The 16 Worst Failed Computers of All Time

Posted 04/07/2011 at 10:59am | by George Jones

Greetings. And welcome to. The Old PC Yard.

There are. Bzzzzt. Numerous. Failures in PC history. We’ve isolated the. Worst 16. Around.

We are certain that a smart human such as yourself. Will. Have strong opinions on this list. If TRUE, then replay in. Comments. If FALSE, have a. Nice day.

Initiating countdown module in 5…4…3…2…

1 of 16

16 Worst Failed Computers

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16. IBM PCjr (1984): Nicknamed the Peanut, the PCjr was surprisingly expensive given its similarities to the Commodore 64 and Atari systems. It came in two models—a 64KB 4860-004 at $670 and a 128KB 4860-067 at $1270. Each offered color CGW graphics, a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 proc, wireless keyboard, lightpen port, two ROM cartridge slots, two joystick ports, and full PC compatibility. Critics universally panned the chiclet-style keyboard, and gamers maintained their loyalty to the Apple II.
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15. Mac Portable (1989): With a hinged black and white active matrix LCD screen, a removable trackball for a mouse, expandable SRAM, a fairly speedy boot from sleep mode, a SCSI mode that allowed it to be used as a hard drive, video out, and a low-power 16MHz Motorola 68HC000, Apple’s very first portable computer was ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it was neither light in weight (16.5 pounds) nor a commercial success.
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14. Commodore Plus/4 (1984): Commodore released like 2,000 computers in about 5 years time. That’s baffling. The Plus/4 was a home computer with a built-in software suite—word processor, spreadsheet, database, and graphs. It had 64kb of memory, a MOS 8501 proc, and a pretty snazzy-looking chassis. Unfortunately, Commodore 64 fans called it the Minus 60. ‘Nuff said.
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13. GateWay Destination (1996): Gateway’s $4,000 PCTV was ahead of its time, so much so that it never really sold that well. The system came with a set of surround speakers, a tuner card, and a 36” 640 x 480 CRT monitor. We take the HTPC for granted today, but in an era where Windows was still fairly crash-prone, a home theater slash computer made no sense at all.
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12. IBM PS/2 (1987): How ya’ gonna’ do it? PS/2 It! Or not. The Personal System/2 was IBM’s failed attempt to regain control of the clone market via a closed, proprietary architecture. IBM originally intended for OS/2 (get it?) to be the OS, but at the time of release, it wasn’t ready. Consumers balked en masse at IBM’s evil empire play. But the system introduced several important new standards, including Micro Channel Architecture, the PS/2 interface, VGA connectors, and 3.5” floppies.
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11. Sinclair QL (1984): The QL in the name was short for quantum leap, and with a Motorola 68008, 128KB of memory (expandable to 640KB), LAN ports, two built-in ZX Microdrive tape cartridges, and a built-in multi-tasking OS named QDOS, it certainly seemed advance. Unfortunately, the Sinclair QL shipped five months late and was buggy enough to doom it to failure…FOREVER.
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10. Apple III (1980): It was essentially an Apple II designed for the business crowd, and was powered by an 8-bit 1.8MHz SynterTek 6502A processor. It also had 16-color high-res graphics, an 80-column display with upper AND lowercase characters, and a numeric keypad. All of this cost between $5,000 to $7,000, making it outrageously expensive and wildly unpopular.
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9. Go L Mach L 3.8 (never released): We’re ashamed to admit that Maximum PC got suckered into the hype around Liebermann Inc’s PC-on-steroids. The company promised outrageous speeds and features that went way beyond the state of the art in 2003, including 5.0GHz systems, five-screen displays, outrageous cooling schemes, Solid State Drives, and data throughput speeds of 8GB/s. The company went out of business in 2004, having never shipped a single product.
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8. Apple Lisa (1983): In the words of The Arnold, Apple’s first crack at a GUI-based business computer was one ugly muthableep. It was, however, a powerful machine for its time, with a 5MHz 68000 CPU, 1MB RAM, two 5.25-inch drives, a hard drive, and a paper calculator. Unfortunately, it cost $10,000. Success: denied.
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7. Commodore 128 (1985): If you’re a way-back Commodore geek, you were probably excited about the Commodore 128. It sported 128KB of memory, an 80-column display, and two dedicated processors—a 2 MHz 8502 and a Zilog Z80. (They didn’t work in tandem.) A dedicated C64 mode ensured 100% compatibility. Ultimately, however, the masses didn’t want a low-cost, business-oriented machine. We wanted games, awesome music, and great graphics. We wanted the Amiga.
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6. Osborne Executive (1982): Adam Osborne’s self-named 1980 portable sold surprisingly well. The Osborne Executive? Not so much. As legend has it, the Executive played a direct role in shutting down Osborne Computers. Once it was announced, computer retailers immediately began cancelling orders for the Osborne 1. The company declared bankruptcy later in 1983. Forever after, the Obsorne effect would refer to a company obsolescing an existing product by pre-hyping the successor.
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5. NeXT Computer (1988): Based on the Motorola’s new 25MHz 68030 CPU and including 8MB-64MB of RAM, a 330MB hard drive and an 1120x832 grayscale display, Steve Jobs’ NeXT station cost $10,000 a pop. It was inaccessible to most and didn’t sell very well. Despite its limited commercial success, NeXT played a pivotal role in history. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer at CERN as the world’s first web server. And much of the Mac OS X environment is built on OPENSTEP’s foundation.
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4. Atari Falcon (1992): Technically named the Falcon030, the final computer Atari Corp produced embodied the disarray that must have existed at the company during its final years. A 32-bit 68030 CPU in a 16-bit data bus? FAIL. Well, at least it had a Motorola DSP56000. Atari canceled the Falcon in 1993 to focus on the, ahem, Jaguar. Ahem.
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3. Coleco Adam (1983): Released in time for the holidays in 1983, the Adam was plagued with issues. Defective tape drives, an electromagnetic surge on startup that was capable of nullifying tapes or discs left in the system, and a power supply that was located in the printer. Hey, at least it played Colecovision games. Unfortunately, it didn’t do much else. Returns killed the company, and even a newer Adam that cost less and offered a $500 scholarship for kids couldn’t compensate.
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2. Power Mac G4 Cube (2000): Measuring 8 cubic inches and suspended in an acrylic enclosure—bah, pretty G4 Cube and pretty G4 fanboys make Hulk mad. Critics agreed—most argued that it was too expensive, didn’t include a display, and worst of all, had a “manufacturing issue” that led to cracks in the fancy, newfangled case. We’ll say no more.
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1. Babbage’s Difference Engine (1822): Like so many other computer makers on this list, Charles Babbage was ahead of his time. WAY ahead. Unfortunately, high costs prevented the mathematician from realizing his dream of building a steam-powered mechanical machine that could compute values of polynomial functions. The London Science Museum did realize his dream, however. In 1991, using some of the original parts, scientists completed a working version of the difference engine.

