The videocassette rental giant began offering on-demand viewing on home computers in its waning days.

Too little, too late, the Blockbuster critics hooted. But at least Blockbuster tried to change.

As a sidebar -- or perhaps a bookend -- to the Blockbuster story is the story of Fotomat, which made a very aggressive effort to remake itself in the late 1970s.

They are pretty much forgotten now, but Fotomat drive-through kiosks were once ubiquitous. They were little yellow booths that stood in parking lot of every shopping center in America, or so it seemed. They offered what was (in the early 70s) lightning-fast photo processing: 24 hours, as opposed to the couple of weeks you had to wait dropping your photos off at the drugstore.

Perhaps recognizing that one-hour photo shops would soon displace them, Fotomat embarked on a daring experiment in 1979. The idea was to use their existing infrastructure of kiosks for movie rentals, an infrastructure that just happened to cover the suburban areas where VCR market penetration was highest.

Of course, very few people owned VCRs in 1979, and the major studios were just starting to experiment with licensing a few titles to pre-recorded tapes. A couple of entrepeneurs had already tested the waters of video rental, usually in the form of mail-order "clubs" that required steep annual membership fees.

So Fotomat's concept was really quite brilliant, but unfortunately its system was too complicated: you took a paper catalog, made your rental selection, called a phone number to reserve your tape, picked it up 24 hours later, then had five days before you needed to return it.

That model failed, but it wasn't long before another succeeded: the video rental retail shop. That, of course, was a model that worked brilliantly.

Until it didn't.