Amstrad E-m@iler Telephone
Think back to 2000: would you pay 12p to send an email?
When it was released, Amstrad's E-m@iler Telephone cost £79.99 from Dixons and allowed you to send email without using a PC. This was an interesting concept, but it was a pain in the asterisk to use and it looked revolting. Most people had computers and the Net was becoming ever more ubiquitous. What was the point of such a comparatively costly system?
Speaking with our sister site ZDNet UK at the time of the E-m@iler's release, an anonymous analyst said, "This is 2000. I think he [Amstrad director Sir Alan Sugar] may have missed the boat." Quite.
In about 1994 this could've been hugely successful, as the Web was tiny and computers with modems were expensive. But for 2000? Dead on arrival.
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Anonymous 22 July, 2010 19:37
Well having trawled my way through all this blurb and read the huge slaggings towards Microsoft, I'm getting bored of reading the same old same old. For those of you who are interested in moving forward, follow me, for those that aren't stay in the 20th Century.
As an I.T. Technician with a huge multi-national company (in excess of 250,000 users & 10,000+ servers) which runs Windows XP SP3 and Windows Server 2003, I was greatly relieved when last month they announced that from July 1st 2010 the new standard was Windows Server 2008 & Windows 7 for end users. XP has had it's day and to be fair Vista was just another update for XP with a new front-end that required more memory to run. Vista was and still is a better OS for the end user than XP and so it should be.
But now we move on yet again to the OS that really does "do what it say's on the can", it works. Long live Windows 7, but no doubt this will get another thread all on it's own and no doubt many more slaggings for Microsoft, it's just a way of life for the whinging few. Have fun!
Anonymous 22 November, 2010 06:12
I still have to laugh at how people still defend Microsoft OS's. Whether it be 3.1 or Millenium or XP or Vista, they all suck; but we have been programmed by the tech community to accept this as "normal". Windows is just a bad product, but don't get me wrong it is not just windows. MAC, or Linux, or Solaris are in the same boat. The computer age just came too fast and what we have for it is a lot of bad software and hardware. Unfortunately it is so integrated into our lives there is no going back. But wake up people and start demanding what you are paying for. I can hardly wait until the Microsft on Ford vehicles starts blue screening.
Anonymous 22 November, 2010 06:13
This would also include the 8 time it took to get the captcha right.
Anonymous 22 November, 2010 06:19
To the guy 2 above this post. Seriously???????
Anonymous 8 February, 2011 14:49
Sorry guys but I LOVE my Tamagotchi...it keeps me busy when I'm otherwise too sick to do anything else but play with it.
Anonymous 22 April, 2011 09:41
Vista is a piece of sh*t. Dont feed me that crap about "insufficient hardware", cause that is bullsh*t. Ive had exceptional machines, fail through Vista, and flawless through XP and Windows 7. So please stfu, and dont bother with a dipsh*t response.
Anonymous 13 August, 2011 21:40
Guys, vista was a leak from withing microsoft, it was never ment to be released.
Why do you think it had so many security issues, the real thing they were trying to make is what we have now, windows 7.
Stop blaming microsoft for a bad OS, its not theyre fault.
anonymous 9 October, 2011 12:33
who's fault is it then? Microsoft suck. they with draw support for operating systems just as they get them to the state they should have been at release! Xp is still the most stable most compatible os they have and support for that will be removed soon.
You could be forgiven for thinking it's all a deal with hardware manufacturers. Oh look you can have our shiny new os but only if you double your ram and increase you cpu clockspeed by about 50%. And what do they do different? almost nothing. About 60% of the resources used when vista or 7 are running are completely unessential. It's amazing how much you can speed up your bootup and general running performance if you know how to remove these things.
Of course for your average user who just wants to do stuff this is impossible or at least very intimidating. Almost all the problems are caused by lazy programming and relying on more powerful hardware to make up the difference.
Thats why you can play the same games on a ps3 or xbox 360 whose technical specs are far behind those of a modern pc required to play the same game. Better hardware optimization will always win out. They cant simply say oh you need a faster cpu. Games console hardware is fixed and developers are forced to get every last bit of performance out of it.
But face it we are stuck with micrsofts efforts for better or worse. If you just want to surf,email,listen to music and do some word processing give ubuntu a try it's free after all. It works very well on very modest hardware. But if you want a pc to be all the things its supposed to be these days then microsoft really do have a monopoly.
To be fair you can do most of these things on ubuntu or many other linux distributions but it often takes more effort than people can be bothered to make. The only area linux really sucks at is games. So if you want to play cod whilst having a break then sorry you're back to windows!
anonymous 26 June, 2012 20:36
DO NOT, I REPEAT DO NOT MOCK THE C5, My C5 called Brian is a beautiful chap and he's done many miles, extremely reliable and i have a coat thank you so i don't care if im exposed to all weathe as long as im with my Brian :)
anonymous 30 June, 2012 20:05
Windows Vista reduce my high end laptop from being a very reliable and powerful machine when used with Windows XP pro to a slugglish and annoyingly slow lump with vista on it.
People who say Vista isn't bad had clearly never had to let there computer be paralysed for two whole working days by three sets of service packs, which did little to improve things, angry birds on chrome browser runnning from nice and smooth down to around four frames per second, the amount of work I have not being able to get done by this operating system is a fair amount, even something as simple as listing items for sale on ebay become unneccesary hard work, it actually couldn't be done as many of the built in feature that browsers use failed to work, my wireless card did not work at all, even with offical drivers, to say I am unimpressed is a mild understatement, to say I feel like i have been ripped off badly would be more accurate,