2021: things that didn’t quite make the cut

This year we mostly concentrated on the year ending in "1", covering gadgets and technology from 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. It turns out to be a decent last digit for computers, games consoles and cars in particular. But here are some of the things that were also notable that didn't get covered.

2011 saw the launch of two rival handheld gaming platforms that were evolutions of previous devices. The Nintendo 3DS had a dual display capable of displaying glasses-free 3D on an otherwise modest hardware platform, the Sony PlayStation Vita was a more powerful device but also a more traditional gaming console. Both products competed directly against each other, but it was the Nintendo that won out although the Sony did gain a dedicated fanbase.

Nintendo 3DS and Sony PlayStation Vita

A decade earlier, in 2001, the Nintendo GameCube was launched against the Sony PlayStation 2 and the original Microsoft Xbox. In this fight, the GameCube came in third - in quite a bruising result for Nintendo.

Skipping back another decade to 1991 we see the Commodore CDTV, a repackaged Amiga that was meant to compete against the Sega Mega Drive and Nintendo SNES. It was a failure, and helped to accelerate Commodore to its demise a few years later.

Nintendo GameCube and Commodore CDTV

In the early eighties, the best place for video games was the local arcade and 1981 was part of the golden era of arcade machines. We've covered quite a few from this year, but Namco's Galaga and Atari's Tempest were both notable and were very different types of shoot-em-up. And if you fancied something different from endless slaughter, there was Taito's Qix which was more of a puzzle game where the player had to fill the screen with boxes while being chased by a mysterious electric entity.

Galaga, Tempest and Qix

None of this would be possible without the microprocessor, and the first commercially-available device was the Intel 4004 which was launched in 1971. Originally designed for a calculator, the 4004 could be used for a variety of other purposes. A successful line of products followed for Intel, notably the x86 series of processors used in most PCs today.

The same year saw the release of the world's first floppy disks. Originally a huge 8 inches across (and very floppy), these inexpensive and transportable storage media and their 5.25 and 3.5 inch descendants were the standard way of transferring files into the 1990s and beyond.

A decade later, the Intel 8085 and a pair of 5.25" floppies could be found in the ergonomically designed Nokia MikroMikko. Nokia Data had a series of mergers and acquisitions, first with Siemens and then ICL until finally vanishing into Fujitsu.

Intel 4004, 8" floppy disk (with 3.5" for comparison), Nokia MikroMikko

Nokia have made many things over their long history, including car tyres. Today you might find Nokian winter tyres on a Nissan Patrol or Toyota Land Cruiser - both these rugged and practical 4X4s were originally launched in 1951 and were heavily inspired by the wartime-era Willys Jeep.

Nissan Patrol (circa 1958) and Toyota Land Cruiser (circa 1966)

If exploring in your Japanese offroader with your Finnish tyres, you probably want a good system to tell you where you actually were in the world. Today you'd use a GPS system, but that wasn't an option back in 1981 when Honda announced the world's first in-car navigation system, the Electro Gyro-Cator. Instead of using satellites, it used inertial navigation and a set of transparent maps fitted over a screen. It was bulky, expensive and of limited use, but eventually the first in-car GPS system was launched in 1990 by Mazda.

Honda Electro Gyro-Cator

Stretching things out a bit more… if you found yourself off-roading in your big Japanese 4X4 with Finnish tyres in the 1970s or 1980s and you wanted to make a high-quality video recording of your journeys, the choice of professionals was a Sony U-matic recording system which was launched in 1971. Capable of capturing broadcast-quality images, the U-matic was the choice of professionals. Smaller than a traditional film camera, most units were still quite bulky and required a crew of two or three - one for the camera, one for the recorder unit and perhaps one for the microphone boom. Perhaps on your exploration into the wilderness you might want to pack some supplies, and there's a good chance that these might include Heinz Baked Beans, a staple of tinned food since 1901. Luckily the Japanese make some of the best can openers in the world too..

