The Computer Scrapheap Challenge Quiz

Answer: Apricot

Apricot traced its origins to a British company set up in 1965.

By 1985 it had between 20 and 30 percent of the UK market. Apricot also sold well in Europe, but could not compete in the US after IBM launched its own 16-bit computer. Although Apricot's Victor was better, and cheaper, IBM convinced the markets their product was the one to go for.

Eventually Apricot became part of Japan's Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. By 1999, MEC was haemorrhaging money and shedding jobs. Among other cuts, it closed the Apricot computing division.

Answer: Compaq

Founded in 1982, Compaq was the first to go head-to-head with the IBM Personal Computer.

But it struggled against the likes of HP and Dell and could not keep up in the price wars. HP bought out Compaq in 2002 and used the name for a few years before it disappeared in 2013.

Answer: Acorn

Acorn arose from the ideas of a group of students and researchers at Cambridge University. Their aim was to take computing out of the hands of a few coders like themselves and into everyday homes.

Their Acorn Atom was to offer that. Their further development of that, the Proton, was to be the basis for the home computer the BBC was looking for.

Branded the BBC Micron, it was to be phenomenally successful and Acorn became a successful public company. But the sharks were circulating and finance was shaky.

Answer: Wang

Founded in 1951, Wang Laboratories grew its revenues to $3bn and employed 33,000 people by the 1980s.

But Wang hung its coat on the hook of word processing computers. When other companies did that (and more) with their personal computers, Wang could not keep up.

It filed for bankruptcy in 1992 and although the brand limped on for a few years under new ownership, it was buried in 2008.

Answer: Sinclair ZX Spectrum

While the names Steve Jobs and Bill Gates resonate as computer royalty, that of Sir Clive Sinclair is less talked about outside the UK.

It is difficult to underestimate his role in getting many young Brits on the road to geekdom.

In the 1980s, the ZX Spectrum was at the cutting edge of computing and it was Britain's best-selling computer. Sadly, financial problems caused Sir Clive to sell the entire Sinclair business model to Amstrad in 1986 for £5m.

There is a red herring in the wrong answers. Sir Alan Sugar also made computers, but sold them under his Amstrad brand.

Answer: Palm Pilot

Palm developed the first Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). These were devices smaller than a paperback novel on which owners could write, store notes, keep a diary, and do basic calculations.

All that was done with a stylus that people could use to write on a glass screen. The device could turn handwriting into print.

For many years that system fell out of favour, but by the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the stylus was back.

Palm was active between 1991 and 2011, by which time it had fallen into the hands (no pun intended) of HP.

In a review of "The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade" in 2009, "Time" magazine recorded that shares in Palm Palm's traded for $669 in 2000. Nine years later they were at $11.

Answer: Netscape

Back when Sir Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the world wide web was in its infancy, Netscape provided one of the first browsers. Netscape first operated in 1994, and soon had 90 per cent of the market, but was squashed by Internet Explorer.

In 2007 Netscape, by then in the hands of AOL, ceased to exist as a browser.

Answer: Iomega

This quiz author remembers spending long hours entering computer code into a Commodore 64 and then saving it onto cassette tape. It was all personal computing had.

Then came the 3.5inch floppy disc with a huge 74kb capacity (joke).

Iomega saw the problem and came up with the zip drive that could initially store 100mb and eventually 750mb. Iomega products were suddenly all the rage but as the 21st Century opened, CDs and later DVDs became available.

Iomega tried to fight back with new products but it was too late. EMC bought Iomega in 2008 then rebranded the products products as LenovoEMC in 2013.

Answer: Gateway

In the five years between its foundation in 1985 and 1990, the sales of Gateway computers quadrupled. As "Time" magazine noted, by 2004 it was number three in the US hardware market behind Hewlett Packard and Dell.

Gateway was big in desktop computers but its failure to follow the route into laptops was one reason cited for its failure.

In 2007, Gateway was snapped up by Acer.

In 2009, "Time" included Gateway in its list of "The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade"

Answer: Microsoft Zune

Just to get one bit clear, Apple did not invent the hard-drive music player, but they did improve what was out there and make it blindingly simple to use.

The iPod came out in 2001. Microsoft looked on, and looked on, and looked on, and finally came up with its "iPod killer" the Zune...in 2006

Get it first or get it better is a good concept in business, and Microsoft failed on both counts with the Zune.*

Apple had sold more than 100m iPods, according to "Time" magazine by the time the Zune came out.

"Time" noted: "Sales were dreadful during the first several months after the launch. 'Bloomberg Television' said that between the launch date and mid-2007 only 1.2 million Zune players were sold."

In the last quarter of 2008, Zune made $85m. In that same period, the iPod took $3.37 billion.

* It is also a truism that if you have to describe your new product as an "XXXXX-killer", then you're on the back foot from the off.