Herewith, seven press releases that turned out to be less than prophetic–all in excerpted form for the sake of brevity, and all annotated with the facts as they actually transpired in the days, weeks, months, and years after the releases hit the wire.

Systemax completed the acquisition of the rights to the name on May 19, and relaunched circuitcity.com over the holiday weekend. Old customers will begin receive e-mails from the new owners beginning June 9, although they are being given until that time to choose to opt out.

All assets were sold to Systemax for $14 million USD, plus “a share of future revenue generated utilizing those assets over a 30-month period,” a minimum of $3 million USD according to the press release announcing the new site launch.

CircuitCity.com had a message on it for quite awhile promising some new version of the site, although it wasn’t very clear how it would return. The new version seems not much different from the old — it retains the old color scheme and general layout, although it does seem to have a TigerDirect like feel.

It’s new overlords will not honor warranties or service products from the old Circuit City, it should be noted. Regardless, it is moving on with a new mantra for the brand: “Lower Prices, Wider Selection, Faster Shipping, World Class Service!”

(No solace to the 30,000 employees left go, eh?)

Systemax is certainly on a roll — it now owns the two biggest retail names in electronics next to Best Buy: Circuit City as well as CompUSA. The company bought the latter brand last year for about $30 million USD and began reopening select retail locations two months ago.

It appears we won’t see any reopenings of Circuit Citys in the near future, however Systemax is making a smart move in using a very familiar brand name to lure customers in. Yes, it essentially is a reskinned Tiger Direct/CompUSA, but who cares if you’re their shareholders right? Money is money.

More about Zune HD. Maybe.

eBay: we’re spinning off Skype.

Net neutrality? Now now, please!

Amazon.com: a third of e-commerce.

AT&T wants more iPhone exclusivity.

Microsoft patches up Office holes.

Philips: Two dimensions are enough.

I’m afraid to use ATMs.

Miss Circuit City? Just wait.

For this story–which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose “Whatever Became of…?” books I loved as a kid–I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant–if “extant” means that they remain for sale, in one way or another–and didn’t address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

If you’re like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that some products are still with us at all–and will be saddened by the fates of others. Hey, they may all be inanimate objects, but they meant a lot to some of us back in the day.

Click on to continue–or, if you’re in a hurry, use the links below to skip ahead to a particular section.

Hardware Holdouts
More Hardware Holdouts
Software Survivors
Sites, Services, and Stores

Hardware Holdouts

Dot-Matrix Printers

What they were: The printer you probably owned if you had a PC in the home from the late 1970s until the early-to-mid-1990s. Models like the Epson FX-80 and Panasonic KX-P1124 were noisy and slow, and the best output they could muster was the optimistically-named “near letter quality.” But they were affordable, versatile, and built like tanks.

What happened: Beginning in the early 1990s, inkjet printers from HP, Epson, and Canon started to get pretty good–their output came far closer to rivaling that of a laser printer than dot-matrix ever could. And then, in the mid-1990s, they added something that killed the mass-market dot-matrix printer almost instantly: really good color. (I still remember having my socks knocked off by the original Epson Stylus Color when I saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1994.) There was simply no comparison between even the best dot-matrix printer and a color inkjet.

Current whereabouts: Nobody ever thinks about dot-matrix printers anymore, but they haven’t gone away–my local Office Depot still stocks them, in fact. That’s because they have at least two valuable features that inkjet and laser models can’t match: The fact that the dot-matrix printhead hits the paper with a hard whack means they’re perfect for printing multiple-part forms, and their use of tractor-feed mechanisms rather than dinky trays lets them print thousands of pages without a paper refill. Consequently, small businesses everywhere refuse to give them up. It won’t startle me if there are still Epsons productively hammering out invoices and receipts a couple of decades from now, assuming we still use paper at all.

Hayes Modems

What they were: Dial-up modems from the company whose founder, Dennis Hayes, essentially invented the PC modem in the 1970s. The commands he devised became such a standard that all dial-up modems use them to this day. Hayes dominated the modem business for years–it was as synonymous with the product category it pioneered as any tech company before or since.

