A first-of-its-kind circular display. A stainless steel casing that took two weeks to etch. And a Swiss-inspired mechanism that means it opens just as smoothly in 2020 as it did twelve years ago. Motorola didn’t get much wrong with its… Read More ›
Retro
Pac-Man | Design Icons
While a nascent games industry was laser focused on emulating the success of Taito’s Space Invaders, one designer tried to make something completely different – and ended up creating our second design icon: Pac-Man. Brilliant.
Too Smart for Their Time
In the late ‘90s, Microsoft’s research division started work developing the SPOT platform, which it planned to integrate into everything from GPS navigation units to coffee makers. To expedite its arrival, instead of working with big telecommunication companies to implement… Read More ›
15 Old Computer Sounds…
In the ’90s, there were distinct sounds associated with computers that we don’t think about today, but they’re lodged deep in our memories. Let’s go back to some computer sounds you probably haven’t heard in decades… More here. Thanks to… Read More ›
The early days of home computing
There were no design conventions for the earliest home computers, no rules for how they’d look,” says Alex Wiltshire, author of Home Computers, a new book that explores the rapidly changing face of the household machine between its birth in… Read More ›
Meet Sphinx
Named the Sphinx Station, with ‘Sphinx’ in Russian serving as an abbreviation for Short for Super Functional Integrated Communicative System, the system was designed by Azrikan in 1987 in collaboration with A.Kolotushkin and V. Goessen, following an assignment from the… Read More ›
The golden age of personal digital assistants
The guys in the Lost In Mobile WhatsApp group have been looking through their old mobile devices. Some genuine memories have appeared so far. What devices do you remember from a few years back?
Retro Tech: Game Boy
Excellent, just excellent.
The Hall 1 Typewriter
Thomas Hall, a Brooklyn engineer, invented this first index typewriter. A typewriter with no keyboard that requires one to use a selector (the black handle) to choose the characters when typing. It is housed in a handsome mahogany case with… Read More ›
The ZX81
In 1981 : The ZX81 was launched. It was produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Dundee, Scotland by Timex Corporation… tweeted here. Many memories of wondering what this product was at the time. I was 11 and it took… Read More ›
