Throwback Thursday Tech - page 2

Once-famous robot lives quietly away from limelight

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Robot
Elektro, a robot built by Westinghouse in 1937, was a star at the World's Fair in 1939-40. Photo: Courtesy of Scott Schaut/Mansfield Memorial Museum
Photo: Scott Schaut/Mansfield Memorial Museum

America’s oldest surviving robot no longer smokes cigarettes.

Long lines of people no longer wait to see him, topless women haven’t danced around him in years and his legs have been broken since that amusement park gig.

But Elektro is home now, his head reunited with his body, cared for by a man named Scott Schaut, who is so fiercely protective that museum requests to borrow the gold robot usually end with him replying “over my dead body.”

Radio Shack may die, but its ’80s-era portable PC lives on

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The Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 came out in 1983 and was a popular tool with writers.
The Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 came out in 1983 and was a popular tool with writers.

Some journalists remember the day the future arrived: We felt like James Bond on special assignment when our editors, playing the part of provision master Q, handed us the portable device that would allow a story to be written in the field and transmitted back to the office.

So when Radio Shack said earlier this month it would file for bankruptcy, more than a few of us flashed back to the TRS-80 Model 100, one of the first notebook-style computers.

Released in 1983, it set portable computing in motion. The TRS-80’s liquid-crystal display showed eight lines of text. The computer came in 8K and 24K versions and weighed just over 3 pounds. A later version, the Model 200, boasted a flip-up screen that showed even more text, but the original model was by far Radio Shack’s most popular, with more than 6 million sold.

First wearable computers made you look like a freaking Borg

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The Xybernaut Poma was considered the first wearable computer - and a tech failure.
The Xybernaut Poma was considered the first wearable computer - and a tech failure.

It would have been hard to don a Xybernaut Poma wearable PC in 2002 without uttering the phrase, “Resistance is futile.”

What was arguably the first wearable computer had the look of a Borg, a cybernetic villain from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Borg’s design, a menacing mashup of species and technology, was badass, but Poma users just looked awkward. The computer’s processing unit was portable enough, fitting in a pocket or clipping to a belt. But once you added the keyboard to the forearm and a clunky-looking, head-mounted optical piece, your cool crashed like a bad hard drive.

As compact discs die off, so does a piece of me

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A Yamaha CD-555 with the CD carosel stopped. Photo:  Leo-setä/Flickr
A Yamaha CD-555 with the CD carousel stopped. Photo: Leo-setä/Flickr

I stood in the doorway, still teary-eyed from goodbyes with my parents. There, before me, sat the first lesson of my freshman year in college.

Peter Otto had a blond mohawk and twirled a shiny butterfly knife. He had already adorned his side of the room with posters of his favorite bands: The Meatmen, Dead Kennedys and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

“I guess I’m your roommate,” I said and he pointed to the lower bunk. I was chubby, an Eagle Scout and a mama’s boy. But I had one cool card I could play — a boombox that played compact discs, a relatively new music format.

But with only two CDs — a synth-pop album by Kenny Loggins and the debut record from Bruce Hornsby & the Range — there would be no cool, not then anyway. Otto wound up being the best roommate I ever had during two college tours. Some of his music made it into my CD collection, which accelerated in the fall of 1985, but I doubt he ever took to Loggins.

Nearly 30 years later, I keep reading stories that eulogize the CD, report plummeting album sales and lay out how the music industry is now taking its product directly to customers through social media, streaming services or direct downloads from a group’s website.

Will flying cars ever get off the ground?

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The Curtiss Autoplane in 1917 is considered the first flying car. It hopped but never got far off the ground.
The Curtiss Autoplane in 1917 is considered the first flying car. It hopped but never got far off the ground.

The first airplane was in flight for 12 seconds and flew 120 feet. But it was enough to send imaginations airborne.

  Not long after Kitty Hawk, aviators were trying to figure out how to fly a car.

Glenn Curtiss was the first with the Autoplane in 1917. It had a triwing, looked like a Model T and hopped. Before he could actually get its wheels off the ground, World War I broke out and Curtiss diverted his energy toward building aircraft for the U.S. Army.

While we have figured out how to put people in space, we’re still tinkering with a future that has yet to arrive. If you’re waiting for George Jetson’s future, consider that the car his family flew around in was a 2062 model.

How a grandma with a bum hip sparked a shopping revolution

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Jane and Ned Snowball shopping online in 1984. Photo: Courtesy of the Aldrich Archive
Jane and Ned Snowball shopping online in 1984. Photo courtesy Aldrich Archive

A 72-year-old grandmother with a broken hip started the revolution with a television remote in her hand. She pointed it at the screen in her living room in 1984 and bought eggs, cornflakes and margarine.

Jane Snowball of Gateshead, England, spent a few pounds and became the first online shopper. In 2013, online shopping generated more than $1.2 trillion worldwide (with the promise of higher figures when 2014 numbers are reported).

Snowball did not use the computer as we know it. She used a device called Videotex, which merged media and business information systems and made them available to “outside correspondents.” She pressed a button on the remote with a phone icon and was able to connect to her local Tesco supermarket with a telephone number. The store received her list and delivered the items to her door.

The smart detective who inspired today’s smartwatch

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A child calls a buddy on his Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist Radio in this 1960s commercial.
A child calls a buddy on his Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist Radio in this 1960s commercial.

I have no plans to buy a smartwatch at the moment, but when I do, I already know the first command to give it.

I’m going to make my jaw as square as possible, activate the phone for my first call (probably to my wife), and say: “Calling all cars! Calling all cars!”

With Android Wear already here and Apple Watch on the way, we must salute detective Dick Tracy and his his two-way wrist radio.

Comic strip creator Chester Gould first strapped a wrist radio on Dick Tracy in 1946. He upgraded it to a wrist television in the 1960s. Tracy never complained about dropped calls or bandwidth problems.