Right Place, Wrong Time: 9 Technologies Born Before Their Time

Posted 09/29/2011 at 3:17pm | by Brad Chacos

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While it’s a fact that some lame-o ideas flat-out just won’t die, no matter how long in the tooth they are – VHS tapes, dial-up Internet and DRM, anyone? – the inverse is also true. Sometimes, truly groundbreaking ideas pop onto the scene long before the mainstream is ready to embrace it. Rather than praising the success stories, this article takes a look at the lesser known forefathers that made best sellers like the iPad and Hulu Plus possible. Grab a seat and raise a toast to these technologies born before their time; without them, modern life wouldn’t be as comfy and convenient as we know it.

Tablet PCs

Image credit: edibleapple.com

Let’s get started with the 800 lb. gorilla in the room: tablet computers. Contrary to what Apple would have consumers and the worldwide courts believe, tablets didn’t begin with the iPad. The concept has been around in pop culture for a long, long time – in fact, Samsung recently pointed to the appearance of a tablet in 2001: A Space Oddysey when Apple tried slapping the Galaxy Tab with an injunction request in the U.S. While it’s true that the iPad thrust tablets into the limelight, the Apple portable wouldn’t have even been created without the legion of unsuccessful tablets that came before it.

Plenty of people – including the group mind at Wikipedia – consider the Microsoft Tablet PCs that popped up in the early 1990s as the father of the tablet. Pfah! Tablet-like computers have been around much longer than that. As our evil twins at MacLife.com point out in their excellent “5 Tablet Blasts From the Past” article, Samsung’s GRiDpad popped up in 1989, and Apple itself failed with the Newton MessagePad before the iPad and the Apple Graphics Tablet (which interfered with radio signals and raised the FCC’s hackles) way back in 1979. Admittedly, the Graphics Tablet and the early 1980s Pencept tablets needed to be hooked up to a separate computer in order to work, but hey, it still kinda counts. Every tablet failed in varying degrees of spectacularness, however, until Steve Jobs hypnotized the world with the iPad in 2010.

Instant Boot

Image credit: hpmuseum.net

PCs that boot instantly are the holy grail of computing. Even if you think tablets are more of a novelty than a useful piece of hardware, you can’t deny that their speedy boot times are awesome. News flash: fast boots have been around a lot longer than iPad 2 and ASRock, n00bcakes. In fact, the oddly innovative HP Omnibook 300 sported even faster boot times than Apple’s flagship tablet way back in 1993.

How’d they do it? By keeping nearly everything – including Word, Excel, and the entire Windows 3.1 operating system – off of the hard drive and running it from ROM memory, instead. The nifty trick created a boot time that was really, truly damned near instantaneous. The 2.9 lb. portable PC packed in a couple of other interesting features, too; it contained a mouse that popped out of the notebook’s casing and, in a pinch, it could run on 4 AA batteries. Unfortunately, with a starting price of just a hair under $2000, the Omnibook 300 never really took off.

Batteries

These days, it’s difficult to remember a time without batteries. Sometimes, it seems like everything but the kitchen sink requires a two or ten of the expensive little electricity tubes in order to run. Thomas Edison was in the battery business way back in 1900, and Alessandro Volta invented the first real battery in 1800. But even though batteries seem to have caught on right away, some controversial archaeological evidence suggests that the first battery may have been created over 2,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.

Image credit: technology.am

Archaeologists have found a number of “Baghdad batteries” near – duh – Baghdad, Iraq. The terracotta jars have a hollow copper cylinder inside, which houses an iron rod in its center. A stopper at the top of the jar keeps the iron rod from contacting the copper, but it isn’t watertight; the copper tube can fill with liquid. This odd design led an archaeologist named Wilhelm Koenig to speculate in the 1940 that the ancient Mesopotamians used to fill the jars with lemon or grape juice to create an electrochemical reaction and electroplate gold on to silver objects.

After World War II, an American named William Gray whipped up some replicas and filled them with grape juice. Lo and behold, the Baghdad battery responded by spitting out 2 volts of energy. Other archaeologists dispute the theory and argue that the Baghdad batteries aren’t batteries at all, but were instead used to hold scrolls. We’re not scientists, but the idea of ancient Mesopotamians screwing around with electricity and rocking gold plated jewelry is just too juicy to give up on, so we’ll toss our hat in Koenig’s ring.

CDs/Digital Music

Remember the last time you rushed out to your local music store to pick up a hot new cassette tape by one of your favorite artists? Yeah, us either. The digital revolution has taken the music world by storm, leading to the meteoric rise of iTunes, Pandora, and the lawsuit-churning arm of the RIAA. Before that, the 1990s were ruled by gargantuan CD sales. None of it would have been possible without James Russell, who created the first digital-to-optical playback device way back in 1970 – and was promptly ignored by music companies.

Russell’s primitive CDs were photosensitive platters encoded with one micron-wide “bits” of binary data, which were read by a laser and converted into audible sounds by a computer. Russell and Battelle, his employer, began shopping the technology around to potential licensees in 1974, including recording industry giants Sony and Philips. They didn’t bite, but in 1979, the two companies began internal development of digital audio discs. Sounds familiar, eh? A little too familiar: in 1988, Optical Recordings Co. – which held the rights to Russell’s patents – received a $30 million infringement settlement from Sony and Philips. Unfortunately, Russell never saw a dime, but music lovers around the world still owe him their gratitude.

Image credit: The Seattle Times