Every decade reckons it has glimpsed the future. The nineties reckoned it harder than most, and did so while wearing a fleece and a pair of Global Hypercolour trousers that turned a damp shade of purple whenever you sat down. We queued outside Dixons. We circled things in the Argos catalogue with the little blue pen, quietly working out whether we could ever afford any of it. And we believed, with the fervour of a man who has just discovered oven chips, that we stood on the very edge of a new dawn.
Some of it came true. Most of it now sits in a loft, in a bulging carrier bag, wedged between a Breville sandwich toaster and a boxed set of Now That’s What I Call Music on cassette. As a twenty-something young man, I was heavily into gadgets in the nineties, so I feel qualified to eulogise the gadgets we all swore would change everything. Reader, they changed nothing. Except my loft.
The MiniDisc: better than the CD, apparently
Sony launched the MiniDisc in 1992 with the swagger of a company that had already given the world the Walkman and rather fancied doing it all again. A little disc in a plastic caddy, skip-proof, recordable, smaller than a beer mat and roughly twice as clever as anything else available on Dixon’s shelves. The player cost around £460. For that money, in 1992, you could have bought a second-hand car.
Within a year, Sony had shifted fewer than fifty thousand of them. The fault never lay with the technology, which purred along beautifully. It lay with the price, the near-total absence of albums you could actually buy on the format, and the small matter of the recordable CD turning up shortly afterwards and undercutting the whole thing into oblivion. Once blank CDs dropped below a quid, the MiniDisc took on the doomed air of a man who has brought a fax machine in 2022. Sony finally stopped shipping them in 2013, after spending two full decades insisting they would catch on any minute now.
The Apple Newton: it knew what you meant, just not what you wrote
In 1993, Apple released the Newton MessagePad, a hand-held computer with a stylus and one very bold promise. Write on the screen in your own handwriting, and the Newton will understand you. A beautiful idea, undone by a single flaw: it understood almost nobody.
The handwriting recognition became a national punchline. The Simpsons put the boot in, showing a school bully’s Newton translate “Beat up Martin” into “Eat up Martha”. The cartoonist behind Doonesbury had one misread “Catching on?” as “Egg Freckles”, a phrase Newton owners quoted at each other for years afterwards, through gritted teeth. Steve Jobs came back to Apple, took one look, and killed the line in 1998, having never met a stylus he liked. The Newton flopped. Its ghost, though, lives on: the ARM chip humming inside it, and the whole notion of a pocket computer you prod with a finger, fed quietly into the iPhone a decade later. Dead product. Immortal idea.
Nintendo’s Virtual Boy: a headache with a price tag
Picture the scene. It’s 1995, virtual reality has the entire industry frothing at the mouth, and Nintendo, the most trusted name in gaming, unveils its vision of tomorrow. It costs $180. It renders everything in red and black, like the inside of a migraine. You play it by jamming your face into a visor bolted to a little plastic stand, in a posture no chiropractor has ever knowingly endorsed.
The reviews mentioned headaches. And dizziness. And eye strain. Nintendo pulled the plug within a year, after releasing a grand total of twenty-two games. Around 770,000 people bought one worldwide, a figure the company would rather you forget, and a fair few of them presumably lay down in a darkened room shortly afterwards. As visions of the future go, it aged like a pint of milk left on a radiator.
WAP phones: the internet, if you held it at arm’s length and squinted
By 1999, the mobile phone had learned a new trick, and the marketing men could barely keep their trousers on. WAP, they told us. The Wireless Application Protocol. The internet, in your pocket, wherever you happened to roam. Nokia brought out the 7110, the first phone you could browse the web on, and for roughly six weeks the future felt properly, dizzyingly close.
