February 27, 2010

The Magic Boxes


It is the shape, not the circuits, that makes a computer classic.

I reminisced with a fellow passenger last night on the flight back from Las Vegas, as we sat with our sleek, superslimm, forever tasking notebooks. We tried to recall (memory not what it used to be) the early eighties, pre mouse, pre “PC in every pot”, era.  A ‘286’ was our machine, “DOS” nighttime reading, floppies came in size 5 ¼, word-processing an adventure in combination keystrokes, and the C drive was king. Generating wiring diagrams, schematics and circuit board layouts took hours (pre mouse, how did we ever manage), and “Al Gore’s Internet” was an infant. E-mail and going on-line a marvel. The rest is an amazing history.

So much for the circuits.

“No one will ever collect computers,” a Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur once declared to me. “Computers are just boxes.”  The entrepreneur, who collected automobiles, was wrong. His company went bankrupt, and the computer he produced is now a collectible.

Computers are just boxes, but the shape of the box, like the shape of a car, is important in selling the machines. When computer hackers talk of the “architecture” of a computer, they are referring to the organization of its circuits, not the box. To the rest of us, the look is important.

The traditional designer’s ambition of expressing function in aesthetic form giving a car an aerodynamic shape, for instance-is particularly challenging for computer designers. By their nature, these machines are charged with connotation of power and control, but their functions are silent, subtle, and abstract. The expressive side of the design saying what the machine is all about-is the designer’s hardest task.
Unlike the automobile industry, where “styling” did not appear until the public had bought fifteen million simple black Model-T’s, the murderously competitive computer business achieved a level of design in its infancy remarkable for an industry. These have become the classics of today’s collectors.

The Grid Compass and the Mindset have been for many years in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

However, who remembers these? –

The Digital Equipment Rainbow monitor, little more than a stripped-down picture tube, it sat on the desk with the tenuous dramatic balance of a Brancusi head. Digital Equipment used the fact that the computer won international design awards in their advertising.

Memotech’s cool brushed-metal black box. Memotech contrasted itself to plastic computers by touting its “extruded aluminum casing,” for protecting the chips, acting as “a heat sink,” and serving a “a Faraday cage, completely sealing off radio-frequency interference that could impair picture quality.”

Kaypro acted as if it did not care about design, but the crude metal box that housed its bargain-basement computer made it look as basic and no-nonsense as a WWII Jeep did. Referred to by engineers as “Darth Vader’s lunch box”.

Radio Shack’s TRS-80, the silver plastic housing led computer buffs nickname them “Trash-80’s.”

And finally, a German company called Frogdesign opened an office in Campbell, California, near the Apple Headquarters, in Cuptertino. Soon it had produced the Apple IIc, a pure white machine with a ridged, squarish box, combining keyboard and system unit, “unsculptured keys”, and a futuristic looking monitor. Ah, those Germans and their machines.

Designers approached the first personal computers with the science fiction models of Buck Rogers and 2001 fixed firmly in their minds. Those images-visions of what a computer would look like if it existed-inspired the shape the machine took when it finally became a reality, and what an incredible journey it was, is, and will be.

Composed on an antique Mac II (I know, it does not compete with Charles’ ancient Osborne I).



20 comments:

Andrew, still hacking away said...

Thanks for the memories. How about all those lovely programming languages? You remember “brittle code?”, "assembly language?" (30,000 lines of code sans comments, I still have not let go of the pain. Fortran, COBOL, Lisp, "3GL's, ALGOL, Pascal, C and ADA?
AHHHHH, yesterday, when we were young.

Steve H. also still slugging along said...

Not to mention our 1982 systems-solution
SWTPc = a.k.a sweat tech. Southwest Technical Products Corporation Central Processors
56K RAM and 384 K bytes. Disk drives with a capacity of 175K, 1.2M and 16M bytes!
Wow, GAZMET was never the same.

Charles said...

How could I resist?

Osborne computer - "Henry Ford
revolutionized personal transportation. Adam Osborne has done the same for personal business computing."
- September 1982


here is a great site for old computers....

http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/old-computer-ads-5.html

Ms. Edna (squared) said...

more, how could we resist?

"Who needs a man, when you have an Equinox?"

Charles said...

I believe this idea was advanced by Madonna?

Keil said...

What programmer?

Glenda (OB) said...

and then there was...

Bill Gates loves Microsoft, and himself.

Ms. Edna (squared) said...

...and that is why I love my apple.

Apple - "What in the name of Adam do people do with Apple Computers?"

Clive (23 and totally in the dark) said...

what ARE you all talking about?

an OLD friend said...

boring you NEVER are...

steve h. said...

pardon the inferrence, but your crappy blogspot editor is acting-up one your other two blogs. any chance the boys are able to fix?

Ms. Edna (squared) said...

nope, will have to come up with fix myself.

Glenda (OB) said...

NOW I know about GDS (aka Google Derangement Syndrome.

Engineer from that time said...

Hello, as an engineer I am not verbally very expressive and the written word, unless it is an instruction manual, not my constant companion. But coming to your site via this post, I must confess I have enjoyed READING for the first time in a long time.
Thank you...

Ms Edna said...

Dear Charles,
spliced in your code =
zip, nada, nothing.
I'd say enough for the time being.

Ms. Edna (squared) said...

eh & 0 ?
How about kuddos for the programmer?

Charles said...

Kuddos

Anonymous said...

interesting thread

Tommy Lee said...

Hello Slugger,
I see you are in fine form. When are you coming to Texas?

ross said...

he you, hello. longtime no speak. will give a call.