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Comments

Comments are closed on this article

garyhope

December 19, 2011 at 4:12pm

Hey, You kinda hurt my feellings that you didn't include my mid 80's DEC Rainbow 100. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives that used propritary drives and disks, useless to anyone else, big 128 K ram, monochrome monitor (weren't they all then) 10 MB HDD, incompatible with regular MS DOS, had to use the useless DEC version and it only cost $6500 minus the $1500 dot matrix printer and minus software. We never finished paying it off. A blight on our credit report.

Falcon040

April 18, 2011 at 11:34am

I must admit to some culpability for the 030 and DSP in the Atari Falcon. After working with an early prototype (68010, IIRC), my boss asked me, the fresh-outta-school new kid, what I thought. I said, offhandedly, "needs an 030 and DSP". A week later, without any further discussion I remember being part of, those were now the plan.

newegg911

April 13, 2011 at 7:00pm

The IBM PS\2 does NOT belong on this list. Yeah it had some problems and didn't do as well as it should have, but there probably litteraly dozens of others that were far worse.

Spacetech

April 12, 2011 at 6:58pm

These two Netbooks (before there were netbooks), had a dial-up modem, SDD with PCMCIA Expansion, B&W or Color Screen (VGA), all for under $750 back in the early '90's...

Where has all the hardward gone...Long time passing...

Marcus_Soperus

April 11, 2011 at 1:44pm

I was the electronics manager for a Children's Palace (also known as Child World: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_World) store (think Toys-R-Us, but with Peter Panda instead of Geoffrey Giraffe) that opened in October 1983. The Mattel Aquarius got as far as our storage cage, but never reached the sales floor.

