The Internet’s first search engine, Archie, launched 20 years ago today. To celebrate this occasion, I decided to look back at the early days of many search engines (mostly web) of the past 20 years. The resulting slideshow is up on PC World.com for all to see. I hope you enjoy it.
Apple IIc and the Apple Flat Panel Display
I’ve always loved this cover shot. It bursts with vivid, colorful photography of a particularly beautiful Apple IIc.
“Particularly,” I said, because this Apple IIc is not in its usual configuration. It sports a rare and wondrous peripheral known as the Apple Flat Panel Display, an LCD monitor which initially sold for $595 (that’s about $1,205 in 2010 dollars) in 1985.
Despite being Apple’s first LCD display, the device sold poorly. Here’s why: For one thing, it was way too expensive for what you got. And what you got wasn’t that great. Sure, it displayed 80 columns by 24 lines and even high resolution graphics, but in a bizarrely squat screen ratio. In a 1985 review of the monitor, Infoworld wrote, “…characters displayed on the Flat Panel Display have the same oddly stretched appearance of writing on a fat man’s T-shirt.”
The same review notes how difficult it was to read the non-backlit display under any lighting conditions — bright light, dim light, direct light, etc. The combination of intense glare and low contrast made the monitor uncomfortable to use. Mix those elements together, and you have yourself a recipe for a genuine ahead-of-its-time Apple flop: innovative, but not quite ready for prime time yet. Sound familiar?
Still, I’d love to get my hands on an Apple Flat Panel Display and report my experiences directly to you. If anyone out there has one that they’d like to get rid of, please let me know.
Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first use a computer with an LCD screen? When (if ever) did you switch to using LCD screens on your desktop PCs?
An image like this should be familiar to early Macintosh users, since the first Macs only supported 1-bit color. That is, two colors total: each pixel could be black or white — on or off — and nothing in between. The image above uses only black and white and a dithering effect to trick your brain into perceiving shades of grey. Somehow, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Update: Hover over the image to see 1-bit Mona Lisa rendered with Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, which is another algorithm for converting color images to black and white.
“Press <CR> for more”
For my sixth grade social studies class, I wrote a report on Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union. And he really was “former” then — the USSR had fallen apart just two years prior to my report in 1991. For that report — which I ran across recently — I used every resource available to me, including a novel one at the time: Grolier’s Encyclopedia on CompuServe Information Service. My family subscribed to CompuServe — that massive, pre-ubiquitous-Internet dial-up service that cost amazingly large fees an hour — and I loved it.
What you see above is part of the Gorbachev encyclopedia entry in the form of a dot-matrix printout from the DOS version of CompuServe Information Manager (a front-end client for CompuServe) that I printed myself. Various lines are crossed out and underlined, noting areas of interest that I was to paraphrase for the report. This wasn’t plagiarism — I even cited the online encyclopedia in my report’s bibliography. That fact is actually kinda impressive to me in retrospect.
CompuServe’s online encyclopedia was amazing at the time (1992-1993 era). It was so easy to just search for a term, look it up, and print it out. It sure beat our family’s musty 1968 World Book Encyclopedia set that I used for every report prior to this one (yes, the information in my reports was often woefully out of date). For Christmas 1993, my dad bought us Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM, and that served as the meat of my school reports for the next few years after that. But that’s another story entirely.
Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first use an electronic encyclopedia — CD-ROM or otherwise? What did you use it for?
Ten years ago this month, Apple shipped the Power Mac G4 Cube, a unique computer that fared poorly in the marketplace but captured the imaginations of many computer enthusiasts. Naturally, I warmed up my dexterous typing fingers and wrote something about this anniversary. Well, two somethings, in fact, and they’re both up on Macworld.com today.
The first, “The Cube at 10: Why Apple’s Eye-Catching Desktop Flopped,” is an exploration of reasons why the Cube fared so poorly sales-wise.
The second, “Apple’s Cube Was Ahead of Its Time,” compares and contrasts the G4 Cube and the Mac Mini, exploring in particular why the Mini was successful when the Cube was not.
I’d like to thank my editor at Macworld, Philip Michaels, who always does an excellent job of distilling my work into crystal clear prose.
On a personal note, when Apple announced the G4 Cube in 2000, I thought it was amazing and I immediately wanted one. Although I’d traditionally been a PC-clone user, I had been following Apple news closely since the return of Steve Jobs in 1996.
