1 post filed under vintage
“This is a VT220 serial console (circa 1983) set up as a terminal for my Mac Pro (circa 2010), a nerdy dream I’ve had for a long time that I finally made a reality yesterday.”
1 post filed under vintage
Body Rap by brigadeneurale on Flickr.
“Body Rap is a high tech portable sound machine! It features 8 pressure-sensitive sound pads. Each one makes an acoustic drum or cymbal sound or says “B B B Body R R R . it Rap. It makes it easy to rock ‘n roll. Super sensitive pads provide split-second sound.”
If anyone can find the original ads for these please get in touch.
1 post filed under vintage
Sensorama : the revolutionnary motion picture system that takes you into another world.
1 post filed under vintage
The cockpit of a Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane
As it screams through the air at three times the speed of sound, this jet needs to keep the air flowing through the engines down around 500 mph. The solution: a retractable cone plus a series of doors and bypasses. Pilots monitor this system on a sub-panel of indicators (lower left) while making sure they hit specific speeds at precise altitudes during ascent and descent. This Cold War-era spy jet, retired in 1998, also collected intelligence on itself, with a sort of proto-black box that captured 200-plus data points every three seconds. “If a pilot screwed up, we could download the tapes and say, ‘OK, buddy, here’s what you did wrong,’” says Rich Graham, a flight instructor and retired SR-71 pilot.
From “From Spy Plane to Monster Truck — a Photo Gallery of Awesome Cockpits” (Wired)
I wonder how the data was visualised.
1 post filed under vintage
I’ve wanted to do something with Nixie Tubes for a long time. This is a beautiful thing.
“The clock is a celebration of purist elegance. Its distinguishing markup is the combination of massive cherry wood and shiny black anodized aluminum constituting certain gentility. Imposing reflections on the black surface repeat the full beauty of these rare tubes.”
(via Spime)
1 post filed under vintage
An Apple vision piece from 1987. Check out the iPad type device with multitouch!
Fast forward 23 years to 2010 and they’ve recently bought Siri - a company that offers a very smart virtual personal assistant experience not unlike the one shown in that video. It’s 2010 and we’re one step closer to HAL (or Holly).
Siri say:
“Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) represent the next generation interaction paradigm for the Internet. In today’s paradigm, we follow links on search results. With a VPA, we interact by having a conversation. We tell the assistant what we want to do, and it applies multiple services and information sources to help accomplish our task. Like a real assistant, a VPA is personal; it uses information about an individual’s preferences and interaction history to help solve specific tasks, and it gets better with experience.”
1 post filed under vintage
USB Typewriter - A bit like the Twitter Typewriter but the other way round.
1 post filed under vintage
BBC Micro News
Ever wondered what the BBC News would sound like if it was read out by a 20 year old BBC Micro computer?
BBC Micro News is recordings of actual BBC Micros reading the RSS feed of the latest news from the BBC News website. It’s not an emulation. This is 20 year old technology hooked up to the internet.
There’s even a daily podcast with Big Ben chiming between the stories.
Genius.