What happened: Well, dial-up modems don’t matter as much as they once did, in case you hadn’t noticed. But Hayes’ decline and fall dates to well before the death of dial-up: The company stubbornly kept prices high even in the face of much cheaper competition, and thought its future lay in making ISDN modems, a market that never took off. It declared bankruptcy in 1994 and again in 1998, and was liquidated in 1999.

Current whereabouts: In 1999, Zoom Telephonics–the company whose dirt-cheap modems played a major role in crushing Hayes–bought the Hayes name. It continues to market a few Hayes-branded modems. But it’s a pretty obscure fate for a once-mighty brand–I didn’t know it was still extant at all until I checked.

MiniDisc

What it was: Sony’s format for pint-sized recordable audio discs, introduced in 1992. The idea was that it combined the best qualities of compact discs and cassette tapes into one high-quality, portable package that could contain up to eighty minutes of music.

What happened: MiniDisc found some fans–it was popular in Asia, and among musicians. But it never gained much support from the music industry, so few prerecorded albums were available. And within a few years of its introduction, it found itself competing with digital downloads–and while Sony introduced NetMD, a MiniDisc variant that supported MP3, it made it remarkably unappealing by adding copy protection to your tracks as you transferred them to disc. Why would you choose NetMD when a multitude of players, such as those from Diamond and Creative, let MP3s be MP3s? Good question!

Current whereabouts: In 2004, Sony upgraded the MiniDisc format with Hi-MD, a higher-capacity, more flexible standard that was backwards compatible with MiniDiscs. It garnered some admiration among audiophiles for the high quality of its recording capabilities. But as of 2009, only one Hi-MD device remains in Sony’s lineup, the MZ-M200. It’s aimed at musicians and journalists who need to make recordings on the go. The moment it disappears, we can officially declare MiniDisc dead.

Monochrome Displays

What they were: The black-and-white CRT that most businesses and many homes used with computers from the 1970s through the late 1980s–and they worked just fine, since most DOS applications made little use of color, and early Macs didn’t support it at all.

What happened: Graphical user interfaces, multimedia, and games all made universal use of color inevitable, but it took a long time before it truly conquered computing. Well into the 1990s, lots of folks who wouldn’t dream of using a black-and-white display with a desktop PC still toted monochrome notebooks. But today, even a $200 netbook has a perfectly respectable color display.

Current whereabouts: You don’t want a monochrome display. But if you did, you wouldn’t have trouble finding one–even Dell still stocks them. They’re still out there in large quantities, being used for electronic cash registers and other unglamorous but important text-based applications. And hey, monochrome is making its own unexpected sort of comeback: My brand-new Kindle 2 e-book reader has an e-ink screen that does sixteen shades of gray, and nothing else.

Hercules

What it was: An extremely popular line of graphics cards for IBM PCs and compatibles. Hercules first appeared in 1982, the year after the IBM PC was launched, and was known for its high-quality text; it was as synonymous with graphics in the 1980s as Creative’s Sound Blaster was with audio a decade later.

What happened: When fancy color graphics replaced spartan text displays, Hercules continued to be a prominent brand for years, though it never dominated as it did in the early years. But in 1998, it was bought out by competitor ELSA, which then went bankrupt and sold the Hercules brand to French tech company Guillemot. (Researching this article, I’ve come to the conclusion that one sale or merger is usually bad news for a venerable brand, and a second one is usually near-fatal.) Guillemot continued to make cards under the Hercules name for several years. But industry consolidation in the graphics biz was ongoing and brutal, and in 2004 it ceased production of them.

Current whereabouts: The Hercules name lives on, but on an array of tech gadgets that doesn’t include graphics cards: Guillemot uses it for notebooks, Wi-Fi and powerline networking gear, sound cards, speakers, iPod accessories, laptop bags, and more. I wish them luck. But it’s a little as if McDonalds stopped selling burgers to concentrate on tuna salad, Philly cheese steaks, BLTs, and Reubens.

After the jump, a final set of fuzzy iPhone photos from the scene of the sale. I wonder how long it’ll take the landlord to fill the space, and what will replace Circuit City there–and in the 566 other storefronts that the chain’s failure leaves without a tenant?

