The Gadgets Page

Update 01-15-15

The incredible Mike Dodas recognized the computer and the people in the photos! He identified some of them and told us the whole story about them here:

• The Gadgets Page – Utah Department of Employment Security and Their RCA Spectra 70

Thank you, Mike, for sharing all this information with us! I love hearing about the old systems and I believe all of it should be saved and archived. Wishing you the best in all you do!

I found these photos in a local antique store in Salt Lake City and I knew that I HAD to have them. It’s obvious that these people are so proud of their RCA Spectra 70.

Here is a little more information on this particular computer.

• RCA Spectra 70 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The RCA Spectra 70 was a line of electronic data processing (EDP) equipment manufactured by the Radio Corporation of America’s computer division beginning in April 1965. The Spectra 70 line included several CPU models, various configurations of core memory, mass-storage devices, terminal equipment, and a variety of specialized interface equipment.

The system architecture and instruction-set were largely compatible with the non-privileged instruction-set of the IBM System/360. While this degree of compatibility made some interchange of programs and data possible, differences in the operating system software precluded transparent movement of programs between the two systems.

Michael found these PDFs of the RCA Spectra70 Brochures:

• RCA Spectra70 Brochure – 1965
• RCA Spectra70 Brochure – 1968

If you notice, the 1965 brochure doesn’t mention a Salt Lake City office, but the 1968 brochure does. Considering that RCA stopped selling the Spectra70 in 1970, I suspect these photos are from the opening of the Salt Lake City office. There were few companies in Utah who would be so proud of their computer back then: Evans and Sutherland or maybe the U of U.

More photos after the break: (Continue Reading…)

I found this advertisement from General Motors in Seventeen Magazine back in 1984.

The ad reads:

The Future of Transportation is Here

Park A Dream On Your Bedroom Wall

This concept car was designed and built for the future by General Motors. You can’t see it on the highways yet (the actual concept car can be seen at EPCOT CENTER), but you can see it every single day in your own room. For this full color poster…

Why they advertised so regularly in a teen girls fashion magazine, I’ll never know. The irony of the whole thing is their catch phrase if it were only finished correctly:

Park a dream on your bedroom wall, because you’ll never be able to park it in your future.

I’m still waiting for this car, GM. Maybe THAT’S why you guys need a government bailout…

Did you know that Atari Computer Camps existed?! I had no idea and I was EXACTLY the kind of kid that would have LOVED Atari Summer Camp.

Last month, I was doing some research at the library for Starling Fitness by looking through old Seventeen magazines from the Eighties. I happened to find these two advertisements for Atari Computer Camps and even now I wonder how I didn’t hear anything about this. I READ those magazines back when I was a teenager. You’d think I would have noticed these ads a little more than the “It Feels Good To Be Thin” ad that I remembered even after twenty years.

I first learned how to program in BASIC on an Atari 800 at Kennedy Junior High. I would have LOVED to go to Atari Computer Camp. Look at that photo! I would have thought it a dream come true to go to a COED camp with BOYS.

This advertisement makes a big deal about that “feature” of the camps. It reads:

Why do girls like Atari Computer Camps?

Maybe girls like Atari Computer Camps because of our full program of sports and recreational activities. Maybe it’s our professional and dedicated staff. Most probably it’s because they have the unique opportunity to get computer skills that will serve them the rest of their lives.

And of course, it could just be that Atari girls happen to like Atari boys.

It doesn’t get any better than that, does it?

I found this article wrote in 1983 about the Atari Camps:

• Inside Atari: Computer Camp

The schedule looked like this:

9:00-10:25 a.m. Computer Instruction
10:30-11:10 Drama
11:15-12:00 Tennis
12:00- 1:55 Lunch – Rest Hour
2:00- 2:55 Computer Workshop
3:00- 3:35 Free Swim
4:00- 5:25 Softball

They even had famous visitors:

Once a week on banquet night a special guest speaker, usually a computer game designer/programmer, appears to talk about his work. The week before our visit, Chris Crawford, author of Atari’s Eastern Front, talked about his programming experience and his new games, soon to be released, called Gossip and Excalibur. The day we visited the camp, Vince Wu, designer of the famous Donkey Kong arcade game, was scheduled to speak.

I would have loved to go to a camp like this! I wonder how my life would be different if I had.

This is a pretty fun video showcasing the history of computers. It’s called Dot Matrix Revolution from SUPERBROTHERS and I found it delightful:

DOT MATRIX REVOLUTION* from superbrothers on Vimeo.

Even their description of it is fun:

Following an early morning status check of their vintage electronic equipment, two computer engineers “throw down” in an awkward dance-off that seems to echo the development of information technolgy and the internet from 1951 up to the present day (!?). The film features a catchy jingle by pop impresario Jim Guthrie. This is the second film by SUPERBROTHERS.

