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Beta tapes are still around for pro use: Betacam, Betacam SP, Digital Betacam. So what if Betamax is dead?

I loved the quality of Betamax tapes in comparison to VHS and S-VHS.

Nowadays however, they will not make me fall into the trap of buying 2 standards... HD-DVD or BluRay ? pffff

keep them, my dvd/divx player is good enough for me.

I want to get The Wings of Honneamise on DVD.

Unfortunately, the upcoming re-release from Bandai Visual USA only bundles the DVD with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD editions, not as a stand-alone. That and using Japanese price levels ($80) for the U.S. market makes me a bit leary, not to mention the cost of an HD player.

A quick look at the internet archive shows that they predicted the following technologies would fail:

1) Push content
2) ISDN
3) 56k modems
4) Internet phones
5) NetPC
6) Spam-blocking software
7) PDAs
8) PC TV
9) Java

Interestingly enough, most of these really didn't fail, but morphed into a slightly different, but ultimately successful technology.

- Push content: Morphed into RSS feeds and RSS aggregators.
- 56k modems: Substantial broadband penetration took a long time; 56k modems certainly had they heyday.
- Internet phones: VOIP anyone? Vonage, etc?
- Spam-blocking software: It's integrated into everything now.
- PDAs: The "PDA" market proper is waning, but I don't think smartphones and the iPhone are fundamentally different devices
- PC TV: Interestingly enough, all three major US networks have many of their TV shows available via streaming on their websites; of course, torrenting TV shows is huge too
- Java: Never succeeded properly in client space, but absolutely took over server space, which no one saw coming

What was the upper level speed of the Motorola chip on the consumer market before Apple went to Intel?

The Way Back Machine is your friend... Just prefix http://web.archive.org/web/*/ to any of the dead links there, and (hopefully) you'll get to see the content.

From the link above for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine..

Data Retrieval Failure.

We're sorry. We were unable to retrieve the requested data. We may be experiencing technical difficulties and suggest that you try again later.
See the FAQs for more info and help, or contact us.

Priceless

Also, do bear in mind that there is no backup of the Internet Archive. This is a basement run project using entirely legacy hardware. If a hard disk dies, that's a whole chunk of Internet history lost right there. Scary when you think about it.

My god. This makes me think.

However, Wikipedia reports that "It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library." -doesn't it mean it has some funding?

Edited 2007-08-27 10:03

Also, do bear in mind that there is no backup of the Internet Archive. This is a basement run project using entirely legacy hardware. If a hard disk dies, that's a whole chunk of Internet history lost right there. Scary when you think about it.

That is the reason mirror sites exists

It has been held back for sure. And every economist can tell you why. Monopolies tend to do that...

while there's been a lot of exciting developments in the last ten years, I'm still surprised to see how stagnant the industry has been. The same key players are there, the Amiga stories are similar to what we see here these days.

The Amiga seems it has been trapped in a time loop.It's all the time the same history again and again with different players.The Amiga universe collapsed in a black hole?

You want to take a peek at Audacious.
http://audacious-media-player.org/
Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player, which itself was a fork of XMMS.

Welcome to the new web, same as the old web.

Actually, the pages were querying a now-defunct ad network called "spinbox." One search and replace later, Google ads!