People have been sharing technology that was basically obsolete as soon as it came out – 17 tools and devices that got their timing wrong

Comedy is all about timing, and so it seems is technology. After all, there’s no point pushing the boundaries if something else has already got there first.

You’d think that clever tech developers would avoid this problem, but some developments simply can’t be predicted. To hear about the devices that got their dates wrong, Ambitious_Plastic_55 put the following question to r/AskReddit:

‘What is a piece of technology that was obsolete almost immediately after it was released?’

Here are the upgrades that history forgot…

1.

‘More of a technology service but there was once this number you could text with a question and they would have a human look it up and text the answer back, for something like a dollar IIRC.

‘It could only exist in that brief window after texting became commonplace but before internet-capable feature/smartphones fully took over’
-fredisnotmyboss

2.

‘Visingsö forest. Sweden planted 300,000 oak trees in 1831 to secure a long term supply of timber for warships. Warships then went to steel.

‘The forest actually notified the Swedish navy in 1975 that the timber was ready for harvest and use for their warships 😂😂’
-RageQuitNZL

3.

‘CED Videodisc spent so long in development it released outdated technology to try to compete with LaserDisc’
-hot_ho11ow_point

4.

‘DIVX DVDs. Digital Video Express format was Circuit City’s proprietary DVD format.

‘A customer could watch a DIVX disc for 48 hours. After that, repeat viewings are charged, or a one-time fee for unlimited viewings. It failed quickly and was off the market in like one year.’
-F-Cloud

5.

‘The Pony Express.

‘It was introduced as the fastest mail service possible across the western US. At the time, it used a relay team of horsemen and ponies that would sprint until the bag of mail could be handed off to the next horseman/pony, allowing mail to be delivered in only 10 days.

‘It lasted for a year and a half, because then a telegraph line was built, which allowed messages to be sent at the speed of light.’
-another-princess

6.

‘This is incredibly niche but there was a period of time at the turn of the century, shortly after automobiles were invented, that horses and cars had to share the road.

‘Some horses were really freaked out by the cars, so people invented things to put fake horse heads on the front of cars to try to trick horses into thinking cars were also horses lol.

‘”Horsey Horseless” or the “Hays Motor Vehicle Attachment”. They didn’t work very well and were obsolete very quickly as horses were phased out.’
-chires20

7.

‘A bit vague, but; I remember a physical device launching in the early 2000s which let you identify the song playing on the radio.

‘It was a clunky affair – when you wanted to find a song title, you’d press a button on the device and it would record the timestamp.

‘Then when you got home, you’d connect it to the internet, and it’d check the timestamp against yes.net, which held a database of all the music played on certain stations. You told it which station you were listening to at the time, and it’d tell you the song!

‘Of course, at the same time someone somewhere was launching Shazam…’
-quarterpastfour

8.

‘Oh man, pretty much every kind of portable storage from 1995 to 2003.

‘In the early 90s, if you wanted to move something from one computer to another, unless they were networked together pretty much your only option was 3.5″ floppy disks.

‘Around this time, computers (and file sizes) were advancing incredibly quickly and that 1.4MB capacity started showing its age, fast.

‘Enter the Zip Disk: 100MB of portable, writable storage was genuinely game changing back in the day, and shortly afterwards Iomega introduced the Jaz Disk.

‘Both of these were mostly rendered obsolete by the CD-R/CD-RW, which were then largely replaced by the advent of USB flash drives in the early 2000s, a format we still use to this day.

‘It’s actually wild how rapidly things changed in a pretty short period of time.’
-Zhuul

9.

‘Gameboy Advance Micro

‘It came out like a year after the DS, had a smaller screen, and wasn’t backwards compatible with GB games. There was no reason to upgrade from the SP since the DS was already out and performing well.. and the DS already played GBA games..’
-ChiefFloppyCock