Sony U-matic in a carry bag and Heinz Baked Beans

Image credits:
Nintendo 3DS: Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
PlayStation Vita: Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
Nintedo GameCube: BugWarp via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Commodore CDTV: Patric Klöter via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Tempest: Russell Davies via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Galaga: David via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Qix: Joho345 via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Intel 4004: Simon Claessen via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
8" floppy disk: Michael Holley via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
Nokia Data MikroMikko: Nokia
Nissan Patrol (1958): Sicnag via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Toyota Land Cruiser (1966): Sicnag via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Electro Gyrocator: Honda
Sony U-matic: Joybot via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Heinz Baked Beans: Ian Kennedy via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0

UNIVAC I (1951)

Introduced March 1951

The immediate post-war years saw the first viable commercial and scientific computers hitting the market, such as the LEO I and Ferranti Mark 1 in the UK and the UNIVAC I in the United States. These huge, heavy, power hungry, expensive and slow computers are very primitive by today’s standards, but they found their niche in corporations and laboratories.

UNIVAC I in use at the US Census Office

Rather like the British LEO I, the UNIVAC I was a business computer made up of around five thousand vacuum tubes, weighed about 8 tons and sucked in 125kW of electricity. Primary memory consisted of 1000 12-character words stored in mercury delay lines (similar to the LEO), but one novel feature the UNIVAC had was magnetic tape drives for secondary storage. These UNISERVO I drives were the first ever commercially available computer tape drives, and they used heavy nickel-plated phosphor bronze tapes. Other rival computers tended to use punched cards, and initially the UNIVAC I lacked this option.

It was an eye-wateringly expensive system, costing the equivalent of around $7 million in today’s money.  This tended to put it out of reach of many universities and into the realm of government departments and large corporations instead. Given the price and complexity of the UNIVAC I, they wouldn’t always go straight to the customer but would instead be used for a while as demonstrators.

UNIVAC I mercury delay line memory

Once such UNIVAC I was bound for the US Atomic Energy Commission, but took a detour to detour to CBS to help predict the results of the 1952 US Presidential Election. Programmed by the legendary computing pioneer Grace Hopper, the UNIVAC had a complex model built up of data from past elections. With a sample of 5.5% of the vote, the UNIVAC came up with a prediction – out of the two candidates of Dwight D Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower would win in a landslide. The problem was that the UNIVAC’s prediction was completely at odds with pollsters who were predicting a win for Stevenson. So the UNIVAC’s analysis was downplayed by CBS.

Even if you don’t follow US presidential elections of the 1950s, you’ve probably heard of President Eisenhower and not President Stevenson.. that’s because the UNIVAC turned out to be accurate and Eisenhower did indeed beat Stevenson, by a similar margin to the computer’s prediction. Eisenhower might have won the vote, but the UNIVAC won when it came to the star of the election night count. 

Grace Hopper working on a UNIVAC I console

Demand for UNIVAC machines boomed… but Remington Rand were struggling to build them. So ironically, it was rivals IBM who actually benefitted with their IBM 701 mainframe and its successors as they could build them in the quantity customers wanted. As for Remington Rand, they were taken over by Sperry in 1955 which in turn merged with Burroughs to create Unisys in 1986. Unisys is still around today, and it still makes computer hardware such as the Intel-based ClearPath Forward systems among a muddle of consultancy services and resold products.

Although the UNIVAC I was only a moderate success in sales terms, it is socially significant for its role in the Presidential Election where it offered a glimpse into the future of computing, only seven years after the end of the Second World War. It’s astonishing to think that all this was still more than a quarter of a century before the launch of micros such as the Apple II…

Image credits:
U.S. Census Bureau via Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
Tiia Monto via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 2.0

LEO I and Ferranti Mark 1 (1951)

Introduced February 1951

The years immediately after the end of the Second World War saw huge advances in the use of electronics and the development of early computers. By 1951, these machines were becoming practical – albeit in strictly limited scenarios – and February 1951 saw both the world’s first public demonstration of the LEO I and the delivery of the first Ferranti Mark 1 computers.