Unfortunately, the Coleco Adam had a big fan in our company's buyer (apparently he never had a failure with the notoriously cranky "high speed data drive"), and every Adam we sold came back. One benefit: I made a friend and mentor for life by going through every Adam that had been returned (including that customer's) and put together a single functioning unit for him. Go the extra mile for your customers, and you might be pleasantly surprised at what happens in the long run.

pcleveland

April 11, 2011 at 9:59am

Ahhhh how I remember the days growing up playing Dam Busters on my Coleco Adam...

With the wonderful printer that sounded like a machine gun and had the speed of a fast type writer

jamialovan

January 12, 2012 at 9:33pm

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Caboose

April 11, 2011 at 9:08am

The Apple III, paving the way for the overpriced Apple computers that still continue to this day!

schwit

April 10, 2011 at 8:53am

The PS/2 50, 55, 70 and 80 were excellent computers. They could run the same software that could run on clones and they were reliable. MCA may have had no future, but as you point out the line gave us new technologoes that became industry standards. How does that make the computers a failure?

Donc314

April 09, 2011 at 2:16pm

The PS2 seemed like an OK computer. Sadly after we loaded all of our lab data the IT knuckle head replaced it with a different computer and lost all of our back ups.

Spent many hours in a hot poorly lit room using the Osborn. It was supposibly "portable". The darned thing must have weighed 40 pounds :)

My first computer? Laser 128 Apple clone. It belongs on this list. A truley bad experience.

JohnP

April 08, 2011 at 8:46pm

Heh, The Coleco Adam. I was involved with the HP uP development system for that computer (used to debug the board and write the firmware). I went into their headquarters in Hartford CT a bunch of times when the Adam was being sold. At some point one of the company executives decided to ship ALL of the defective returns back to headquarters for "analysis". The walls of the hallways and finally some of the offices were lined to the CEILING with boxes, thousands of boxes. There was the "analysis" team, all three of them, testing one computer at a time. What a fiasco. And just after the huge Cabbage Patch Doll craze and the excellent Colecovision system. Betting the company and losing, big time.

Shalbatana

April 08, 2011 at 12:10pm

Great Article, thank you.

benjerome

April 08, 2011 at 11:49am

I got a used Destination at an auction and 3 for parts. Not a bad computer i uninstalled

windows 98 and put windows xp on it and it ran good until it got droped when i moved to my

new place.

publicimage

April 07, 2011 at 8:52pm

Aw, poor Coleco Adam... poor Commodore 128... I had friends with each of these. But now I remember why I never had either one. You hit the nail on the head.

vectorizer

April 07, 2011 at 5:18pm

I couldn't afford a Gateway Destination, but it did inspire me to roll my own: an existing 36inch Sony tube TV, a Gateway 486 tower, a scan converter (VGA->composite), and a wireless keyboard w/touchpad using infrared for datacomm. It really worked well for the kids' low res PC games of the day, but for text it was craptacular. All the rest of the components of my pseudo-Destination are long gone, but the TV is still going strong.

DogPatch1149

April 07, 2011 at 4:38pm

No TRaSh-80s with their famed rrrepeattingg kkeybboarrdss, no Packedin Hell PCs, but the Commodore 128 is on the list? Seriously? What universe was this article written in?

MPC, c'mon...change the Publish To Facebook to opt-in instead of opt-out. How many complaints in posts will it take before you listen to your readers?

Emgtek

April 07, 2011 at 3:21pm

What! No Packard Bell systems made the list!

kiaghi7

April 07, 2011 at 2:40pm

No mention of Apple computers themselves???

Granted a few specific Apple examples are there, but Apple itself FAILED!

The Apple VS PC war ended, and Apple lost HARD!!!

Every last apple made today is nothing but an outdated PC with Apple OS, there ARE NO APPLES ANYMORE! It's akin to the difference between Windows and Linux, they are both on PC's, just different OS... Same for Apple, it's nothing more than an OS now... That is the penultimate failure in the history of computing!

johnny3144

April 08, 2011 at 3:54am

first of all, i do NOT like Mac and Apple at all.

However i have to pointout 10% is a huge market share. even higher in age group of 18 - 30. go to a college or university, count the amount of mac vs dell(or any other brand). it is quite evident that mac hold a significant share of the market(like 30% or so, at least judging from my university). not mentioning apple signed lots of deal with universities/schools. the desktop in my universities libeary is almost 1:1(mac : PC).

so no, apple is not failing, they are quite sucessful really. but their product is not nearly as good as they claim it to be, and it's not all that special. just marketed very nicely and selling like hotcakes.

