MOTOROLA MDT 9100-T MOBILE DATA TERMINAL photograph

 

This incredible piece of Motorola  dashboard hardware was fitted to select police cruisers in America during the eighties. Anticlimactically it just enabled them to link to precinct computers instead of convert the cars to a flying mode or fire lasers.

Texas Instruments home computer advert

Calculator giant Texas Instruments entered the computing boom in 1979 with the T4A - with disastrous results. Despite this ad extolling its' versatility the machine lacked software due to going out of its' way to make coding difficult, while the tiny arcane keyboard and its' inability to produce lower case letters were roundly mocked at the time. Slashing the price by 80% didn't help and neither did a compact version in 1981, and in 1983 Texas discontinued their home computer range after a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. The whole programme was such a disaster that IBM used it as a what not to do for their own range.