Ppshaw
The first digital cash in the UK at least was called Mondex.
A couple of weeks back we wrote about the plan to have Oracle's NetBeans Java IDE become an Apache project and in an attempt to get some perspective on the move asked friend of the Regand former OpenStack board member Tristan Goode what he thought. Tristan's response? “The last NetBeans I remember was these in my old industry …
We had Mondex on our ID/library card at York university when I was a student. In theory, at the time, it was an interesting idea, you could load your card at cash machines or pay phones on campus, societies could take payment from them with a little calculator style transfer machine, and you could pay for anything on campus (including the payphones and a few local shops) with it.
But it was so, so, sooooo slow. I don't think anyone ever tried to use Mondex at a busy college bar more than once.
Had it been remotely as fast as contactless credit card payments it could have found a niche somewhere, but petty much everyone fell back to using cash.
Nowadays of course it's been made utterly irrelevant by contactless payments. In a world where we have almost ubiquitous internet connections this kind of digital cash solves a problem that doesn't really exist any more.
Ah, Flooz - the I remember that from the first and only time (to my knowledge) that my card details got stolen to buy some. An early lesson in why it's not a good idea to use a debit card online but (fortunately?) I was still an impoverished student at the time so didn't have much to steal.
I'm no Apple fan but even I wasn't taken in by the Blackberry tote bag (stuffed with a load of leaflets but alas, nothing useful) at the launch of their tablet, whatever it was called. Remember - the one that didn't actually have email on it?
On the side the slogan was something along the lines of "Yeah, you should have waited" or "Bet you wish you waited". It hung around the office for long enough but was victim to a tat clear-out last year. Probably lasted longer than any of the actual devices. I wonder what happened to BlackBerry?
There was a fleece I got from emusic.com back in 2001 or so for signing up and paying actual money for real mp3s.
I'm still with them on the same grandfathered account; what was originally $9.99 for unlimited downloads (try that on a 128k ISDN) became $9.99 for 40 tracks a month which became £16.80 credit per month for a payment of $9.99 (~£6ish) at a price of £0.42 per track. Still good value - all the indie and classical I want and I've still got the fleece!
I remember CueCats used to phone home, and there was a way to easily stop it, and the CueCat company threatened to sue all these "hackers that were depriving it of a living"
Big 'ol storm on Slashdot, back when Slashdot was actually relevant.
I also remember Radio Shack pushing them REALLY REALLY hard. Almost as hard as they pushed batteries.
Edit: Fired up a few more sleeping neurons and remembered also there was a method to convert them into plain 'ol standalone barcode readers.
Still have some branded items of clothing.
An all singing all dancing email gateway back in the days of ccMail and MSmail before Microsoft Exchange developed the capability to act as a gateway and wiped out the oposition.
People with a downer on Exchange probably don't remember quite how dire email was before it was available.
Unfortunately they no longer fit because I seem to have shrunk. Still, happy days.