> Why/how did it turn out?

It is extremely hard (for Brian, but even more so for anyone else, I certainly can't) to give a good answer to that, since you're talking about the absence of utility. People had applications in mind but dismissed them because they either found better ways or it wasn't practical. But that very frequently doesn't result in a "paper trail".

(It's a bit like LLMs having problems with negatives/absences.)