Back in the Day, Patents Actually Meant Something [Retromodo]
From 1790 until 1870, patent applications had to also include a miniature model, less than 12 square inches in size, along with the idea. We wish the policy were still around, at least to weed out the more ridiculous ideas.
Today, tech companies are some of the worst offenders in patent application, filing crazy patents for any half-baked idea they can think up, without the slightest regard for whether an object can actually be made. That’s not even going into patents for basic ideas like Page Up/Page Down keys. Questionable patents aside, the strict miniaturization policy might have finally given us an iPhone Nano.
The days of physical patents are over, but some are still collecting the rare miniature versions, including the roller skate and paper clip. They’re pretty cool, especially if you’re as big a paper clip fanatic as I am. [Wired]
How to Build the 1MHz Apollo Guidance Computer For Just $3000 [DIY]
$3000. That’s how much it costs to build now the $150,000 Apollo Guidance Computer—the first computer to use integrated circuits, with a 1MHz clock, four 16-bits registers, 4K RAM, and 32K ROM—using 1960s-like components.
Designed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the Apollo Guiding Computer was the most advanced computer of its time. It ran a multitasking operating system called EXEC, capable of executing eight jobs simultaneously. What you are seeing above is just the visible part of it, the Dsky user interface, which was mounted in both the Command Module and the Lunar Module. The astronauts had to enter commands and data for the AGC to process using that keyboard, which also gave them feedback beyond the other million lights and indicators in the cockpits.
Back 40 years ago yesterday, the AGC ran into some unexpected problems: Executive overflows alarms fired up, caused by too many interrupts from the rendezvous radar. This radar was intentionally turned on by the astronauts in case there was a need to abort the mission fast. However, this data—coupled with the landing radar’s stream—overloaded the AGC causing some commands to be delayed.
As we know Armstrong and Aldrin saved the day, helped by ground control and the programmers. The Eagle landed safely and they all lived happily ever after. If it were 1969, they would still be up there now.
You can try to build your own Apollo Guidance Computer following John Pultorak’s full, and exhaustive and huge and dizzying, step-by-step instructions here. [Galaxiki via Universe Today—Image via ibiblio]
Check our complete Apollo 11 coverage here
1979: The Golden Age of Lego [Lego]
1979 was the beginning of Lego as we know it today, the year when they took over the world, the year of the Galaxy Explorer. I photographed all the classic sets in my Lego trip. Here’s the never-released gallery:
The Lego bricks were invented a lot earlier, but 1979 was the year of Legoland Space, Legoland Town, and Legoland Castle. Those three are the Lego universes that started it all. They were first introduced in 1978—except for the Galaxy Explorer—but it wasn’t until 1979 and the few following years when they really took off. More importantly for me: It wasn’t until 1979 when I actually build them.
During 1978, 1979, and the beginning of the 80s, Lego had its Golden Age. For sure, now they sell more than ever and they have a huge army of followers. But that was the true Golden Age, with the very best sets ever developed by the Danish company.
Many great ones came later, but I was lucky enough to play with all those original sets back in 1979, when I was a little kid.
Here you have my favorites, straight from the official show room on top of their secret vault, in the original Lego factory.
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Vintage Desk Coughs Up Vintage General Electric Abacus [Retromodo]
Those young whipper snappers back in 1979 couldn’t hold a candle to this archaic computational device, the abacus. Gizmodo 600 BC, anyone?
Reader Robin says this little guy was hiding out in the drawer of a recent vintage purchase:
My wife, Deborah, recently bought a secretary style vintage desk from an estate seller. In one of the drawers along with some staples & glue was this little abacus. It’s about 2 x 4 inches. Thought you might enjoy seeing this – no clue of it’s history or age & I don’t see anything about it searching google.
Personally, I love the simple juxtaposition of the label. An abacus, one of the oldest counting tools on the planet, with a General Electric “Computer Department” label on the side? Classic Retromodo. [Thanks, Robin]
1979 Rumor: Leaked Docs of “Compact Disc” Audio Format Using LASERS [Giz 79]
From 1979: A source “close to the matter” claims this document outlines a future Audio format that would utilize a tapeless design, and *snort* use lasers as some sort of record needle. Sounds like Bullshit to me.
