While taking in the wonderful Israel Perosnal Computer Museum in Haifa I came face to face with the Intelligent Systems Compucolor II, a bizarre 1977 home computer built into a repurposed 13″ TV set. What drew my attention was the strange keboard layout: the arrow keys were clustered at the top right corner. This is … Read more
A new article on my History of Computing site traces the evolution of the straight slide rule over its 3 centuries of service. From a design perspective this progress is an interesting one to follow because the same basic principle evolves through a sequence of progressively more effective designs, culminating in the familiar form that … Read more
Something weird is happening to car designers. Back in the mid-seventies there was one car in my home town that someone had imported from the US, and I remember how futuristic it looked to us then. Photo source: Wikimedia Commons. This was the remarkably innovative AMC Pacer, and it had those huge wrap-around windows that … Read more
Form follows Function, as we all know… but function can change, leaving the form out of context. Consider the long, rather dilapidated building with the vaulted, tilting roof seen behind this parking lot in downtown Jerusalem. What does its form tell you? In its heyday, in the 1940s and 50s, this strange form was dictated … Read more
In a world of rapidly advancing technology it is the fate of any given product to go down from the latest and greatest to a commodity in a few years. The fancy box my first electronic calculator came in probably cost more to make than an entire calculator costs today – and today’s unit, though … Read more
The “zebra” pedestrian crossing with its rectangular stripes is all too familiar. According to Wikipedia, it was introduced after WW2; but its roots appear much earlier in history… During our recent tour of Pompeii I saw how the Romans approached the matter, which they did with their usual pragmatic attitude. Pompeii’s streets are paved with … Read more
The ancient Romans were amazingly like us… If you want to learn how they lived, you have two options: watch the HBO series (which made an honest effort at historical accuracy), or go visit Pompeii, a lively town frozen in time by that devastating Vesuvian eruption in 79 AD. I did both, and in Pompeii … Read more
I was watching 2001: A Space Odyssey again. Such a contrast to today’s special-effect-based space operas… an incredible movie by two giants, and not a bit of CGI in it, either (Sigh…) Anyway, in the beginning Dr. Heywood arrives at the space station, and is subjected to a “Voice Print Identification” process as he enters … Read more
Cross-posting this from my work site… a look at the original Blackberry from 1998, a winning design with different functionality, different constraints and a quite different usage model from today’s designs. Read all about it here!
We all know about vestigial organs in living creatures, such as the useless vermiform appendix that gives many people a bad time. These were useful in earlier releases of our body plan, but are now just along for the ride. So here is a sighting of a similarly useless historical remnant in a Bosch power … Read more
