These Are The Incredible Vintage Gadgets That Inspired Apple’s Most Magical Products

By

braunipod

For years, an unassuming Microsoft Research scientist named Bill Buxton has been collecting gadgets that have informed today’s landscape of technology. Now his collection is on display at the the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Vancouver, and what do you know? A large number of them seem to have directly inspired many of Apple’s most iconic products and innovations. If only they’d done the same for Microsoft.

For example, consider the Dieter Rahms-design transistor radio above, which inspired the first four generations of the venerable iPod, upon the success of which Apple built almost all of its modern fortunes.

But there’s more example besides. For example, this is the Phantom Chess set, a chess computer with a twist.

Each piece came equipped with a magnet: when a move was made, a computer inside the Phantom Chess set would automatically make its countermove by magnetically shifting the appropriate piece to its correct position. Buxton thinks it shows how “disappearing” a computer part through magnetism can lead to heightened human-computer interaction… a lesson Apple seems to have learned with its own use of magnets in everything to the iPad 2’s Smart Cover to the MacBook’s lid catch and MagSafe connectors.

Or check this out.

It’s a Casio watch from 1984 with a touchscreen on which you could actually write digits to do calculations. “It’s a calculator watch with no buttons,” says Buxton… and the similarities to Apple’s own touchscreen devices, including the latest iPod nano, can’t go unmissed.

Buxton’s collection is a great look into the mindset of Apple… ironic given that Buxton is a Microsoft employee. It can be easy to forget, given the way Apple’s products seem to miraculously leapfrog the tech of the competition, that Cupertino isn’t just looking into the future: they are inspired on a daily basis by the products of the past that tried something daring and new, and were still forgotten.

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