As I wended my way towards the store, I noticed that the huge STORE CLOSING banner was gone. I don’t think this is a clue they’re having second thoughts. And it probably doesn’t mean they sold it to anyone, although that would be kind of cool. I suspect that the store is simply so near its end that they’d already started to remove the going-out-of-business signage. Either that, or it was torn asunder during the blustery weather we’ve been having here lately.

For the first time since my first visit to this store’s liquidation, it was packed with consumers–more than I’d seen in any Circuit City in a long time. And they were buying stuff, too. I was shocked to see a queue at the checkout.

Around seventy percent of the store was now cordoned off. I don’t know what the “SERVICE DEFECTIVE” on that tape means, but it’s sort of fitting: Circuit City died, in part, because its service was too often defective.

In normal times, you expect the signage attached to PCs in a store to brag about the features they contain. At a nearly-moribund Circuit City, it lists what’s not inside. Kind of like “no radio” signs tacked to car windows.

All the remaining laptops I saw were apparently floor models, missing fripperies like…oh, like all their keys, for instance. Despite signs saying that everything in the store was at least fifty percent off, computers were still marked down by only forty percent–Circuity City still hoped that someone would plunk down $539.98 for this one. (Tip: You can buy a pretty good brand-new laptop for less than that these days–one with a full set of keys, even.)

The store had planted folks brandishing signs promoting the sale around the neighborhood, and their placards stated that all TVs were 50 percent off. As far as I could tell, “all TV” consisted of one TV. As the description taped to its front explains, it has a red line down the middle of the screen. Bsut hey, it’s still a 1080p HD set with an impressive 10,000:1 contrast ratio.

The ample supply of blue iPod cases I’d seen last Mondaay were still there, still looking hopeful that someone would buy them. Sadly, it wouldn’t be these two ladies, who sauntered off after I snapped this photo.

Also still on hand: vast quantities of armbands for various Sandisk Sansa MP3 players. For thirty cents apiece. You gotta think they could knock them down to a penny apiece, and still have trouble getting rid of them.

The same Canon gadget that mystified me on my last visit was also still lurking about (upon further reflection, I think it’s a little photo printer). It’s really just not that much more tempting at $60 than it was at $90. When Circuit City closes for the last time tomorrow night, I wouldn’t be shocked if this were the last unsold item in the place.

Most of the CDs I’d seen on my last visit were gone, but I did run into Mary J. Blige. Repeatedly.

Thanks bad economy. Seems the only way people will buy anything these days is if it is discounted so much that nobody’s making any money.

The place looked a little desolate even before I went inside: The “Store Closing” banner was twisting in the wind like a Circuit City creditor, a “For Lease” sign was up, and you still tell where the signage promoting the Verizon Store within (which is gone) had been haphazardly removed.

Inside, large sections of the store floor were cordoned off like a crime scene, with stern warnings forbidding customers to enter them. These were the only areas of the place that didn’t look a little like a dump.

So the big question with any liquidation sale is: Are there deals to be had? This one did have at least a few–$45 for a fresh copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student is a steal–it goes for appreciably more even at eBay.

Curiously, Circuit City hasn’t seen fit to do anything insaaaaaaaaaane with PCs yet. Despite signs around the store claiming that everything was at least 30 percent off, desktops and laptops have still only been marked down by 20 percent. Most desktops seemed to be gone, but it had stacks and stacks of one HP model.

I didn’t see any factory-sealed notebooks remaining–Circuit City is still trying to sell open-box ones (floor models?) for only 20 percent off. As one shopper I overheard commented, “My socks remain firmly on.”

TVs were 40 percent off, including a 42-inch LG model that was in plentiful supply. I tried to find the LG elsewhere to see if Circuit City’s $779.49 price was a big whoop, but couldn’t find it–looks like it may be an old model. I did find TigerDirect selling an LG model that looks similar, but with better specs, for $20 more. And LG’s own site says that Circuit City’s set lists for $1049, not the $1299.99 that Circuit claims.

