were sold everywhere but computer stores.
- 20. Prodigy -- Online service from Sears with crude graphics; competed with Compuserve, but AOL killed it.
- 21. Silicon Graphics
- 22. Tandy -- TRS-80 was one of the first home computers
- 23. Tomagatchi -- Virtual pets. An idea whose time had not come.
- 24. U.S. Robotics -- Top modem maker. Remember dial-up? Built-in modems were the beginning of the end.
- 25. WordPerfect -- The top word processor, replaced by Word (and still beloved). Bad marketing hurt them, as did the move to Windows.
I can add some others -- GEnie, WordStar (and Wordstar 2000), Multi-Mate, Lotus Symphony -- but these are names that will soon be forgotten.
