Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
Most of the technology mentioned in the series are products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, a decidedly inept company which designs and manufactures a wide range of robots and labour-saving devices, such as lifts, automatic doors, ventilation systems, and the infamous Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser. In the novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the Guide summarises the problem with all the corporation's products:
It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of [their products] by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
The only profitable division of the company, its Complaints division, takes up all of the major landmasses on the first three planets in the Sirius Tau system. The theme song for the Complaints division, "Share and Enjoy", apparently becomes the theme for the company as a whole. The main office-building and headquarters for the company was originally built to represent this motto, but due to bad architecture it sank halfway into the ground, leaving the upper halves of the motto's words to read (in the local language) "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig."
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities (GPP). GPP imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Other examples of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's record with sentient technology include an armada of neurotic elevators, hyperactive ships' computers and (perhaps most famously of all) Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and "terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side" stem from unresolved flaws in his programming.
The radio serial of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul mentions the Corporation, which also appears listed in the instructions to the Atari Jaguar game Alien vs Predator as a manufacturer of medical equipment.
By-products of Designer People
In the backstory Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation designed and produced synthetic personalities to order, but they turned out to be the "By-products of Designer People - amalgams of characteristics which simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms". Some of these were dangerous as they did not alert people to their dangerousness. The starship Billion Year Bunker contained three of these in the hold, on their way to being blasted out of the universe - but one had escaped to Earth, "the man babbling gently about a shining city on a hill"; later revised editions clarify the reference by describing the figure as "a Reagan" (in other words, Ronald Reagan).
Doors
Doors manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation are programmed to love their simple lives; they love nothing more than to open and close for passing users, and thank them profusely for so emphatically validating their existence. Most characters in the series grow to loathe the doors, particularly Marvin (the first to explain the doors' "cheerful and sunny dispositions").
Happy Vertical People Transporter
The lifts in the Hitchhiker's Guide offices are called Happy Vertical People Transporters. As designed by the Corporation, they are meant to be sentient (enough to argue with) and have "defocused temporal perception". The latter concept is meant to enable the lifts to see far enough into the future to arrive at a floor before potential passengers realise they wanted a lift, thus saving them from having to wait around and make friends like they would have to do normally.
The one lift with a voice appears in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, voiced by David Tate. The lifts make cameo appearances of sorts in the radio series The Quintessential Phase and in the computer game Starship Titanic.
Matter transference beams
Matter-transference beams feature as the main means of teleportation encountered throughout the series - first used by a Dentrassi to transport Ford and Arthur onto a Vogon ship seconds before the Earth is destroyed. Ford explains that one probably loses some salt and protein when transported for the first time through a matter-transference beam. In the Hitchhiker's game, this condition is fatal without eating peanuts. Used again in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: as the team try to escape from Hotblack Desiato's stuntship, they find a room, approximately 6–8 feet tall, with what resembles a multiple shower unit with half-finished wiring tangled from the ceiling. Since there is no guidance programming and no automatic system, Marvin has to stay behind and operate the machine (he himself escapes by an artificially introduced Improbability Field). Arthur wakes up from the transport and states he has the worst headache imaginable.
Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser
The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is a product of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. The Guide has this to say on the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser:
When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received.
However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
In Fit the Ninth of the radio series, the machine fails to produce tea altogether, in fact refusing to try, and taps Eddie's logic circuits to compute why Arthur wants tea at all; "Because I happen to like it" doesn't compute. With the help of the spirit of Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, Eddie eventually settles on the answer "because he's an ignorant monkey who doesn't know better", though this answer is not well received by Arthur.
In the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, on the other hand, Arthur Dent manages to freeze up a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser (along with the rest of the spaceship they are on) by asking it to make him tea, due to the various servings of the terrible-tasting sludge he'd received from the machine during the entire trip. The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser defines tea as "The taste of dried-up leaves boiled in water". After many hours of considerable thought with the help of Eddie it manages to produce real tea, which Arthur describes as "the best tea he's ever drunk".
In the film adaptation, a machine similar to the drinks dispenser appears, serving brown sludge into a plastic cocktail glass. However, it is not mentioned by name, nor does it engage Arthur in conversation. There is also a similar machine nearby that detects and produces - according to Trillian - "what you're craving". While still incapable of making tea, this machine does not in fact paralyze the ship's systems—that feat is instead accomplished by the hitchhiking mice who are, in fact, the pan-dimensional beings who activated Deep Thought for the second time.
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