Technologizer

The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History

Monday, November 9, 2009

It’s not love, war, or baseball. But over the years some memorable things have been said about technology. Some have been memorably eloquent; others are unforgettably shortsighted, wrongheaded, or just plain weird. Let’s celebrate them, shall we? A few ground rules for the list that follows: I considered only statements attributable to a specific individual, which [...]

The 20 Greatest Tech Underdogs of All Time

Thursday, November 5, 2009

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Rocky. The Chicago Cubs. Charlie Brown. Avis, back when its whole schtick centered on being America’s #2 rental car company. America loves its underdogs–and the technology business has always been home to a disproportionate number of exceptionally lovable underdogs. They may never achieve market leadership, but without them, the tech in our lives would be [...]

Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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You’re familiar with Moore’s law. You know all about the accelerating pace of information technology. Regardless, you’re still amazed at how many gigabytes you can fit in your pocket these days. Remember how your first computer’s entire hard disk only held 20 megabytes? You could accidentally swallow a thousand times as much data now if [...]

The Plot to Kill Plain Old QWERTY

Monday, October 19, 2009

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A couple of months ago, I dug into Google Patents and found some weird, weird pointing device patents. The results became the most popular Technologizer slideshow to date. Where there are mice, there are almost always keyboards–so I recently checked Google Patents for peculiar keyboards, and found an embarrassment of riches. Most alternative keyboards aim to [...]

Keyborgs! 21 Bizarre Keyboards

Monday, October 19, 2009

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If our ancestors of the late nineteenth century hitched a time-machine ride to 2009, nearly everything about the technology we use would leave them dumbstruck. They would, however, immediately recognize our computer keyboards, nearly all of which work in pretty much the same manner as the ones on Victorian-era typewriters. Which is not to say [...]

Apple Rumors: The Early Years

Monday, September 28, 2009

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We live in an, um, golden age of Apple gossip. Thanks to the blogosphere, a surging sea of sites cover an endless array of rumors about the company, from ones that are right on the money to ones that are partially right to ones that aren’t right at all. The conversation spawned by the scuttlebutt [...]

A 20th Anniversary Tribute to a Misunderstood Machine

Sunday, September 20, 2009

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On September 20th 1989, Apple announced its first true portable computer, which it called–logically enough–the Macintosh Portable. And ever since, folks have been tearing it down: It was too big and heavy, the screen was hard to read, and it offered too little for too much money. Whenever anyone starts to list Apple’s worst flops, [...]

Macintosh Portable (1989) vs. MacBook Air (2009)

Sunday, September 20, 2009

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Today, September 20th, marks the twentieth anniversary of the first truly mobile Mac, the Macintosh Portable. (For 1980s computers, all the compact Macs were surprisingly portable–they even sported convenient handles–but they couldn’t run off batteries.) When you hear the Portable mentioned at all these days, it’s mostly to mock its size–rather hefty even by late 1980s [...]

Inside the Macintosh Portable

Sunday, September 20, 2009

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A Misunderstood Machine On September 20th, 1989, Apple released the Macintosh Portable, the first true mobile Mac and a much-maligned machine. It didn’t sell well and is very rare today–not due to any particular design failure, but because the original price was a whopping $6,500-$7,300 ($11,288 to $12,677 in 2009 dollars). It wasn’t the only Mac to [...]

Where No Mac Had Gone Before

Thursday, September 17, 2009

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[UPDATE! The auction house selling this Mac is now saying that it's an original Mac plus that was later upgraded--not a Mac Plus--and that the serial number doesn't mean it was the first Mac of any sort. I should have figured out something was amiss about their identification when I noticed it didn't have a [...]

Old Operating Systems Don’t Die…

Thursday, September 17, 2009

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Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I [...]

Commodore 64 iPhone App Comes, Goes

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

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Developer Manomio developed a fully-legal Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone, struggled to get it approve by Apple, then succeeded when it disabled the BASIC interpreter. Except it didn’t. From Wired’s Gadget Lab blog: In order to win Apple’s approval the developer Manomio pulled the BASIC interpreter form the application. It turns out that it was [...]

Twenty-One Peculiar Portables

Monday, September 7, 2009

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With laptops outselling desktops, the majority of today’s computers share the same design: They’ve got an LCD display and a keyboard, and a hinge in the middle, and they’re small enough to take just about anywhere. It just works. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of inventors from trying to top it. I’ve collected some [...]

Laptopia! The World’s Weirdest Portable Computers

Monday, September 7, 2009

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There aren’t many pieces of technological design that simply can’t be improved upon, but the clamshell-style laptop computer case–introduced by Grid Systems in 1982–may be one of them. That’s why the vast majority of the portable computers built ever since have used it. But for more than a quarter-century now, inventors have been trying to [...]

Word Processing Circa 1968

Friday, August 21, 2009

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If you’re as fascinated by the prehistory of personal computing as I am, the early issues of Computerworld at Google News are hugely entertaining. They date from a time before there were such things as personal computers, but there are hints of what was to come everywhere in their pages. I wrote about a 1968 [...]

Polaroid Cameras Are Back! Briefly!

Thursday, August 20, 2009

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I never expected to write as much about Polaroid cameras as I have at Technologizer, but the little guys continue to make more news than some gadgets which are still in production. Dazed Digital is reporting that the Polaroid preservers at The Impossible Project have saved 700 old-stock One600 cameras and will be selling them, [...]