With a bit more than a week to go until the first pitches of the baseball season, I’m in a sporting mood. So I’ve prepared a slideshow on the hottests sports toys of three decades ago–the early electronic sports handhelds produced by Mattel, Coleco, and others. Never have LEDs engaged in such heated competition, from the baseball diamond to the football field to the hockey rink and beyond.
Tag Archives | Nostalgia
Smallball! Handheld Sports Games of the 1970s and 1980s
When it comes to sports simulations, there’s an inverse relationship between realism and charm. The handheld sports games that toy companies cranked out in the early days used a single LED to represent each player, not thousands of polygons, but they had more personality than today’s console titles–and they were plenty addictive, too. This slideshow skews towards baseball (hey, it’s only a week until opening day) and football (unquestionably the most popular handheld-sports sport), and focuses mostly on games from Mattel and Coleco (the major leagues of handheld sports). It celebrates them through patent drawings, packaging photos, and original commercials. If you’d like more–a lot more–of this stuff, check out Rik Morgan’s wonderful www.handheldmuseum.com, where some of the images in this show originated.
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Twenty Years Ago Today, the Idea That Became the Web Was Born
Over at Cnet, Charles Cooper has a nice post on a meaningful historical tidbit: Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, submitted a proposal to his bosses on how the organization could do a better job of keeping track of information. It involved publishing documents online with links to tie everything together, and it was the idea which eventually turned into the World Wide Web.
If you were trying to determine the twentieth anniversary of the Web, you probably wouldn’t decide it was today. (Another possibility would be August 6th, 2011–the day that marks two decades since Berners-Lee’s first Web site went live on the Internet.) But his 1989 memo remains good reading, and the fact that his plan to change how CERN used information turned out to change how the world uses information is as inspiring as stories about technology get.
I’m about to board an airplane to go to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, and have been brooding about the fact that I’ll be deprived of the Web for just a few hours while we’re in flight. It’s startling to remember that something as essential as the Web is so new–and that the guy who came up with it is not only still with us but very much involved in shaping its future.
Thanks, Sir Tim! I feel like I owe you my career–because if there weren’t a Web, there sure wouldn’t be a Technologizer…
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Computer Shopper: A Magazine No More
At its peak, Computer Shopper may have consumed more wood pulp each month than any other magazine of any sort, ever: It consistently ran over 1,000 pages oversized a month in the early 1990s. (I remember in part because I worked for a not-very-successful magazine that had been formed to take Shopper on head-to-head.)
The onetime behemoth will never kill another innocent tree again: SX2 Media Labs, its publisher, is discontinuing print publication to go online-only after the April issue, reports PaidContent.org. The news comes a few months after Ziff Davis folded the print version of PC Magazine, once Computer Shopper’s even more profitable stablemate. (Shopper was a Ziff publication during the fat years, though it began as an independent operation and was also owned by Cnet for a spell until SX2 bought it in 2005.)
Also recently defunct, at least as a standalone publication: the extremely venerable programming journal Dr. Dobb’s, which I remember reading in the late 1970s.
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Then and Now: A Fast-Forward Tour of Gadget History
Astonishing breakthrough. Household object. Funny anachronism. Such is the journey that nearly every great gadget travels. (Sometimes it takes several generations; sometimes it takes just a few years.) And then it happens all over again with whatever hot new gizmo rendered the old one obsolete.
While rummaging through the endlessly fascinating Google Patents recently, I was moved to compare some significant devices of the past with their modern-day counterparts. In some cases, old and new are connected by seamless evolution (the cell phone, for instance). And in some cases, they’re separated by seismic technological shifts (like the one that replaced silver-halide film with tiny slivers of silicon).
After the jump, a dozen comparisons of past (in the form of patent drawings) and new.
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More Futuristic Tech Nostalgia: The Home PC, Circa 1969
While I was checking out the 1981 report on Internet newspapers that I (and half the world) just blogged about, I came across this clip–supposedly from 1969–which not only predicts home computers in general but also the Internet, multi-monitor machines, Webcams, online shopping, online banking, and desktop printers, among other things. (Dad even has three PCs on one desk for no apparent reason–just like more than a few geeks do today.)
It’s a little bit Jetsons, a little bit Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and surprisingly accurate in its predictions…even though the computer setups look like microfilm machines crossed with tabletop radios, and mom keeps her keyboard off to the left for no apparent reason. I’m not sure who made this and why, but I’m impressed…
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Get the Latest News! On Your TRS-80! Via a Dial-Up Modem!
When and if the Internet kills off the daily newspaper, it’ll hardly be a crime of passion. Actually, it may be the most premeditated murder in the history of premeditated murders–it all started decades ago, and the dirty deed hasn’t been completed yet. Here’s proof in the form of a wonderful 1981 San Francisco local TV news report on bleeding-edge Bay Area newshounds who were dialing into CompuServe and downloading online newspapers–which took, according to the report, a couple of hours to do.
If you were using computers back in 1981, this clip is extraordinarily nostalgic, from the TRS-80 Model 1 with cassette player to the TRS-80 Color Computer hooked up to a TV to the rotary-dial phone and acoustic coupler to the reference to $5 an hour access fees to the vintage newspaper office equipped with green-screen terminals. I love the PC owner (“Owns Home Computer”) and the anchorwoman’s arched-eyebrow skepticism about the whole idea. And the misleading newspaper ad that shows a highly graphical online newspaper was simply a few years ahead of where newspapers would eventually get.
If you didn’t use computers back in 1981–maybe because you hadn’t been born yet–the clip is a great short course on what those of us who did went through. I miss many things about the old days, but not monochrome text-only screens, tape decks, or 300-baud modems.
I’m skeptical, incidentally, about the report’s statement that only two or three thousand folks in the Bay Area had home PCs. Especially given that the Bay Area was the epicenter of the home computer revolution and PCs of various sorts had been around for six years by then.
Twenty-eight years later, the daily newspaper is still with us, but it’s in extraordinarily fragile condition. It’s hardly making a daring prediction to say that we’ll end 2009 with fewer major newspapers than we started it with (actually, predicting that we won’t would be the gutsy guess). Anyone want to speculate on whether newspapers will exist in any form at all in, say, 2037? (My guess: Probably not. But magazines will still be with us, at least sorta.)
(Thanks to Charles Forsythe–with whom I spent much of my waking hours using TRS-80s at high school in 1981–for finding this on DailyKos…)
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What Computer Graphics Were in 1984
It’s not multi-touch. Hey, it’s not even single touch by modern standards. But the Atari Touch Tablet that Vintage Computing and Gaming‘s Benj Edwards recently bought was still in its original, unopened packaging. And so Benj took the opportunity to do a new unboxing of a really old gadget–and we’re delighted to publish it here.
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Atari’s 1984 Touch Tablet: A Retro-Unboxing
The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS4, think back to a time before time–a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images. A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages. It was a time when you could buy an $89.95 Atari CX77 Touch Tablet for your Atari 8-bit home computer. Luckily, I bought mine for considerably less last year, although it was still in new, unopened condition. Safely sequestered in the official Vintage Computing and Gaming computer lab, I recently began the task of unpacking the antique peripheral and documenting the process. Here’s an account of the experience.
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Wii? PlayStation 3? Who Needs ‘Em?
Weird but true: I never owned a Simon, an Atari 2600, or a Vectrex…but I’m still nostalgic for all of them. So we’re following up our absurdly popular gallery of Apple patents with one of evocative images from patent filings for electronic playthings. If you don’t have a soft spot for any of them, you’re a lot younger than I am or a lot older. Or a Martian.