First of all, a laser is going to burn up whatever it touches, so, like, do you listen to it once and then throw it away? That sounds like a great idea if you’re one of those guys who made us buy 8 tracks and now want us to repurchase all our favorite songs on cassettes again. I’m not even going to get started on the potential fire hazard here. And last time I checked (the movies) lasers shoot out, they don’t shoot back in, so its not like a laser is a good replacement for a record needle. Sure, it wouldn’t wear out these magic laser records like vinyl and physical needles do, but that’s because said disc would be make believe. And if even real, be on fire.
Sheesh. Nice try, rumor fakers. Never going to fool an expert gadget blogger. [25th anniversary of the CD]
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
Then and Now: Microsoft [Microsoft]
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
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Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
Cray-1: The Super Computer [Computers]
Seymour Cray’s big super computer was crazy. It’s signals between components had to be timed by trimming long cables up to 1/16th of an inch at a time by hand and was basically interwoven with a giant refrigeration system.
Name: Cray-1
Year created: 1976
Creator: Cray Research, Inc.
Cost: $5 million to $10 million
Memory: 4MW semiconductor
Speed: 160 MFLOPS
Building supercomputers was a dream, an aspiration, and a life’s pursuit for Seymour Cray, and his work on the computers that bore his name was the culmination of work he had done for the U.S. Navy, for CDC [Control Data Corporation], and finally for his namesake company. When Cray left CDC in 1972, after his work on the 6600, 7600, and minimally the 8600, he took much of the supercomputer fire with him.
While Cray’s departure from CDC wasn’t overly dramatic, his impact on supercomputing was. Cray artfully designed computers so that each part worked to efficiently speed up the whole, and he usually didn’t rely on the newest experimental components, preferring instead to tweak existing technologies for maximum performance. For instance, the Cray-1 was the first Cray machine to use integrated circuits, despite their having been on the market for about a decade. At 160 MFLOPS, the Cray-1 was the fastest machine at the time, and despite what seemed like only a niche market for expensive superfast machines, Cray Research sold more than a hundred of them.
Form and size were always concerns for Cray, as far back as his days developing the CDC 160, which was built into an ordinary desk. There was also a big concern with the heat that could be generated by so many parts being packaged so tightly together, so Cray’s designs typically involved unique cooling solutions, whether it be Freon on the Cray-1, or Fluorinert, in which Cray-2’s circuit boards were immersed.
Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!
The photos in the book were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.
Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
The Network Before the Internet [Network]
The network started to breathe in the 70’s. Above, the first ethernet cable, found in PARC’s labs by Boing Boing Gadgets. Dag Spicer, numero uno Curator at the Computer History Museum, tells us more:
John Shoch and Jon Hupp at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center discovered the computer “worm,” a short program that searches a network for idle processors. Initially designed to provide more efficient use of computers and for testing, the worm had the unintended effect of invading networked computers, creating a security threat.
Shoch took the term “worm” from the book “The Shockwave Rider,” by John Brunner, in which an omnipotent “tapeworm” program runs loose through a network of computers. Brunner wrote: “No, Mr. Sullivan, we can´t stop it! There´s never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail! It´s building itself, don´t you understand? Already it´s passed a billion bits and it´s still growing. It´s the exact inverse of a phage – whatever it takes in, it adds to itself instead of wiping… Yes, sir! I´m quite aware that a worm of that type is theoretically impossible! But the fact stands, he´s done it, and now it´s so goddamn comprehensive that it can´t be killed. Not short of demolishing the net!” (247, Ballantine Books, 1975).
USENET established. USENET was invented as a means for providing mail and file transfers using a communications standard known as UUCP. It was developed as a joint project by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by graduate students Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, and Steve Bellovin. USENET enabled its users to post messages and files that could be accessed and archived. It would go on to become one of the main areas for large-scale interaction for interest groups through the 1990s.
The first Multi-User Domain (or Dungeon), MUD1, is goes on-line. Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, two students at the University of Essex, write a program that allows many people to play against each other on-line. MUDs become popular with college students as a means of adventure gaming and for socializing. By 1984, there are more than 100 active MUDs and variants around the world.
Dag Spicer is CHM’s “Chief Content Officer,” and is responsible for creating the intellectual frameworks and interpretive schema of the Museum’s various programs and exhibitions. He also leads the Museum’s strategic direction relating to its collection of computer artifacts, films, documents, software and ephemera—the largest collection of computers and related materials in the world.