This left me feeling melancholy: The TVs that were still plugged in were running a video in a continuous loop bragging about the fabulous after-the-sale service and peace of mind that buying at Circuit City brings.

Weird: In same cases the store had dozens and dozens of one item on hand, as if someone in the purchasing department had been engaging in irrational exuberance. Such as one particular blue iPod case.

Circuit City also remains a great place to buy DVDs, as long as they’re either The Dark Knight or Hancock.

What was the single steepest discount I saw in the place?”Mobile Accessories” were eighty percent off. Most of them seemed to actually be parts that the store’s installation department would have used, such as car model-specific faceplates for installing aftermarket stereos.

And yet Microsoft has just announced plans to open its own stores and help other sellers promote Microsoft products, presumably inspired in part by the phenomenal, unexpected success of the Apple Stores. You gotta think, however, that the company isn’t diving into technology retailing because the market is booming so much as because it’s so anemic. My guess is that Microsoft figures that the computer merchants of America are doing a mediocre job of explaining its products, and that it must therefore step in and try to get it right. Just like Apple did when it decided to play storekeeper a few years ago.

On some level, it would have been more startling if CompUSA and Circuit City had thrived than if they’d fallen on hard times. The history of consumer-electronics retailing in America is pock-marked with once-famous names that were forced to call it quits. And even though the currently dismal state of the economy may have dealt Circuit City may have dealt Circuit City its death blow, I can’t help but come back to one depressing thought: Circuit City collapsed because it didn’t do enough to earn the loyalty of busy, intelligent shoppers. And neither did the majority of electronics retailers that have ever existed. Their failure to do so inevitably led to their failure, period.

It’s tempting to point to the Apple Stores and blithely say that all the answers to building better computer retailers are contained within their four walls. Some of them are. But it’s not that simple. Apple Stores concentrate on selling Apple’s own limited selection of products, which makes it far easier to competently display, explain, and fix them. It’s hard to replicate that approach when you sell thousands of wares from hundreds of companies. And Apple deals mainly in high-end products that presumably leave a comfortable enough profit margin to invest in a superior retail environment. That’s far easier to do when the typical laptop you stock costs $1599, not $599.

Even so, I think it would be possible to build a chain of full-service tech superstores that served their customers better than any have to date–and which, as a result, stood a better chance of being viable businesses for years to come. Here’s what would make me a raving fan and a frequent buyer, anyhow:

Better stuff. It’s a vicious circle: Tech stores emphasize cheapo, bargain-basement products which won’t draw more sophisticated, affluent shoppers, and therefore have trouble squeezing out the profit they need to stay in business. (If you want something as mundane as a netbook with a six-cell battery rather than a chintzier three-cell one, you’ll probably end up hitting the Web rather than the mall when you buy.)

Newer stuff. Why is it that so many of the computers stocked at retail feel like flashbacks to what online merchants were selling six months ago? Why do digital-camera sections often sport some of last season’s models rather than the newer, better, cheaper ones that replaced them? There’s got to be a way to rush the latest products onto shelves far more efficiently.

Better-displayed stuff. Cruise the aisles of most technology retailers, and you’ll be confronted with laptops with keys pried off, TVs that are shut off so you can’t judge their picture quality, and printers set up to produce output samples–except they’re out of ink and/or paper. In theory, brick-and-more retailers have a huge advantage over Web-only outfits in their ability to let you see and touch products before you buy. In reality, most of them fumble this opportunity big time.

Better-explained stuff. I’m not even talking about salespeople who know what they’re talking about. I just want the right specs and prices displayed with the right products, so I know what I’m getting and how much it’ll cost.

More accessible stuff. I understand that retailers have to contend with the sleazeballs who shoplift their products. But when stores shackle up their laptops, you can’t lift them and judge their weight. When they put anything pricier than a 2GB thumb drive in a locked case, you might give up and walk out of the store if you can’t find a clerk with a key quickly. And when a merchant places a guard at the door to check my receipt (or pretend to), the message is clear: We Treat All Our Customers as Potential Thieves.

