7 early videos of now-everyday technology
Remember when VCRs were a novelty? How about cellphones as big (and heavy) as a brick? Check out these now-vintage videos.
Photo: YouTube The first mobile phone service was available in the '40s from AT&T and required 80 pounds of equipment and a service plan that cost the equivalent of more than $300 per month. By necessity, the first mobile phones were installed in cars, and it wasn't until 1973 when the first truly mobile handset was developed. Cellular service hit U.S. shores in 1983, and just a few years later this gem of a video was produced.
VHS players first started challenging the established video standard Betamax for the hearts and dollars of consumers in the late '70s and early '80s. VHS offered longer playing times, faster rewinding and fast forwarding, though Betamax enthusiasts still insist their format had the highest quality image and sound. Even so, convenience and the ability to put a feature length movie on one tape won out and by the early '80s, the VHS tape and its accompanying VCR were sitting pretty as the established standard.
"This is weather," so begins this great video from the 1950s showing off the UNIVAC computer, one of the early pioneers in computer development. The UNIVAC was made famous in 1952 when it predicted the outcome of the U.S. presidential race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Its initial predictions called for an Eisenhower landslide, something the editors at CBS rejected and kept off air, at least until the outcome turned out to closely match the scenario predicted by the UNIVAC.
As technology and standards change over the years, so do the terms and words used to describe them. In 1975, "portable computer" was defined as a large box weighing 50 pounds with a tiny screen that you needed to plug in. Though we poke fun, the IBM 5100 was revolutionary in its time: This was 10 years before Windows 1.0 was released, six years before IBM’s PC. It had a 16-bit processor, 64 KB of RAM, a few hundred KB of ROM that held program code, and a five-inch monochromatic display. A computer with the same capabilities just five years earlier would have taken up the better part of your average small room.
After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth [is] no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Comments
Looks like Cliff Stoll got it right, not wrong: the Internet has *tried* to replace those items, but has replaced good with crap.
I remember just about every one of these. We had a VCR that had the pop-up feeder (although it didn't have that cool color scheme of the JVC), my parents had the brick bag cell phone for the car (and the antenna to put up on the outside of the car), my older brother had a BetaMax machine, and I knew someone with the 'portable' IBM suitcase as well.
