HD DVD was a high-definition optical disc format developed primarily by Toshiba and NEC and promoted, from 2004, by the DVD Forum and the HD DVD Promotion Group. Its pitch was pragmatic rather than visionary: deliver true 1080p high-definition video on a disc that could be manufactured on lightly modified versions of the same lines that already stamped billions of standard DVDs. That meant cheaper discs, cheaper players, and a familiar logistics chain. Backers included Universal Pictures, Paramount, Warner Bros. (initially), and Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 shipped with an optional external HD DVD drive.
The problem was that HD DVD never got to fight the war it had prepared for. It was launched into a head-to-head contest with Blu-ray Disc, a rival format led by Sony, Panasonic, Philips and a deep bench of consumer-electronics giants. Blu-ray held more data — 25 GB per layer versus HD DVD’s 15 GB — and, crucially, Sony embedded a Blu-ray drive inside every PlayStation 3. The console war and the format war became the same war, and HD DVD was outnumbered in living rooms before most consumers had decided anything.
The HD-A1, Toshiba’s first HD DVD player, reached U.S. stores in late March 2006, narrowly beating Blu-ray to market. For roughly two years the two formats waged an expensive proxy battle through studio exclusives, retailer shelf space, and dueling price cuts. Then it ended with unusual speed. On January 4, 2008, Warner Bros. announced it would release new titles on Blu-ray only; within weeks Walmart, Best Buy, and Netflix lined up behind Blu-ray, and Toshiba announced on February 19, 2008 that it would stop developing, manufacturing, and marketing HD DVD players and recorders.
HD DVD’s life as a consumer format lasted barely two years — one of the cleaner, faster defeats in the history of format wars. It was not killed by a bad product; by most accounts the players worked well and the picture was excellent. It was killed by content, by hardware install base, and by the cold arithmetic of a market that did not want to keep betting on the loser.
Concorde was the Anglo-French supersonic airliner that, for 27 years, let paying passengers cross the Atlantic faster than the planet turned the morning into afternoon. Born of a 1962 treaty between Britain and France, it was a turbojet-powered delta-wing aircraft cruising at Mach 2.04 — a little over twice the speed of sound — carrying about 100 passengers from New York to London in roughly three and a half hours, less than half the time of a conventional jet. It first flew in 1969 and entered scheduled service on January 21, 1976.
From the start, Concorde was a triumph of engineering and a problem of economics. Only 20 aircraft were ever built, and just 14 entered commercial service, flown exclusively by British Airways and Air France after the original wave of airline orders from carriers around the world collapsed. The aircraft was magnificent and ruinously expensive: it burned enormous quantities of fuel, demanded intensive maintenance, and — because supersonic flight over land was banned in most countries to prevent sonic-boom damage — was effectively confined to transatlantic and a few other overwater routes.
For decades the two airlines kept it flying as a prestige product, charging premium first-class fares to executives and celebrities who valued the time saved and the cachet. But the underlying business was always fragile, and a cascade of blows in the early 2000s ended it. The only fatal Concorde crash, Air France Flight 4590 at Gonesse near Paris on July 25, 2000, killed 113 people and grounded the fleet for over a year. The post-September 11 travel slump and a downturn in premium traffic eroded demand, and Airbus, the manufacturer’s successor, decided to stop supporting the aircraft.
British Airways and Air France retired Concorde in 2003. Air France flew its last commercial service on May 31, 2003; British Airways operated its final scheduled flights on October 24, 2003, with a ceremonial retirement flight on November 26, 2003. No supersonic airliner has flown passengers in scheduled service since — a rare case of a technology that, having reached the future, was deliberately walked back.
Oldsmobile was, for most of the twentieth century, one of the most consequential names in the American automobile — and at the end one of the most quietly redundant. Founded in 1897 by Ransom E. Olds, it was older than General Motors itself, older than Ford’s assembly line, and arguably the company that taught the industry how to build a car in volume. When GM finally retired it in 2004, it ended 107 years of continuous production.