Better-priced stuff. I know that it’s impossible to provide both the best shopping experience and the lowest prices. Which is fine–actually, I’m happy to pay a bit more at a store which I know is working overtime to make me a happy customer. But why do manufacturer price cuts which online stores reflect instantly take so long to take effect at retail? It can result in a completely meaningless price penalty of $50 or $100 on a digital camera.

A little sense of fun. The vast majority of electronics merchants are remarkably dreary–even grim–establishments. Who wants to spend time or money in a joyless place that makes buying an expensive toy like going to the DMV? Where’s the Trader Joe’s of tech–a chain that seems to be run by people who enjoy what they do, and want you do enjoy yourself, too?

Okay, I’m done venting. Please tell me if you feel my pain–or if I’m asking for something that’s impossible to deliver. And if you have any other ideas for fixing tech retailing, I’d love to hear them and share them with other Technologizer readers.

[Note: This post was originally published in Technologizer's T-Week newsletter, delivered to your inbox for free every Friday--head here to subscribe.]

I joined the line, and got the impression that other folks had joined it in part because they saw a line and figured it was worth joining. (Or at least the woman behind me seemed unclear on the concept–she asked what was going on in the store, and why were were all queuing up.)

A CNet reporter said he found “pandemonium” inside a Southern California Circuit City; this one, just to the south of San Francisco, was relatively sedate inside. Actually, there were fewer people in line to buy stuff than I usually see at Best Buy on a Saturday afternoon. The store felt downright lonely, in part because it was full of staffers who knew they were about to be unemployed, tables of open-box merchandise, items scattered in the aisles, and TVs forlornly playing a video loop arguing that you should buy a TV from Circuit City because of its great post-purchase service.

It was easy to tell why so few people were filling their carts with gear: The deals to be had were far from spectacular. The signs outside promised “Up to 30% OFF,” but a more direct claim would have been something along the lines of “Most hardware 10 percent off, software 20 percent off, and good luck if you find anything in the store that’s 30 percent off.” If your goal was to get the best possible price, you could probably beat even Circuit City’s liquidation prices without trying very hard by going online. Which is presumably one reason why Circuit City was forced into bankruptcy in the first place.

If Circuit City’s liquidation follows the usual pattern, the discounts will get larger as the shelves grow barer, and within a few weeks the stores will be left with items that you don’t want to buy even at 80 percent off. After the jump, some bad iPhone photos from my visit, which left me melancholy about the death of the 60-year-old merchant even though I was never a big fan in the first place.

Even if the U.S. economy was in better shape, the odds were against the company–and, for that matter, anyone else who tries to operate a big chain of electronics stores. Far more of them have folded over the years than have ever been viable businesses. Running successful retail stores is by definition really hard, and the intense price competition among gadget sellers makes squeezing out a profit incredibly tough.

Even so, Circuit City’s death strikes me as largely self-inflicted: For too long, its stores were joyless places with limited selections, uncompetitive prices, and mediocre customer service. It even had an organized program to fire staffers who were experienced enough to know what they were doing and replace them with clueless, low-clost newbies.

With Circuit City’s imminent disappearance, the country is really left with only one nationwide full-service electronics chain, Best Buy. It’s long played Gallant to Circuit City’s Goofus, and should ride out the recession in decent shape. Other electronics purveyors are specialists (RadioShack), generalists with an electronics department (Wal-Mart, Target), regional (Fry’s, the current incarnation of CompUSA), or willfully limited in number of locations (Micro Center). Or, of course, completely virtual (Amazon.com, Buy.com, etc., etc., etc.).

Among the reasons I wish that Circuit City had made it is this: It would be a lot better for consumers if there were at least two strong national chains competing to win customers through broad product selection, low prices, and decent service. Best Buy has enough competition and challenges on other fronts that I don’t expect it to grow too fat and happy, but it no longer has to worry about its most direct rival.

Of course, if Best Buy’s management is smart–and it is–it’ll continue to run scared. Jim Collins’ business bestseller, Good to Great–published in 2001–lavishes praise on Circuit City as one of the country’s best-run companies of any sort. It took Circuit City only eight years to go from glory to death. Bottom line: Best Buy could be dead in a decade too, if it doesn’t make its customers happy…