FReeper Canteen ~ Half a Century of Gadgets, Part II ~ 31 Jan 2006

We Support Our Troops! For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.

Part 2

Today we'll look at some gadgets that changed the way we lived in the 1980's and 90's. Last week, we looked at the 50's, 60's and 70's. I'm sure you can think of MANY more gadgets in these eras. Please share them with us!
FR CANTEEN MISSION STATEMENT: Showing support and boosting the morale of our military and our allies military and the family members of the above. Honoring those who have served before.

1982, Commodore64 : The best selling computer of all time still appears to be the Commodore 64: Estimates of this PC's sales range from 15 million to 22 million units. The first C64 cost $595 and came with 64KB (KB, not MB!) of RAM, a 6510 processor, 20KB of ROM with Microsoft BASIC, 16-color graphics, and a 40-column screen. It also was the first PC with an integrated sound synthesizer chip.

1982, Sony CDP-101: The first commercial compact disc player caused millions of music lovers to ditch their turntables. The boxy CDP-101 wasn't especially sleek, and at $900 it was pricey, but it ushered in the age of digital sound--no more hisses, scratches, pops, or skips. Now, with SuperAudio CD and DVD-Audio offering vastly superior sound, and MP3 downloads dominating music sales, CD players may eventually join turntables and 8-track machines as relics of our audio past. But they sure have sounded good in the meantime.

1982, Times/Sinclair 1000: Invented by British gadget king Clive Sinclair and marketed in the United States by Timex (which knew a thing or two about affordable gizmos), this everyman's computer sold for a rock-bottom $100. The slab-shaped T/S 1000 was cheap in every sense of the word--it packed a minuscule 1KB of RAM and had a barely usable flat keyboard. Even so, it was a blockbuster, briefly: Timex shipped 600,000 of them, many more were sold in other countries, and clones even appeared.

1983, Motorola DynaTAC 8000X: This early "portable" phone measured more than a foot long, weighed close to 2 pounds, and cost a whopping $3995. But with Motorola's DynaTAC 8000X--aka The Brick--you could for the first time walk and talk without that dratted cord. Generally considered the first mobile phone, the DynaTAC 8000X had enough juice for an hour of talk time and enough memory to hold 30 numbers. And the device's Formica-style enclosure was the envy of anything that Ma Bell had to offer.

1983, Radio Shack TRS-80

Model 100 :
In the early 1980s, when people talked about "portable computers" they meant luggable monstrosities like the 24-pound Osborne I. Then Radio Shack introduced the Model 100, the first popular notebook. Starting at $799, this 4.25-pound featherweight boasted built-in word processing and other apps, and its internal modem let road warriors get online at a zippy 300 bits per second. More than 20 years later, the full-travel keyboard on the TRS-80 is still pretty impressive. I used one of these where I worked, although I didn't own one.

1989, Nintendo Game Boy : The original handheld, as shown at CyberiaPC.com, featured a black-and-green LCD and a slot for matchbook-size game cartridges. Later versions became smaller and more powerful but maintained backward compatibility with the original, so you could take your favorite games with you as you grew. You'd better believe I had one of these! So did both my daughters.

1989, Sharp Wizard OZ-7000: It didn't quite fit into a shirt pocket, and its non-QWERTY (Ma, no QWERTY head!!!) keyboard wasn't the most intuitive of input devices. But long before the PalmPilot 1000 or even the Newton MessagePad, the first Sharp Wizard helped popularize the concept of a small, lightweight electronic address book and calendar, thereby becoming the granddaddy of the modern personal digital assistant.

1990 Poqet PC Model PQ-0164: Years before the Pocket PC, there was the Poqet PC. About the size of a videotape, the Poqet was pricey ($2000), but it ran off-the-shelf applications and could go for weeks on two AA batteries. Highly praised during its brief life, the Poqet vanished from the market after its manufacturer was acquired by Fujitsu.

