15 Tech Products From The 1980s That FAILED And Burned Millions

In the 1980s, American living rooms became a test lab. The companies you trusted most — RCA, Apple, IBM, Atari, Kodak, Texas Instruments, Commodore, Coleco, Timex — were all convinced they knew what you would want next, and they were all willing to bet enormous amounts of money on being right. Sometimes they were right about the future and wrong about absolutely everything else: the year, the price, the keyboard, the picture quality, or the simple question of whether anyone actually needed the thing. This is the countdown of fifteen real products from that decade that failed, and the bills they left behind. Some of them you have probably never heard of. There is a flat spreadsheet machine from Silicon Valley so beautiful that reviewers raved about it, sold out of a Christmas catalogue for nearly nine hundred dollars, which managed to sell roughly five thousand units against a plan of two hundred thousand. There is a suitcase-shaped computer with a screen the size of a paperback, and another suitcase computer whose own announcement killed the company that made it — the accident so famous that business schools named it after the founder. Others were in your house, or your cousin's house, and you may never have known they were disasters. A hundred-dollar home computer that got dumped in discount bins at under thirty dollars a year later, after which the watch company that built it walked out of computing entirely. A pocket camera from the most trusted name in photographs, which took pictures noticeably worse than the camera it was supposed to replace. A full IBM machine that cost a fortune and had no cooling fan, where the official repair advice was to lift the computer off your desk and drop it. A legendary toy company's all-in-one computer bundle where the printer held the power supply, so a dead printer meant a dead computer on the Sunday night your school project was due. And at the top of the list: fifteen years of development, a project its own company nicknamed after the Manhattan Project, a diamond needle that read movies out of the grooves of a twelve-inch disc, and an invention that was obsolete on the morning it reached the shops — because the machine on the next shelf cost the same and could also record. The loss was somewhere between five hundred eighty and six hundred fifty million dollars, depending on who you ask, and it helped hand one of America's great electronics names to somebody else. Every product here is real, with a real maker, a real price and a real ending with a date on it. Every figure comes from the record, and where the sources disagree, we say so out loud instead of picking the dramatic one. What makes the eighties worth going back to is not that these things were stupid. Most of them were brave. Graphical screens, pocket cameras, laptops, motion control, movies on a disc — the decade guessed almost all of it correctly, and then charged full retail for the privilege of being ten years early. If you lived through it, you will recognise more of this list than you expect. Tell us in the comments which of these sat in your house, and whether you defended it at the time. Subscribe if you like your nostalgia with the receipts attached.