"If you are one of the hundred best players in the world, these hands will not puzzle you." So reads the instruction manual for AutoBridge, a mechanized version of the classic card game that let enthusiasts play alone.
Computer-generated animations have come a long way in a relatively short time span. Starting as a series of rudimentary renders in the late '70s, it's amusing to think these animations left people in awe. But they probably did.
Ah, sweet, sweet naivety. In this reto-tastic NASA video about space colonization, the narrator waxes optimistically about building a 10,000-person space colony before the year 2000. Hey, at least we got the ISS, right? [Boing Boing]
Before OK Cupid, before Match.com and before eHarmony, there was TACT. TACT was a matchmaking computer based on a machine at the 1964 World's Fair that matched pen pals, TACT made its matches by analyzing the results of 100-question surveys.
In Focus picks up its multi-part World War 2 photo series with the Invasion of Poland and the Winter War. Tucked in the set is this photo, above, that depicts British babies wearing protective respirators in 1939. [In Focus]
The Nintendo Virtual Boy was over before it ever really got a chance to show what it couldn't do. But that doesn't mean that someone, somewhere isn't building an arcade cabinet temple for the aborted console.
It's so easy to take for granted how present-day technology has found an accepted place in our lives. That place was hard earned, after lots of patronizing. Imagine a 50s-era Android instructional video. Kinda like this, but cheesier. [Laughing Squid]
More dispatches from At&T's eerily prescient vision of the future, all the way from the 90s. Here, the simple problem of needing an ingredient for a meal is solved with some cool retrofuturistic tech, replete with cheesy bleeps and boops.
Most of the time the computer interfaces we see in Hollywood flicks are all sorts of ridiculous. They mix glam with hints of what we might expect in the future. Sometimes that's Minority Report (real, see MIT), sometimes it's this:
Why hasn't this kind of critical thinking migrated out of India to the rest of the world? Methinks these educators (seriously, watch to the end) would do well to license out their brand of debunking to other cultures.
Back in the day, when NASA pilots posed with Corvettes and we were just getting to the Moon for the first time, our brightest minds thought space colonies might look at little something like this.
Slate's been reminiscing about the venerable Choose Your Own Adventure book series and it's quite the read! Unfortunately, there's only a single ending to this post, but that doesn't mean it's not an interesting one. Turn the page.
This 1942 ad for a comptometer is just perfect because first of all, I had no idea what a comptometer was (a mechanical calculator, basically) and second, the spec sheet is wonderful: no glare dials, elimination of non-essential zeroes, and a "Keystroke Censor."
According to automotive experts, the last car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck was a 2010 Lexus. As that final model—a Lexus SC 430—rolled off a production line somewhere, a bit of our childhoods faded away. Or did it really?
Why, Ms. Allison, why? If you want single people living alone to cook at home, at least promote gas, not a bloody microwave. Using a microwave for cooking will condemn them to be forever alone. [Thanks Karl!]
1994! Doesn't seem that long ago, right? But for Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, it's been a very long time. This hilarious 1994 clip of The Today Show shows the two of them trying to explain what the Internet is.
Wikipedia turned 10 years old today and to celebrate the wonderful crowdsourced, potluck of information, here's a look at their awkward (and sometimes, wild) past. Their first six weeks of existence, all 10,000 entries, are logged right here.
This is an awesome picture taken in the early 1900s in America. All the boys are wearing foil for some odd reason. Was foil in style? Was it to protect themselves from an alien invasion? Did it represent the future?
Technological advances are wonderful! But that doesn't mean we have to abandon up on retrofabulous design. And there's not much more tempting than walking around with an iPhone-sized Polaroid in your pocket.
