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Bill Gates: My 1979 Memories
Our Gizmodo '79 celebration may have ended last week, but there's room for a final post, written by famed retiree and mosquito wrangler Bill Gates. It's no joke: Gates read the series then sent this in: More »1979: The Golden Age of Lego
1979 was the beginning of Lego as we know it today, the year when they took over the world, the year of the Galaxy Explorer. I photographed all the classic sets in my Lego trip. Here's the never-released gallery: More »Yes, Good Old Retro 1979 Seemed Fun (But It Really Sucked!)
Writing about technology as it was thirty years ago, I realized that 1979 was perhaps the last year before a digital tsunami hit, sweeping clean the analog era that had persisted for decades. More »1979 Rumor: Leaked Docs of "Compact Disc" Audio Format Using LASERS
From 1979: A source "close to the matter" claims this document outlines a future Audio format that would utilize a tapeless design, and *snort* use lasers as some sort of record needle. Sounds like Bullshit to me. More »Then and Now: Microsoft
Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born. More »Cray-1: The Super Computer
Seymour Cray's big super computer was crazy. It's signals between components had to be timed by trimming long cables up to 1/16th of an inch at a time by hand and was basically interwoven with a giant refrigeration system. More »The Network Before the Internet
The network started to breathe in the 70's. Above, the first ethernet cable, found in PARC's labs by Boing Boing Gadgets. Dag Spicer, numero uno Curator at the Computer History Museum, tells us more: More »The Supersonic Concorde Jet: Can We Go Back to 1979, Please?
Many of our Gizmodo '79 posts have illustrated just how far we've come in the past three decades, but in one important tech example, 1979 kicks 2009's ass: The Concorde Jet. More »Tandy TRS-80: The Budget Computer
Even back then, there were computers for people who couldn't afford the more expensive stuff. Take this Tandy, which costs little more than a upgraded Netbook today. From Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman. More »Then and Now: Apple Computers
Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born. More »Digital Cams Still Haven't Caught Up to Film's Resolution: Does it Matter?
Lenses being equal, a large format 8x10 piece of film can capture the equivalent of 800 Megapixels. Just saying. But does it matter? Discuss! More »What Is This?
Q: What classic computer and Apple II competitor opened its steel case up like a car hood? And was named after a domestic rock toy popular at the time? More »Intel 8088: The Chip That Gave Birth to the Borg
This is the Intel 8088. A beast with 29,000 transistors that could be clocked up 8MHz in its 1979 heyday, it was the second chip to use the x86 architecture, and the brains inside the original IBM PC. More »The 1979 Klingon Happy Meal
You may think the weird Happy Meal bundling came during the '80s, but McDonalds was already busy making sure kids got their fix of movie-promotion McNuggets by 1979. Today is a good day to supersize. More »Then and Now: Sony's A/V Range
Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born. More »Add To Our List Of 8 Comically Enormous Retro Gadgets
Frog Design's Hartmut Esslinger On Design in 1979
Hartmut Esslinger's Frog Design made WEGA/Sony's electronics fetish items, and then designed the "Snow White" language the Mac used. He's a design legend and an author. Here he tells us about the challenges of designing, then and now. More »The Dirty Backstabbing Mess Called Betamax vs VHS
You think you enjoyed Blu-ray vs HD DVD? Memory Stick vs SD? Pshaw! You haven't seen a format war until you've witnessed the betrayal and bloodbath that was Betamax vs VHS. More »The Sinclair MTV-1 Micro TV
Sinclair's little ultra-sharp black and white TV was meant to be a pocket set. But with a 4x6-inch footprint, it was impossible to stash in most disco-tight pockets at the time, even if it was under 2 inches thick. More »Speak and Spell: 1979's Best Robotic Teacher
The Speak and Spell, which was first shown at CES in 1978 and sold in 1979, was one of the first gadgets with a visual display to use interchangeable game cartridges, and it taught a whole generation how to spell. More »Then and Now: The Hewlett-Packard Family
Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born. More »