Technological Dead-ends:

The rate of technological innovation and change is accelerating,
and the system designer or assembler must be cautious of
specifying hardware or software components that might lead to
system obsolescence.  Every effort must be made to avoid the
pitfalls of technological dead-ends.  The design objective must
be one of upward compatibility in regard to the fundamental data
structure and operating system environment.  Examples of
technologies that were highly touted and failed for a variety of
reasons litter the trail of the information revolution. 
Significant failures include the CP/M operating system (by virtue
of the popularity of the standard setting IBM PC and its MS-DOS
operating system that launched a thousand clones), and the RCA
videodisc system (with a stylus signal reader that was ill
conceived and technologically archaic from its initial
inception).

<cfile12>   Data Processing Technologies
<cfile73>   Upward Compatibility