Both computer systems were British designed and built, they used vacuum tubes and masses of discrete components such as diodes and resistors, housed in huge boxes weighing several tons that sucked in electricity at a phenomenal rate. Primitive by today’s standards, the Ferranti Mark 1 and LEO I was early examples of successful commercial computers.

The computers had different markets, the Ferranti was aimed at scientists and engineers but the LEO was the world’s first dedicated business computer.

LEO Computer name plate

“LEO” stood for “Lyons Electronic Office”, and it was a computer originally designed for the J Lyons company in the UK. Lyons at that time was a massive business of food manufacturing, tea shops and other hospitality businesses spread throughout the country. Almost every town had a Lyons Tea Shop, making them the post-war equivalent of Costa Coffee or Starbuck today – and they had a huge number of customers and staff to support them, requiring a steady and uninterrupted supply of food to keep everything going.

It was a massive logistical enterprise, and Lyons managed it very successfully. Indeed, Lyons successful management of logistics led to the British government giving them the contract to run a large munitions factory called ROF Elstow during World War II. Logistics was the key to the Lyons business, and this led to their interest in the developing world of computers.

The LEO I was designed to help with that. Inspired largely by the EDSAC computer developed at the University of Cambridge, the LEO I started with the mundane task of bakery valuations before moving on to inventory management and payroll. Lyons even started doing payroll for other companies, and there was demand for LEO I systems from other large companies in the UK.

LEO I Mercury Delay Line Storage Unit

A few years later, the successful computer division was spun out as LEO Computers leading to the LEO II and LEO III which used more modern technology. In the 1960s, LEO Computers were merged into English Electric, then International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and eventually found their way into ICL which itself was taken over by Fujitsu in 2002. The J Lyons company also faded away, by the 1960s the tea shops were losing money and despite a merger with Allied Breweries in the late 1970s, the profitable parts of the company were sold off but the Lyons name lives on under different owners.

The Ferranti Mark 1 had a different lineage – essentially a commercialised version of the Manchester Mark 1 developed at the University of Manchester. Ferranti themselves were a more traditional electrical engineering and electronics company, working in diverse markets such as defence, power systems and home appliances. Their experience in electronics in World War II made them an obvious choice to collaborate with the Manchester project.

Although both computers used vacuum tubes, they had very different forms of memory – the LEO used acoustic mercury delay lines and the Ferranti used a CRT called a Williams Tube. These technologies were only marginally viable even in 1951 and neither technology made it to the end of the decade. Data storage for both systems included the rather more long-lasting solutions of paper tape and punched cards.

Several generations of improved computers came after the Mark 1, but Ferranti wasn’t competitive in the business computer market so eventual sold that off to ICT (who became ICL), concentrating instead on industrial and military applications. Development of these computers continued into the 1980s, alongside Ferranti’s successful semiconductor business.

Ferranti Mark 1 Logic Door

But where J Lyons faded away, Ferranti’s end was more sudden and dramatic. A takeover of a US firm called International Signal and Control (ISC) in 1987 was a disaster – although ISC looked like a good fit, it turned out that the books that Ferranti had inspected were false and instead of ISC being a profitable and above-board defence contractor, its real business was in illegal arms sales which were often made at the behest of the US government. These illegal contracts stopped as soon as ISC because British-owned leading to a massive black hole in Ferranti’s accounts. By 1993 it was all over, Ferranti collapsed and the viable business units were bought out by competitors.

It’s a familiar story of course, early innovators fall by the wayside and then disappear. Not every company can become an IBM or Apple, but in the case of Lyons and Ferranti rather more was lost along the way. 

Image credits:
Ferranti Mark 1 Logic Door - Science Museum Group – CC BY 4.0
LEO Computer Name Plate - Science Museum Group – CC BY 4.0
LEO I Mercury Delay Line - Rhys Jones via Flickr – CC BY-NC 2.0