Tag Archives | Nostalgia

Happy Fiftieth Birthday, IBM Selectric

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 27, 2011 at 5:28 am

Last month, I had fun paying tribute to Polaroid’s SX-70, an old-technology gadget that’s all the more extraordinary because there was nothing digital about it. The SX-70 came to mind again when I learned that IBM’s Selectric typewriter is marking its fiftieth anniversary. It was a great leap forward beyond every typewriter of the time, both technologically sophisticated and beautifully designed. And it remains pretty darn cool even if most of us will never use one again.

To celebrate the Selectric’s fiftieth, I put together a slideshow of evocative images and interesting factoids, including stuff about later models–such as the $21,000 (!!!) Selectric Magnetic Tape Composer. Here it is.

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It’s Selectric! IBM’s Classic Typewriter Turns Fifty

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 27, 2011 at 4:51 am

Do you remember typewriters? Of course you do. But do you remember the last time a typewriter was exciting and futuristic? That would be 1961, when IBM released its first Selectric. It went on sale on July 27th, which makes this Sunday its fiftieth anniversary. (IBM is celebrating its own hundredth birthday this year, making the Selectric a nifty half-way point in its long history.)

The result of seven years of research, the Selectric went on to become one of the best-selling office devices ever. It’s been so archaic for so long that it’s tough to remember just how remarkable it was in its day–and there’s no better time than right now to give it its due.

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Donkey Kong: Thirty Strange Years!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 11, 2011 at 12:13 am

What’s the most significant arcade game of all time? Pac-Man, probably. But you could also make the case for Donkey Kong–a game that celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this month. It was wildly popular in its day. It remains iconic. And it was the breakout hit that put both Nintendo and Mario on the map–a team-up of game company and character that’s as important today as ever.

And then there are all the weird little Donkey Kong footnotes. Such as the fact it was almost about Popeye and Bluto. And the odd spinoffs (Donkey Kong hockey?). Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a bunch of them for Donkey Kong Oddities, our tribute to video gaming’s greatest ape.

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Donkey Kong Oddities

Posted by Benj Edwards on July 10, 2011 at 10:29 pm

Thirty years ago this month, Nintendo released Donkey Kong to arcades across the United States. The game’s American version went on to sell tens of thousands of units, saving the then-struggling US branch of the company and paving the way for Nintendo’s future success on Western shores.

Without Donkey Kong, we would have no Mario, and without Mario, it’s hard to imagine what Nintendo would look like today. That makes Donkey Kong, above all others, the most pivotally important video game Nintendo has ever released.

So it’s time to celebrate–which I did by rounding up a bunch of weird, odd, and interesting stuff about this beloved game.

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How Polaroid Failed to Introduce the Kindle in the Mid-1940s

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 13, 2011 at 12:12 am

Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is justly famous for his 1945 Atlantic essay “As We May Think.” It proposes a device called a memex which bears an uncanny resemblance to a personal computer connected to the World Wide Web–or at least as close as anyone could come five decades before the Web changed the world.

As described in the Atlantic article, the memex was the size of a desk. But Bush also had an idea for a portable microfilm reader–which sounds like it would have been to the Kindle as the memex was to the PC–and tried to convince Edwin Land, cofounder of Polaroid, to help him build it. That’s one of the innumerable interesting things about Polaroid which I learned but couldn’t fit into my story “Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible.”

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Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 8, 2011 at 3:00 am

Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land with an SX-70 and an SX-70 snapshot in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office on November 1st, 1972. Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/Getty Images

What makes a gadget great? You might argue that it’s determined at least in part by how many lives the product in question touches. Back in 2005, when I helped choose a list of the fifty greatest gadgets of the past fifty years, we ranked the Sony Walkman as #1 and Apple’s iPod as #2. Fabulous gizmos both; I suspect, however, that they wouldn’t have topped the list if they hadn’t been bestsellers of epic proportions.

The SX-70–specifically, the SX-70 which I bought at an antique store in Redwood City, California in April of 2011.

But greatness isn’t a popularity contest–not primarily one, at least. Maybe it has more to do with the concept expressed by Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: making technology indistinguishable from magic. By that measure, I can’t think of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera, the instant camera that Polaroid introduced in April 1972. We ranked the SX-70 eighth on that 2005 list, but the sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name.

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The Secret World of Alternative Operating Systems

Posted by Benj Edwards on May 15, 2011 at 9:15 pm

When it comes to desktop operating systems, there are three obvious choices: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. But a whole world of alternative OSes lies below the mainstream radar.

These little-known products are actively or recently developed, and some folks actually use them to get things done. Here are twelve of these strange beasts, all of which run on modern x86-based PC hardware, and many of which can be downloaded for free. Impressively, none of them are based on Linux.

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Like Death and Taxes, Clippy is Unavoidable

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 6, 2011 at 3:47 pm

Shamefully, I’ve neglected to cover the biggest news of the past couple of weeks. I refer, of course, to the return of Microsoft Office’s Clippy, in a game/tutorial from Microsoft called Office Hero 2. (Here’s James Fallows’ report on it.)  Clippy may not be part of Office’s help system anymore, but here he is again, trying to help people use Office. I have the feeling he’ll be with us in one form or another for years to come. (Anyone want to make bets on whether he’ll outlive Mavis Beacon?)

Thinking about his return got me thinking about a Technologizer story from a couple of years ago: “The Secret Origins of Clippy: Microsoft’s Bizarre Animated Character Patents.” It remains one of the most popular things we’ve ever published. And here it is again.

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The Moore the Merrier

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2011 at 3:51 pm

Unless you’re willfully oblivious to Moore’s Law, you know that today’s computers do a whole lot more than ones from twenty or thirty years ago, for a whole let less money. But to really judge how much more bang we get for the buck, you’ve got to adjust prices for inflation. In 2009, Benj Edwards did just that for a story we called “Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost.” I’ll bet he was the first person to discover that a Commodore 64 and an HP Pavilion Elite cost exactly the same amount–and to compare them spec by spec.

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Rumors of the Typewriter’s Death: Greatly Exggerated

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2011 at 2:39 pm

On yesterday night’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams reported the tragic news of the passing of a beloved international icon: the typewriter.

The factoid about the last typewriter factory closing struck me as surprising–even implausible. The typewriter may have been an endangered species for decades, but many, many businesses move really, really slowly. If there are still companies in America who use them–and I’ll bet even some big outfits have them on hand to address the occasional envelope–there are surely ones elsewhere in the world who aren’t ready to give them up.

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