EDIT: responded to wrong comment, was meant for the comment below this one :)

joeking

April 07, 2011 at 7:55pm

I mean, people still use Macbook Pro's. I see alot of those sprout up in the entertainment industry. Aside from that, I generally concur with what you said. It's why Apple is making phones, mp3 players and "pads" now.

Emgtek

April 07, 2011 at 3:18pm

LOL What!?!? Wow!

GenMasterB

April 07, 2011 at 1:55pm

This one never makes the "worst failed" because it was SUCH a failure, people dont even remember it. But it was the Mattel Aquarius Home Computer (79-81, and unfortunately my 1st PC). even though it had a 6502 CP/M based cpu, it had only 4k, a horrific chicklet keyboard and a massive fail of a cartridge port, it came with a 16k expansion cartridge but it had to be removed to use certain programs which made it worthless as an expansion. Zero support and a thermal printer where the paper would last 5-6 days before turning solid blue and unreadable.. failure from design 1 !! I thought I was in heaven when I upgraded to a Apple ][c.. Let that Aquarius burn in PC heck!! lol

srolf

April 07, 2011 at 1:32pm

The Pcjr had 'full PC compatibility'? Don't make me laugh. That was part of the problem with it as a home computer - all the programs were written for the PC, and you never knew whether they would work or not. The jr "borrowed" part of the system RAM for the video memory, and did some other bizarre things as well, so that if the programs were graphic-intensive (i.e., games), they usually didn't work. Great for a home computer.

seattlematt1976

April 07, 2011 at 1:08pm

You're missing:

IBM PS/1 - Expensive, proprietary, and MS-DOS 4.0 (enough said there)

Anything from Packard Bell

jac_goudsmit

April 07, 2011 at 12:09pm

I know you guys are just fishing for the missing ones that everyone's going to report. Here's one: the Philips ":YES". That computer was as if someone in the company started making an IBM-compatible PC and then got totally sidetracked.

The IBM PS/2 was pretty successful, so I don't know why it's on the list. I think you're confused with the PS/1 which bombed completely, and I think that's actually what's shown in the picture.

I lol'd at the Babbage difference engine.

pastorbob

April 07, 2011 at 3:38pm

The IBM PS/2 cost IBM what share they had of the PC market. The idea that a closed proprietary design would fly was obviously a major misunderstanding of the market. After all, if people wanted such a computer they could buy a MAC. It is the open architecture of the PC that has made it such a huge success. And it is the open architecture of the PC that has made it so frustrating at times.

Blmunro

April 07, 2011 at 11:33am

How could you have not included the Xerox 820 CPM OS computer? The fact that it did not make your list is proof of its epic failure. Xerox even opened a chain of Xerox Stores to sell the device. Obsolete before it even hit the shelf, it and the stores quickly folded. The majority of the units sold were dumped on loyal, gullible and naive employees through painless(?) payroll deductions. The 820 along with a 630 Daisy Wheel, 25 lb., printer was sold for as a package for bargain basement price of $3,000 in 1984 dollars. Since CPM was already dead the only applications were Basic, a database program, and a simple Wordstar text program. Xerox emptied their warehouse and the employees who purchased the computers filled their garages. Thanks Xerox for fumbling the future on your own employees.

Marcus_Soperus

April 07, 2011 at 11:14am

The Zenith Z-286 (thanks to Zenith's bizarre proprietary 'Zenith slots' for memory and the processor) and the DEC Rainbow (MS-DOS and CP/M, but couldn't run standard IBM PC programs) deserve places on the list if it were extended to 20-25 units.

The Z-286 and other Zenith PCs of the time (Z-159, Z-248, and Z-386) were so strange internally that they inspired this unofficial slogan at our store "The weirdness goes in before the name goes on." (cf this old Zenith TV/radio sign: http://www.flickr.com/photos/34086110@N06/4745954958/).

jturton

April 07, 2011 at 11:07am

Nice touch including the Babbage engine, guys.

Brdn666

April 08, 2011 at 8:35am

Indeed

Neufeldt2002

April 07, 2011 at 11:32am

Agreed, Many cite this as the worlds first computer.

Please make publish to facebook opt-in, not opt-out.

tornato7

April 07, 2011 at 11:52am

I agree to both of those statements

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