1993, BellSouth/IBM Simon Personal Communicator: Not to be confused with the Milton Bradley game Simon from last week, the Personal Communicator was the first mobile phone to include a built-in PDA. Jointly marketed by IBM and BellSouth, the $900 Simon was a combination phone, pager, calculator, address book, calendar, fax machine, and wireless e-mail device--all wrapped up in a 20-ounce package that looked and felt like a brick.

1994, Apple Newton MessagePad: The Newton PDA had the dubious distinction of being lampooned in Doonesbury, thanks to its less-than-spectacular handwriting recognition. At nearly 1 pound and costing $700, it was too big and pricey for most users, but it paved the way for smaller, simpler devices like the PalmPilot and the iPod. At the time, there was no cooler gadget to be found.

1994, Connectix QuickCam: Found at your desk--typically astride a huge 17-inch CRT monitor--this fist-size grey globe signified connectedness. If you had one, you were part of the QuickCam generation, embracing Internet video in its infancy, sending short, choppy, and highly pixelated greyscale moving images over (most likely) the office or college LAN. The QuickCam's image quality left much to be desired, but its low price and unique design--a spheroid "eye" set in a pyramid-shaped base made it a popular starter Webcam. I didn't have one, but my older daughter did.

1995, Iomega Zip Drive: This little blue external storage drive, roughly the size of a paperback book, was an instant sensation, giving average computer users their first taste of easy backup and relatively rugged 100MB storage media. The only storage technology ever mentioned by name on HBO's Sex and the City, the Zip Drive was available for both Macs and PCs; the Mac version connected to the SCSI port and the PC version hooked up via the parallel port. You still have one somewhere, don't you? I do! I probably have about 5 at school, with data on multiple zip disks.

1995, Sony Handycam DCR-VX1000: Thank Sony for introducing digital video editing to the desktop. Before it released the Handycam DCR-VX1000, if you wanted to edit video on a PC you had to invest thousands of dollars in an expansion card to digitize analog footage. The DCR-VX1000 was the first camcorder to capture in the mini-DV format, and the first with a FireWire port for transferring digital video to a PC. The DCR-VX1000 cost nearly $4000, but it offered dramatically better video quality, and less-expensive models soon followed.

1996, Motorola PageWriter: Before anyone could sign on to AOL Instant Messenger on a T-Mobile Sidekick, before the first SMS message was ever sent from a cell phone, and before a BlackBerry was even a twinkle in anyone's eye, Motorola gave early adopters a taste of the future: the ability to send, as well as receive, text messages on a wireless device. The PageWriter--which looked like a thicker version of Motorola's then-current one-way text pagers--sported a flip-top design that, when opened, revealed a QWERTY keypad (ruh, roh, Ma!) as well as a four-line backlit monochrome LCD screen. Far ahead of its time, it was eventually superceded by less costly mobile messaging options.

1996, Motorola StarTAC: The StarTAC was the first mobile phone to establish that design matters as much as functionality, leading to today's profusion of stylish cell phones. No phone of its era was more portable than the StarTAC: You could clip the 3.1-ounce unit to your belt and go anywhere, which made carrying a cell phone a lot more appealing. The StarTAC let you plug in a second battery to extend your talk time, and was the first phone to sport the vibrate option used in Motorola pagers. Another plus: As the first clamshell-style phone, it looked a little like the communicators from Star Trek. Beam us up, Scotty. (Where's Luv W?? )

1996, PalmPilot 1000: The PalmPilot 1000 was everything the Apple Newton MessagePad wanted to be: a "personal data assistant" small enough to fit in your shirt pocket, with enough RAM (128KB) to hold a then-impressive 500 names and addresses. The handwriting recognition actually worked (once you mastered the arcane Graffiti software), and best of all, you could sync your data with a PC or Mac desktop application. The brilliance of the Palm concept was its recognition that people wanted a supplement to their computers, not a substitute. Subsequent models grew smaller and more powerful, but were basically refinements to the original PalmPilot's elegant simplicity.

1996, Play, Inc. Snappy Video Snapshot: Before PCs came with composite video inputs, before TV-tuner cards became de r

igueur, before USB-connected video input devices became ubiquitous, there was the Snappy Video Snapshot. Attached to your PC's parallel port (and sticking out several inches), it supplied standard video inputs, thereby allowing you to capture still digital images from an analog video source. I can't remember if mine was a Snappy, but I had something similar which I used with my first laptop to capture video.