Of course, I couldn’t afford a Cube, so I simply pined away and read about others’ Cube experiences online. I remember the “cracks” issue being a fiasco in the news after the Cube’s release (one my articles discusses that issue), which seemed embarrassing for Apple.
Overall, I’m glad I didn’t buy one, because they were very expensive. I’m lucky I only had a credit card with a $200 limit (Amazingly low, isn’t it? That was just before banks started throwing high-APR credit at everyone and their brother. Now I can’t get them to stop raising my limit.) I still don’t own a Cube, so if anyone wants to donate one to the cause, I’d be willing to listen.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the articles. Feel free to share your G4 Cube memories below.
The pagan god manifests in many forms, demanding a tribute of small children.
This image is part of a two-page double-sided fold out ad attached to the back cover of Home PC magazine. Its main subject was not actually Microsoft Bob, but a Micron P75 PC (click there to see that page).
Microsoft designed Bob (1995) to serve as a friendly graphical interface and operating environment for beginners, but the product flopped mightily and has since become a tech punchline.
Speaking of Bob, my buddy Harry McCracken has written more about Microsoft Bob than any other living human being on the planet. A good place to start would be his Bob Chronicles, which talks about the origins and history of Bob.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used Microsoft Bob? What did you think about it?
Many computer operating systems throughout history have shipped with at least one free game — Solitaire and Minesweeper are some of the most famous examples. Knowing this, I thought I’d take a stroll through history and examine other OS pack-in games.
I ended up with an amusing collection of over twenty games from 1971 to the present. The resulting gallery is up now on Technologizer. I hope you enjoy it.
The Portrait Display Labs Pivot 1700
When I was a kid, I found myself wondering why all monitors didn’t rotate from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. I thought I had invented the idea myself. Turns out, at least one company actually did make a monitor like that — the Pivot 1700 — and you’re looking at it now.
Full-page displays were something of a marketing fad during the rise of the desktop publishing revolution from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. They were designed with a vertical orientation so that someone could read or edit a full 8.5″ x 11″ letter-sized page on screen at one time.
I have no doubt those displays came in handy for certain document designers and secretaries, but their high price and specialized function limited them to a small market. To this day I have never seen one being used in the wild, although I have encountered a few full page displays out of service in my collecting adventures.
In more recent years, I’ve seen some LCD monitors that can rotate on their base to change orientations rather easily. There’s no doubt that it’s a much easier trick to pull off considering the small size and weight of LCD panels verses their bulky CRT counterparts. Now whether anybody needs it or not with today’s super high resolultion 30″ displays, I don’t know.
Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the largest CRT computer monitor you’ve ever used? How big is your monitor (any kind) now?
Periodically, I visit my parents’ house and pick through the material vestiges of my childhood. Old toys, broken knickknacks, and drawings rendered in crayon litter their dusty attic. My mom, being the mother she was, tucked them away as small monuments to her child’s journey through life. I’m happy she did.
During one of these visits in 2008, I ran across this curious artifact of my early education. It’s one of my kindergarten spelling workbooks, still filled out in my meandering 5-year old hand all these years later.
As I flipped through its pages, memories of my kindergarten year — 1986 — began to bubble up from the deepest corners of my brain. I remembered the workbook’s contents surprisingly well: it contained simple words with letters omitted, replaced with blanks in which I scrawled awkward glyphs.
I recalled having my spelling knowledge put to the test on primitive PCs of the day, which I had always assumed were Apple IIs in retrospect. But when my eyes fell upon the famous IBM logo printed on the cover, a strange realization washed over me: IBM taught me how to read.
[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan Special ] IBM Taught Me How to Read » ]
Commodore first shipped the legendary Amiga 1000 in July of 1985 — twenty-five years ago. In honor of the Amiga’s birthday, I did what comes natural to Benjs of all sorts: I took one apart. And I did it for PC World, making this the tenth entry in my “workbench series” of tech autopsies.
Giving the Amiga 1000 its place in the limelight is only fair because I took apart its arch-nemesis, the Atari 1040STf, back in March (the ST series also turned 25 this year).
I hope you enjoy it. When you’re done, I encourage you — no, urge you — to share your fondest Amiga memories in the comments below.
—
Here are my previous workbench teardowns, if you’re interested: Atari 1040STf, Atari 800, Commodore 64, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, IBM Model M Keyboard, TRS-80 Model 100, and Macintosh Portable.