Next time you hear Steve Jobs talking about uploading things to “The Cloud” remember this little rendition of what it may look like.

Via: The History Of The World In 10 1/2 Pixels: Want To See The History Of The Computer In Under Four Minutes?

Back in December of last year, Jason Kottke wrote about how much he feels about his cell phones. You can see it here:

• Remembrance of Phones Past (kottke.org)

In 2001, I spoke to my father on this Kyocera smartphone from 8th Avenue, having run up the block from work just in time to see the first tower fall. I don’t have to go into all the emotional baggage which that implies.

Since the time began that we were never to be found without our mobile phones (or whichever portable devices, for that matter), I feel that somehow all of the memories of the current chapter of my life are being constantly averaged out and inextricably linked to the phone that I’m using.

The Kyocera smartphone was the same one I was using when the the towers fell. I remember my client calling me on it, worried that I would be glued to the television instead of helping him with his move. Terrorists or not, he was going to homeless in 14 days if we didn’t close on his deal and I wasn’t about to let that happen.

A couple of months before that, I used to visit the phone at Office Max every few days. It was the epitome of smartphones at the time and I really wanted it. When I finally earned enough to buy it, I went to the familiar office supply store. They were closing them out and the only one left was the same display I had been fondling for the last month. I used to joke that I was going to visit my phone. I had no idea how true that was going to be.

Now, the idea of buying a phone at Office Max seems silly. They only sell the lame phones. Even going to the cell phone store to buy one seems strange, since I have bought my last two phones at the Apple Store.

I’m surprised at how much my perceptions of what is normal have changed over just a few years. I have gone through so many phones over the last ten years, each one offering me more than I had dreamed of the year before. I can remember so many times in my life, just based on what phone I had. It’s funny how our lives can be defined by our gadgets.

The excellent Ed Grabianowski at io9 has the five reasons you don’t have a personal jet pack yet: Mad Engineering: Five Reasons You Don’t Have a Personal Jet Pack Yet

• Humans are not designed to fly

• Thrust burns a lot of fuel

• They are dangerous

• Rockets and jets are really, really loud

For me, the most important one was the last one:

• Inefficiency: There’s really no point in flying one person around. Pretty much any practical use you can come up with for a jet pack can be done with a lower tech, cheaper and more efficient solution. This is the main reason the other problems haven’t been overcome by awesome engineers yet — beyond looking cool and flying around, we don’t really need jet packs.

Here is a video from The History Channel about the Bell Rocket Belt and its place in history:

In the end, I realize that I won’t ever have that flying car I always wanted (and was PROMISED) since childhood. I have the option of taking all my nourishment from a dehydrated food tablet like George Jetson did, but his flying car is still out of my reach.

If you enjoyed last month’s episode of The Electronic Frontier that Andy Baio posted, then you’ll love the two episodes of the BBC’s “The Net” that he has made available:

• BBC Two’s “The Net,” Episodes 2 and 5 from 1994 – Waxy.org

Some highlights from Episode 2 (April 20, 1994):

1. Investigating the computers controlling critical safety systems at the Sizewell B nuclear power plant in Suffolk. It’s never had a serious accident, but two days ago, it had its first unplanned shutdown in three years. (0:50)

2. Talking to ordinary people who just started using the Internet, lightly touching on issues of identity, online dating, digital music, emoticons, and slang. Very charming segment, with great shots of CompuServe’s software and NCSA Mosaic for the Mac. (7:45)

3. Jules Gibbons “reviews” FIFA International Soccer for the SNES. Filler. (13:15)

4. Report on Apple’s switch to the RISC chipset and the marketing of the Power Mac. Interviews with the founder of Aldus, a PowerMac product manager, and a director at BBDO, the ad agency that won their account from Chiat/Day (before losing it again in 1997). Shots of an unknown 3D modeling application, the graphic calculator, and a SoftWindows beta. Also, clips from early Power Mac ads and a “road show” to educate consumers. (16:05)

5. Computer-aided surgery and CAT scans with 3D visualizations at Guy’s Hospital in London. (22:15)

6. Very short clip about a company called Ultrabra using computer-aided design to “take the bra into the 21st century.” (28:05)

Highlights from Episode 5 (May 11, 1994):

1. Fluffy coverage of the UK Internet infrastructure, loaded with language like “infobahn,” “cyberslobs,” and “digital superhighway.” Early UI interfaces for an Internet kitchen appliance, with an awkward 1 frame-per-second VRML interface. Great interview with a Blockbuster VP about video-on-demand, from inside a Blockbuster store using a ginormous cell phone. Footage of Al Gore talking about the Internet. (0:05)

2. Another fluffy explanation of the Net. How average people are using the Internet. Very basic explanations of email, Usenet, Web, Gopher, IRC, and FTP. Screen captures from Usenet, Ircle, and TurboGopher for the Mac. Shots of the W3C, World-Wide Web Virtual Library, and The Louvre website from Mosaic. (8:00)