The brand’s claim to history is not marketing. The Curved Dash Oldsmobile of 1901 is widely credited as the first mass-produced automobile, built on a moving-progressive assembly process with interchangeable parts years before Ford’s Model T line. Oldsmobile went on to introduce the first commercially successful fully automatic transmission, the Hydra-Matic, in 1940, and the high-compression overhead-valve Rocket V8 in 1949 that helped launch the postwar horsepower era.
For decades Oldsmobile occupied a comfortable rung on GM’s ladder — a notch above Chevrolet and Pontiac, below Buick and Cadillac — and in the muscle-car years its 442 and Cutlass models gave it genuine swagger. By the late 1970s the Cutlass was among the best-selling cars in America, and in the mid-1980s the division was moving on the order of a million cars a year.
Then the identity dissolved. A disastrous diesel engine in the early 1980s poisoned the brand’s reputation, and GM’s corporate badge-engineering left Oldsmobiles looking and feeling like Buicks and Pontiacs and Chevrolets. The company’s own “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign all but confessed the problem. Squeezed between Japanese imports and GM’s own crowded lineup, Oldsmobile lost its reason to exist. GM announced the wind-down on December 12, 2000, and the last car, an Alero, was built on April 29, 2004.
Polaroid instant film was, for half a century, the closest thing analog photography had to magic: a chemical packet that turned light into a finished, held-in-your-hand photograph in front of your eyes. There was no lab, no negative, no waiting — you pressed the shutter, a print whirred out, and an image swam up from grey to full color while you watched. For decades that small miracle was a fixture of birthdays, real-estate listings, police evidence rooms, and art studios alike.
The format was the life’s work of Edwin Land, a brilliant and famously single-minded inventor whose Polaroid Corporation introduced instant photography to the public with the Model 95 Land Camera in 1948. Land kept pushing the chemistry toward his ideal of a fully integral, dry, one-step print, a vision realized in the elegant SX-70 of 1972 and then democratized by the cheap, foolproof OneStep and the ubiquitous Polaroid 600 series.
What killed it was not a better instant camera but the disappearance of the underlying need. Digital cameras let people see images instantly on a screen and discard the failures for free; camera phones then put that capability in every pocket. The instant print, once the only way to get a photograph immediately, became a slow and expensive way to get a worse one. Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and again in 2008, and in February 2008 announced it would stop manufacturing instant film and close its film factories.
The story did not end there. A small group of enthusiasts called the Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid film factory in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 2008 and spent years reinventing the discontinued chemistry from scratch. They succeeded, kept millions of vintage cameras alive, and eventually acquired the Polaroid brand itself — rebranding as Polaroid Originals in 2017 and simply Polaroid in 2020. Instant film today is a thriving analog niche, with Fujifilm’s Instax booming alongside it.
Kodachrome was a color reversal (slide) film made by Eastman Kodak, introduced in 1935 as 16mm movie film and in 1936 in the 35mm format that would make it famous. For most of the twentieth century it set the standard for what color photography could look like: fine grain, biting sharpness, and saturated yet believable hues that, crucially, did not fade. The film holds an unusual place in the history of invention because its core chemistry was worked out not by career chemists but by two professional musicians, Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes, who pursued the problem as a private obsession before Kodak put its laboratories behind them.
What made Kodachrome extraordinary also made it fragile as a business. Unlike later films, it carried no color couplers in the emulsion itself; the colors were built in during development, in a fiendishly precise sequence that became known as the K-14 process. That process could only be run by specialized labs with the right equipment and chemistry, never at home and never at a corner drugstore. The result was a film prized by professionals and serious amateurs but tethered to an infrastructure that only Kodak and a handful of licensed labs could sustain.
For decades that bargain held. Kodachrome recorded some of the most reproduced images of the century, from Steve McCurry’s 1984 portrait later known as “Afghan Girl” to Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie footage of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Paul Simon gave it a place in popular memory with his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” a song about color and nostalgia that doubled as free advertising.
The arrival of simpler color films, and then of digital capture, dissolved the demand that the K-14 infrastructure required. Kodak announced the film’s discontinuation on June 22, 2009, and the last certified lab finished the final rolls in early 2011. Kodachrome did not so much lose a competition as outlive the world that could support it.