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
The Supersonic Concorde Jet: Can We Go Back to 1979, Please? [Airplanes]
Many of our Gizmodo ‘79 posts have illustrated just how far we’ve come in the past three decades, but in one important tech example, 1979 kicks 2009’s ass: The Concorde Jet.
The Concorde, first launched in 1977, was a joint British-French governmental venture to create a commercial, passenger supersonic jet. It ran over budget (six times over, actually) and was banned in various spots around the world (including New York City, temporarily) due to concerns over safety and the thundering sonic booms that resulted from the jet’s breaking of the sound barrier. It lost a tremendous amount of money for both England and France and ran its final flight in 2003, at that point a bit outdated—the cockpit, while impressively techy in 1979, was full of analog dials and displays that looked silly in the 21st century. Only 20 Concordes were made, and there was no real motivation to update them, due both to a lack of competition and a distinct lack of profitability. Yet it was also an iconic, incredible achievement, capable of flying New York City to Paris in 3.5 hours, and still current holder of a ton of speed records.
Nothing we have now can touch it. A flight from NYC to Paris today takes over seven hours, compared to the 3.5 it took the Concorde. Plane travel has, for better or for worse, become more about economy than luxury, speed, and style. Sure, a cross-country flight on Southwest will only run you $150, but there’s no thrill, no sense of the cutting-edge. The Concorde had those qualities in spades.
While researching the Concorde, I found a lot of interesting sidenotes to the story. For one, many of the same design team that created the Concorde went on to engineer the Airbus, the populist economy plane of our modern, boring times. But funniest to me is the continual hatred the British have of the French, and how it manifested in the forced alliance between the two countries to build the Concorde.
In response to a “perceived slight” by the French President Charles de Gaulle, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan pulled what I now think of as a Bushian move: He changed the spelling of “Concorde” to the more “English” Concord. Even funnier, when the British Minister for Technology, Tony Benn, later changed the spelling back, there was mass nationalistic outrage in England. To diffuse it, Benn had to specify that the reconstituted E on the end of the word stood for “Excellence, England, Europe and Entente (Cordiale).” Yeah, right, Benn. I’m sure the E stood for England. Unbelievably, this quelled the Francophobe anger, though Benn would later mutter about how ridiculous the whole mess was in his memoirs.
We’ll take our iPhones over 1979’s Walkmans, and thank god for internet porn. But just one time, we’d like to break the sound barrier while crossing the Atlantic.
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
Tandy TRS-80: The Budget Computer [Computers]
Even back then, there were computers for people who couldn’t afford the more expensive stuff. Take this Tandy, which costs little more than a upgraded Netbook today. From Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman.
TRS-80 Model 1 (and Model 100)
Year created: 1977
Creator: Tandy Corporation
Cost: $399 ($599 with monitor)
Memory: 4KB ROM
Processor: Z-80
Despite Apple’s marketing message of personal empowerment and freedom, they weren’t giving away those Apple IIs. A computer—especially one with a price tag of $1,300 or more—was beyond the comfort range of most people in the country, and few parents considered such a thing necessary to child development. As far as business went, it would be a while before a “killer app”—a must-have application—would be developed for machines available at an affordable price.
The TRS-80 was in part an antidote to this. If parents were convinced of a computer’s necessity, but their pocketbooks couldn’t support an Apple, then $399, or even $99, was worth considering. For a business that wanted to experiment with computing, that was a reasonable asking price.
The system was developed by the Tandy buyer Don French and Homebrew Computer Club leader Steve Leininger, who was quoted by Creative Computing magazine at the time as saying he had rejected a company plan to sell a computer kit because “too many people can’t solder.” This was an interesting admission from the company that owned Radio Shack, famous at that time for selling electronics parts to hobbyists. Nevertheless, the TRS-80 was actually rather sophisticated. Four kilobytes of RAM were matched with 4K of ROM holding Radio Shack’s proprietary version of BASIC. The silver-and-black color scheme—even more than a beige box—evoked a kind of futuristic proletarian chic. Like other, similar systems, the TRS-80 used a cassette tape player as a storage device.
The early portable TRS-80 Model 100, designed by Kyocera and released in 1983, was evidence that, by that time, beige was winning the color war. Rugged and able to start up immediately, the Model 100 as utilitarian and much-beloved by traveling reporters.
Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!
The above photographs were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.
Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
Houston-Hull, TX