1997, Franklin Rolodex Electronics REX PC Companion: The REX redefined the notion of portable. This credit-card-size device was powered by two watch batteries, measured just a quarter of an inch thick, and was designed to fit into a notebook's PC Card slot. Its design was simple--just a black-and-white, 160-by-98-resolution screen, and five navigational buttons to access such functions as calendar, contacts, and even memos. Although you couldn't enter data into the first version (about $179 with cradle), the REX proved a convenient portable companion.

1997, Sony Mavica MVC-FD5: Yes, it wasn't the first digital camera, but it was the first that saved photos on a platform that every PC user knew and loved: the

ubiquitous 3.5-inch floppy. The FD5 provided a very easy--and familiar--way to get images out of the camera and onto a PC. Storing photos on floppies also meant that people could keep taking pictures as long as they fed the camera more disks. Photographers could easily share digital snapshots with family and friends because everybody used floppies. Like many first-generation digital cameras, the $599 Mavica was bulky and ugly, but its specs were up to snuff (for the time): Image resolution topped out at 640 by 480 pixels (which translates to 0.3 megapixel), and the camera had a sizable 2.5-inch LCD. Believe it or not, we still have several in use at our school. We let the students use them, too! (Yes, we have some newer digital cameras.)

1998, BlackBerry 850 Wireless Handheld: Canadian firm Research in Motion didn't invent e-mail, wireless data networks, the handheld, or the QWERTY keyboard. But with the little BlackBerry, along with server software that made e-mail appear on it without any effort from the recipient, RIM put it all together in a way that even nontechie executives could appreciate--and thereby opened the eyes of corporate America to the potential of wireless communications. THey have forever changed the design aesthetic for personal digital assistants, while their approach to e-mail has become the standard by which all connected handhelds are measured.

1998, Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300: The Nano it ain't, but Diamond's Multimedia Rio PMP 300 started the revolution that produced portable music players such as Apple's iPod.. This first portable MP3 player ran on a single AA battery and packed a whopping 32MB of storage--enough for about a half hour of music encoded in the MP3 compression format.

1998, Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System

1.0 : A do-it-yourself robotics system for the masses, Lego Mindstorms made building machines more fun than should be allowed. An interactive community helped promote different designs and creativity, so you were never at a loss as to what to do with all of those Lego pieces and parts. And one of the early expansion kits included a robotic R2-D2. (Sure, it was just a wireframe, not a solid replica, but it could still carry your Coca-Cola can.)

1999, Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer : The first mainstream optical mouse earned its place on our list by eliminating one of computer technology's most pervasive annoyances: the accumulation of gunk inside a mechanical mouse. Optical mice actually existed long before Microsoft's groundbreaking product, but they were expensive and required special pads. The Intellimouse Explorer (and its simultaneously introduced siblings, the Intellimouse Optical and the Wheel Mouse Optical) brought gunk-free pointing devices to the great unwashed masses and their great unwashed desks (and laps, and armchairs, and many other places you'd never dream of using a mechanical mouse).

1999, TiVo HDR110: The Ti Vo allowed us to

digitize the TV signal and stream it to an internal hard drive, so the user can pause, rewind, fast-forward, or record programs at will. For the first time, users flummoxed by their VCRs could record an entire season of shows with a few clicks of the remote. TiVo undoubtedly won the brand-recognition competition: When Janet Jackson suffered her infamous "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl, thousands of viewers "TiVo'd it"--over and over and over.

1999, Sony Aibo ERS-110: Sony's $1500 robotic pet, the ERS-110, was cuter than your average mutt and a whole lot smarter. Advanced artificial intelligence allowed it to learn from its environment, as well as sit, stand, roll over, and act puppyish. Later "breeds" recognized your voice commands and featured a built-in Webcam, so you could hire Aibo to babysit the kids.

All information courtesy of PCWorld

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.