Some technologies were simply destined for success. Killer innovations such as Facebook and the iPad seemed to spring from nowhere. Yet we often forget that all the inventions that underpin our connected world – including email, social networks and the internet – are refinements of less successful predecessors.
1. MP3 PLAYER: Right track, but no iPod
Before iTunes and touchscreens, there was the Listen Up player – the little MP3 player.
Imagine a portable music player that holds just a single hour of content, interrupts your listening with 30-second advertisements, and whose store offers none of your favourite songs. And all this could be yours for the bargain price of $299.
If this doesn't sound like much of a deal, keep in mind that back in 1996, pairing an MP3 player with a dedicated music store was a radical idea. Before the Listen Up player and Audiowiz store were introduced by Audio Highway - a start-up in Cupertino, California - downloading music was possible. But if you wanted to listen to that music on the go, your best option was to burn the songs onto a CD. Read more.
2. GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE: Xerox's shooting Star computer
In 1977 Xerox PARC user interface (above) blew rivals Apple and Microsoft's minds with the first mouse-driven, window-spawning computer.
Imagine trying to print a document in 1977. Are you at home? If so, forget it - your only hope of finding a printer is at work, where there might be a single dot-matrix device shared by the whole building. Sitting in front of your terminal, you will have to painstakingly key in complex lines of code to initiate printing and get the formatting you want. Don't even think about generating pictures or different colours. Now you're in for a long wait - with an output of less than 200 characters per second, the printer would have taken more than half a second just to print this sentence.
The company that released us from this torture was Xerox PARC, the Silicon Valley research incubator. Run by the company that pioneered photocopying, it also gave the world Ethernet. Read more.
3. SOCIAL NETWORK: Friends before Facebook
Friendster almost became a world-spanning social network, but its problems with "fakesters" sent friends fleeing to MySpace.
Type friendster.com into your browser today, and you'll be taken to a social networking site for gamers. Should you by any chance have forgotten who won the social networking battle, the blue button in the top right corner of Friendster's home page reminds you by inviting visitors to log in with Facebook.
Friendster wasn't the first social network - that honour goes to Six Degrees and a few niche communities built, for example, to track down your classmates - but it was the first attempt to rule the world. It came close. Just four months after its public launch in May 2003, the site boasted a few million members, and by 2005, it had roughly 17 million. But Friendster spent much of its eight-year existence limping down the mountain it had climbed so quickly. Read more.
4. HYPERLINK: The missing hyperlink
Apple's HyperCard inspired the web browser and the hyperlink – once a handful of people had figured out how to use it.
No one knew what to do with HyperCard. As best as anyone could figure, the software, created in 1985 by Apple engineer Bill Atkinson, was a kind of virtual Rolodex. You could jump between one virtual "card" and another by pointing a cursor at, and clicking on, underlined text on the first card. It was a neat trick, but Apple had no clear plan for how to use the software. In 1987, the company bundled it with all new Macintosh computers and let users figure it out for themselves.
After its release in 1987, HyperCard still has a fiercely dedicated following despite no meaningful update in about 15 years. HyperCard has been highly influential; it has been cited as helping shape Java and the Web. It had the potential to be the first Web browser. Many programming tools these days have HyperCard-like graphic interfaces, including Microsoft's Visual Studio. Read more.
5. INTERACTIVE TV: Florida's 1980s internet
Weather, messaging, online shopping: they had it all in Coral Gables, Florida, 10 years before the invention of the world wide web – on their televisions.
The message on your screen says: "Can you come over and babysit?" You type in your response, then check your bank account and the weather before leaving the house to return the blender you purchased online.
It might surprise you to learn that residents of Coral Gables, Florida, were engaging in this behaviour in 1980, a full decade before Tim Berners-Lee put the first web links on the internet. And they weren't using personal computers - all of this was happening on their television screens.
The system was called the Viewtron, and it was the brainchild of Norman Morrison, vice-president of technology at US publisher Knight-Ridder. He saw it mainly as a way for newspaper subscribers to get an early peek at the next day's headlines. But the Viewtron also featured other aspects of today's addictive internet. Read more.
6. TABLET COMPUTER: Apple's 1992 iPad
The iPad may call itself revolutionary, but it stands on the shoulders of Apple's not-so-giant first attempt at tablets, the Newton-powered Messagepad.
If you own an iPad, you might have trouble remembering just how terrible tablets were a few years ago.
The first one was released to great fanfare. In 1992, Apple's chief executive, John Sculley, told a crowded room in Las Vegas that a new generation of portable handheld devices was about to change the world of personal computing. Their advanced handwriting recognition capabilities, he proclaimed, would make keyboards obsolete.
The following year, Apple released the first such device. Called the Messagepad, it ran an operating system called Newton, and the brilliant new input device that would replace the keyboard was a pen.
But the hotly anticipated device proved anything but revolutionary. Among myriad problems, it had terrible battery life and the basic model couldn't connect to a desktop computer. Read more.
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