Then people used it. Pages crawled in over a connection slower than dial-up, which itself moved at the pace of a wet Wednesday. Websites arrived stripped of their pictures and most of their words, rendered as a grey soup that cost a small fortune per minute to stare at. One tech reporter after another tried WAP, pronounced it useless, and wandered off. The dream sat in a drawer until proper smartphones turned up years later and did the job WAP had only promised. WAP walked so the iPhone could run, then sprint off into the distance without so much as a backward glance.
The Sega Dreamcast: the future that turned up on time and left early
Not every gadget on this list deserved its fate. The Dreamcast, which Sega launched in Britain in the autumn of 1999, arrived years ahead of its time… online gaming built in, a modem in the box, graphics that made the competition look like Ceefax. For one glorious moment, Sega owned the best console on the planet.
It also arrived at the worst possible moment. Sony had spent the previous eighteen months murmuring the words “PlayStation 2” into the ear of every gamer in the land, and the nation duly held its breath and its wallet. The Dreamcast sold a respectable nine million units and still went down in history as a failure. Sega, bruised and skint, quit the console business for good in 2001, ending eighteen years of making hardware. These days it turns up on every list of the greatest consoles ever built, which must be a tremendous comfort. There exists no accolade quite so hollow as being adored the moment after you die.
What the loft is really keeping
Here’s the thing about a drawer full of dead technology. None of it survived, though none of it truly vanished either. The Newton became the iPhone. WAP became mobile data. The MiniDisc taught Sony every lesson it needed for the players that followed. We laugh at these things because they lost, yet every last one of them nudged the world a few inches forward before bowing out with dignity.
There’s a smaller, softer thing tucked in beside them, too. Open that carrier bag in the loft and you don’t just find a MiniDisc player. You find the person you used to be, back when you wanted it so badly. The Saturday job that funded your eventual purchase. The mate who owned one first, whose name now surfaces once a decade in a Facebook message that opens with “you’ll never guess who died”. These objects are bookmarks. They hold our place in a life that carried on turning without bothering to ask us.
If all this has left you itching to climb back into a decade that still felt full of promise, I’ve spent a good chunk of my career doing exactly that on the page. No Easy Deeds drops you into Britain in September 1990, where a down-on-his-luck estate agent stumbles into a very strange house and an even stranger bargain. In Lieu of You hands its hero a trip back to 1996 and the chance to un-meet his own wife, which proves exactly as wise as it sounds. And if obsolete technology is your particular soft spot, The Last Stop Video Shop follows a man who discovers the last video shop in England, and a VHS tape playing a memory that never made it to film. Three routes back into the past, not one of them requiring a stylus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which 1990s gadgets were supposed to be the future?
The decade produced a run of confident flops: Sony’s MiniDisc (1992), the Apple Newton (1993), Nintendo’s Virtual Boy (1995), WAP-enabled mobile phones (from 1999) and Sega’s Dreamcast (1999). Each promised to change how we listened, played or connected, and each found itself overtaken by cheaper or simpler technology soon afterwards.
Why did the Sony MiniDisc fail?
Price and timing sank it. At launch a player cost around £460, very few albums appeared on the format, and the recordable CD arrived shortly afterwards at a fraction of the cost. Sony persisted with the MiniDisc until 2013 before finally halting production.
What made the Apple Newton such a famous flop?
Its headline feature, handwriting recognition, frequently misread what people wrote, earning mockery from The Simpsons and the Doonesbury comic strip. Steve Jobs discontinued the Newton in 1998. Its underlying technology, including the ARM processor, later helped shape the iPhone.
Was the Sega Dreamcast really a failure?
Commercially, yes, despite selling around nine million units. Gamers held out for Sony’s PlayStation 2, and Sega left the console business in 2001. In hindsight, critics now regularly rank the Dreamcast among the finest consoles ever made.
Do any of Keith A Pearson’s novels revisit the recent past?
Yes. No Easy Deeds is set in 1990, In Lieu of You sends its hero back to 1996, and The Last Stop Video Shop centres on obsolete video technology and the pull of memory. All three explore nostalgia, regret and the tug of second chances.