3. Jules reviews Twisted for the 3DO. These are the worst game reviews I’ve ever seen. (13:45)

4. Nice look at Bletchley Park, the Colossus computer, and the 12,000 people that worked towards breaking German codes during World War II. Interviews with several of the women that worked there. (15:30)

5. How marketers are studying computer networks to learn about Generation X, with an emphasis on the San Francisco cafe and computer culture in the early ’90s. Interview with Wayne Gregori from SF Net, writer Andrew Hultkrans, and a very dated 3D tutorial for the inTouch iStation. (21:05)

6. Way too brief clip about parsing word frequency in Shakespeare’s works to detect plagiarism. (27:45).

These shows are an interesting time capsule into the perceptions of the Internet in the early nineties.

In the early eighties, my dad bought a broken Pong game from the local thrift store. He opened it up, soldered the connections and we were the luckiest kids on our block. We had a video game before anyone in our neighborhood had an Atari. Watching the creators of Pong play their game, brings back memories of how excited we were.

Thanks, Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison, for starting the video game revolution. Without you guys, there would be no late night Mario Kart marathons.

Via: Retro Futurism: Pong Seemed So Exciting Back in the 1970s

I don’t know why I never saw these commercials. As a kid, I LOVED M.A.S.H. and I loved computers. Of course, I was more of an Atari fan back then, but I would have loved to see my old friends together in these commercials.

IBM hired the entire cast of M.A.S.H. to promote their new computer, the PS/2. Here are the commercials:

I didn’t see a PS/2 until I got to high school. Our junior high was equipped with Ataris. I don’t know when they got an upgrade, but it was well after we left. By the time I got to use the IBM PS/2, it was very much like junior high. We were stacked three to four kids per computer. We learned to write letters on the computer using a new program called WordPerfect. There was no WYSIWYG back then. We had to put in codes before and after the words if we wanted something in italic or bold and we didn’t get to see how it looked until it came out of the printer.

In retrospect, I’m grateful for my experience with old word processors like WordPerfect because HTML seems so natural to me because of them. I don’t have very many memories of the IBM PS/2 because our school had so few of them that I didn’t get much time to use them. The idea of having a computer in my home was so far out of my reach back then that I still thrill at the idea that I have my very own computer. It’s all mine and I don’t have to share it with anyone else.

Via: The cast of M.A.S.H goes corporate – VIDEOS – TV Squad

Photos of this sail wagon were posted on the Library of Congress’ Flickr feed a couple of weeks ago.

Sail Wagon, Brooklyn (Library of Congress) by Bain News Service, publisher from Flickr

This entry from the Kansas State Historical Society has some information about them:

• Kansas State Historical Society – Wind Wagons

A novel device of the Kansas territorial period was the wind wagon, sometimes called a sailing wagon. Several were built and in 1860 the press gave them considerable attention. They were similar to an ordinary light wagon; weighed about 350 pounds; had a bed about three feet wide, eight feet long, and six inches deep; and were propelled by a sail or sails raised over the center of the front axle. When the breezes blew in the right direction the wagons were reported to skim over the prairies at about 15 miles per hour, with speeds at up to 40 miles per hour.

At least one wagon was reported to have traveled from Kansas City to Denver in a little more than 20 days. Upon the arrival of a wind wagon from Westport, Missouri, a Council Grove newspaper asked of its readers: “Who says now that the Santa Fe Trail is not a navigable stream.” The few wind wagons that were built undoubtedly traveled further in the press than they did on the prairie and horses and oxen remained the basic mode of power for a good many years.

My first thought was that they would be useless because narrow roads wouldn’t allow a wind wagon to tack like a sail boat can on the open water. I forgot that our plains were an open swath of land back then.

They were also using sail wagons in California. Here is a first hand description from 1902:

• Rosamond, California, USA: Local History – Sailing Rosamond Dry Lake

Riding on the Desert Queen was thrilling, according to Von Blon. “You go dodging, at the start, between dots of greasewood and cacti as the ‘ship’ leaves camp with the rising wind; here and there grotesque yucca trees stand like sentinels, with limbs, like long arms, outstretched to reach you; homed toads scurry away over the hot sands, and lizards dart,” Von Blon wrote. “These things you notice at first, but the wind increases and the pace grows madder. You tie a string to your hat and anchor it to your suspender; your handkerchief is whipping from your neck and goes sailing and writhing up and away out of sight almost before you realize that it is gone. This is indeed a different wind from any that ever blew in any other part of the world.”

Sail wagons were somewhat of a fad in the early twentieth century, but as a current transportation method, sadly, they would be hampered by our narrow roads. It makes me wonder what our landscape would look like now if the sail wagon had beat out the oxen wagon and eventually the car.

Sail Wagon, Brooklyn (Library of Congress) by Bain News Service, publisher from Flickr