The tech industry is famous for forgetting its own history. We're so focused on what's next that we often forget what came before. Sometimes that's useful, because we're not held back by old assumptions. But sometimes it's harmful, when we repeat over and over and over and over the mistakes that have already been made by previous generations of innovators.
In the spirit of preventing those repeated failures, I spent time researching some of the biggest, but most forgotten, failures in technology history. I was shocked by how much we've forgotten -- and by how much we can learn from our own past.
5. Atari Suitmaster 5200
Video console manufacturer Atari was notorious for its boom and bust growth in the 1980s. The company's best-known failure was probably the game cartridge ET the Extraterrestrial, which Atari over-ordered massively in anticipation of hot Christmas sales that never materialized. Legend says that truckloads of ET cartridges were secretly crushed and buried in a New Mexico landfill.
What's much less well known is that Atari was also involved in the creation of an early motion-controller for home videogames, a predecessor of Microsoft's Kinect. Since video detection technology was not sufficiently advanced at the time, the Suitmaster motion controller consisted of a bodysuit with 38 relays sewn into the lining at the joints, plus 20 mercury switches for sensing changes in position. The suit was to be bundled with the home cartridge version of Krull, a videogame based on the science fiction movie of the same name.
A massive copromotion was arranged with the producers of Krull, and Atari made a huge advance purchase of Suitmaster bodysuits and cartridges. Unfortunately, development was rushed, and late testing revealed two difficulties. The first was that the suit's electromechanical components consumed about 200 watts of power, much of which was dissipated as heat. That may not sound like much, but imagine jamming two incandescent light bulbs under your armpits and you'll get the picture. There were also allegedly several unfortunate incidents involving mercury leaks from broken switches, but the resulting lawsuits were settled out of court and the records were sealed, so the reports cannot be verified.
The Christmas promotion was canceled, but Atari didn't give up on the Suitmaster immediately. The next year, it was repurposed as a coin-op game accessory, allowing the user to control a game of Dig Dug through gestures. Sadly, Atari's rushed development caught up with it again. Due to a programming error in the port to Dig Dug, under certain obscure circumstances when Dig Dug got flamed by a Fygar the suit would electrocute the player. (The bug was discovered by an arcade operator trying out the game after hours, in what is now memorialized in coin-op gaming circles as The Paramus Incident). That was the last straw for Atari's corporate parent, Warner Communications. To limit its potential liability if a Suitmaster were to fall into public hands, Warner arranged to have the entire inventory chopped up and mixed into concrete poured into a sub-basement of the Sears Tower in Chicago, which was then undergoing renovation. A small bronze plaque in the third sub-basement of the Sears Tower is the Suitmaster's only memorial: