2020: things that didn’t quite make the cut

This year we’ve covered gadgets and inventions from the 1800s and up. But there are plenty of other things that had anniversaries this year that we didn’t mention.

One of the most important inventions debuted in 1810 – the tin can. A key product of the industrial revolution, the tin can answered many of the millennia-old questions about how to preserve foodstuffs. More reliable and palatable than salting, drying, pickling and a variety of other methods this humble tin can meant food security for growing populations in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Also hailing from the nineteenth century was celluloid, a versatile class of materials that were pioneered in billiard balls in 1870, and then found their way into many other products from toys to films. However, celluloid’s habit of bursting into flames means that it is rarely used as a material today.

Canned food in a store in Hong Kong, Easter brooch with celluloid flowers

Somewhat related to celluloid is cellophane, a lightweight and flexible material that lent its properties to Scotch Tape, introduced in 1930. Also from 1930 – and perhaps a little bit more edible – is the Hostess Twinkie cake bar. Allegedly, Twinkies last forever – but eat a decade-old box at your own risk.

Vintage scotch tape container, Twinkie cake bars

Fast forward to 1960 and the white heat of technology forges something even more high-tech than sticky tape and cake bars, with the laser. Don’t ask me to explain how these things work, they just do. Pew pew.

Visible lasers being demonstrated

People who remember the home computers of the 1980s probably remember the Commodore VIC-20 – but it had an immediate predecessor in the shape of the VIC-1001 which was sold successfully in Japan only. The main difference between the two is that the VIC-1001 supports Japanese Katakana characters.

Commodore VIC-1001

By 1990 of course things were really getting more advanced. The Sega Game Gear was an 8-bit handheld console that carved a significant market for itself. Another 8-bit games machine, the Commodore 64 Games System (or simply the C64GS) was a more traditional console based closely on the legendary Commodore 64 home computer. The C64GS held great promise with the potential of a huge games library, but it failed to deliver in a spectacular way.

Sega Game Gear, Commodore 64 Games System

In the same year, the Macintosh Classic breathed a bit more life into a familiar format at a sub-$1000 price point, but the 68000 processor was getting a bit long in the tooth by then. More powerful, but three times the cost, was the 68030-based Macintosh IIsi which was much more forward-looking.

Apple Macintosh Classic, Macintosh IIsi

Handheld gadgets continued to develop, and in 2000 the Sharp J-SH04 was launched in Japan which was the world’s first recognisable camera phone, with a rear-facing 0.11 megapixel camera. It wasn’t great, but it set a pattern that other early camera phones improved on.  

Sharp J-SH04

That’s it for 2020, a difficult year for many people. Let’s hope that 2021 will be better. A big shout out to all those key workers, healthcare professionals and everybody trying to be socially responsible (or even just managing to keep themselves sane) this year. 

Image credits:
Canned food in a store in Hong Kong: Bairgae Daishou 33826 via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Easter brooch with celluloid flowers: Pinke via Flickr – CC BY-NC 2.0
Vintage scotch tape container: Improbcat via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
Twinkie cake bars: Photog Bill via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Visible lasers being demonstrated: US Navy via Wikimedia Commons – Public domain
Commodore VIC-1001: Thomas Conté via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Sega Game Gear: James Case via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Commodore 64 Games System: Thomas Conté via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 2.0
Macintosh Classic: Christian Brockmann via Wikimedia Commons – CC0
Macintosh IIsi: Benoît Prieur via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Sharp J-SH04: Morio via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

Zork I (1980)

Introduced December 1980

Although early microcomputers came in all sorts of different and incompatible varieties, they had a few things in common. Specifically, they didn’t have much in the way of memory and if they had graphics capabilities they were pretty rudimentary. Early computer games therefore required a bit of imagination, and one great example of where this was the case if the Zork series of text adventures from Infocom.

Zork running on an ADM31 terminal

Originally designed as a follow-on from the 1970s “Colossal Cave” adventure, Zork (in those days just called “Dungeon”) was developed for the DEC PDP-10 (a 36-bit minicomputer system) and was written in a version of LISP called MDL. Computers like these tended to have a relatively large amount of memory and decent hard disk storage, so the game itself grew quite large and complex. And just like Colossal Cave, Dungeon was very popular amongst people with access to the expensive computing equipment required to run it.

The next step by the authors – Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels – was to port the game (now called “Zork”) to the ever-expanding range of microcomputers on offer. Some compromises had to be made due to the small amount of memory these machines had, and the original minicomputer game was rewritten into three episodes.

The creators formed a company to market the game called Infocom, and set about the challenge of rewriting the game. The approach was a novel one for the time – the Zork game itself was written in its own language called “ZIL”, which ran in a virtual environment called a “Z Machine”. This meant that the game (and others based on the same technology) could be easily ported to any compatible platform that had a Z Machine coded for it. Infocom partnered with the distributors of VisiCalc to sell the game, and by 1980 it was ready for the wider world.

You could call the finished product either an adventure game or a piece of interactive fiction. Rich text descriptions, clever natural-language parsing and complex gameplay made Zork a compelling proposition. The player starts in a field next to a white house, which turns out to be the gateway to an underground layer full of treasure and monsters – including the infamous “Grue” who would kill the adventurer if they wandered around in the dark. By solving a series of puzzles, mazes and other challenges, the player could bring all the treasure back to a cabinet in the house and thus win the game.

Sharp-eyed people may notice that this Kaypro II is accompanied by the Amiga version of Zork I

Sales were good, and as word got around – and the software was ported to more devices – the popularity began to grow throughout the 1980s. Zork II & III were released in 1982 and a wide variety of other games were released in the ZIL platform, including 1984’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” designed in conjunction with Douglas Adams. As a novel twist, some of these games included “feelies” which were physical objects in the box that would form part of the puzzles in the games.

Even as rivals tried to come up with graphical adventures, Infocom’s position remained very strong. But Infocom wanted to move beyond being just a games company, and in 1985 they launched a novel database product called Cornerstone. It wasn’t a success and Infocom was taken over by Activision, which ensured the short-term survival of the company… but in the end Activision didn’t really understand the Infocom brand and by the end of the 1980s development of text adventures had ceased, although there was a brief renaissance in the mid-1990s when several Infocom games compilations were released.

Because of the portable nature of the game, it’s possible to play Zork online for free. Be warned though – you may find that once you start, you won’t be able to stop playing until you’ve solved it all.

Image credits:
CyberHades via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Marcin Wichary via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

 

Atari Battlezone (1980)

Introduced November 1980

Displays on early computer systems – and arcade games – tended to be divided into two categories. Most used a series of dots created line-by-line, like a domestic TV set – these were raster scan devices. But you don’t have to create a picture like that with an old-style cathode ray tube (CRT), you can draw lines from point-to-point too – these are vector devices.

Atari’s Lunar Lander and Asteroids games used vector displays to create cool space-age graphics, modelled in part on the look and feel of Spacewar! on the PDP-1 decades earlier. The next stage for Atari was an impressive evolution of vector graphics, with Battlezone.

Modern rendering of the periscope view of Battlezone

Launched in November 1980, Atari’s Battlezone was set firmly on the ground. Instead of a spaceship, the player controlled a tank with two controllers that pushed backwards and forwards. Push both forwards, and the tank moved forwards, you would go backwards if both were pushed backwards, and to turn you would push one back and one forwards. A button on one of the controllers fired a shell towards enemy tanks prowling around the landscape, or faster super tanks, UFOs or missiles.

The gameplay was fairly straightforward, but the graphics set it apart. In the standard versions, the player would look through a periscope with a lens in it and some painted on artwork, to simulate a real tank. What they saw was a flat plane with an occasional enemy, distant mountains and a live volcano, a crescent moon and random geometric shapes scattered around which could act either as cover or as obstacles. The wire-frame vector graphics, given a primitive but compelling 3D experience.

The enemy often wasn’t visible at all, except for being on radar. A frantic swing around to find the opposing tank would often be too late to avoid an incoming round. Unseen objects could block escape routes, or alternatively save your bacon and block an attack. All the time, the mountains beckoned in the distance. Could you ever reach them? All sorts of rumours and myths abounded, sadly untrue.

Battlezone machine with periscope

The game was a huge hit, but the periscope remained one of the most divisive parts. Although it added to the feel of the game, you had to be able to reach it and it wasn’t always the most hygienic thing to press your face into. Some later versions removed the periscope which made the game more accessible.

Battlezone also had official ports to most of the popular systems of the early 1980s, include the Apple II, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Atari 8-bit machines and the Atari ST. Unofficial versions and games inspired by Battlezone proliferated across every  platform you can think of and are still popular today. Vintage machines seem rare, with prices in the US being around $5000, but if you want a more modern (and compact) VR experience you could try something like the PlayStation 4 version.

Image credits:
Gamerscore Blog via Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0
Russell Bernice via Flickr – CC BY 2.0

Berzerk (1980)

 Launched November 1980

The golden age of arcade games features many classic games that are still fondly remembered and played today, but one that has been somewhat forgotten is Berzerk, launched by Stern Electronics in November 1980.

The basic gameplay of Berzerk was that the player was trapped in a series of mazes and had to shoot robots who were themselves shooting back. An indestructible enemy called Otto would turn up. Getting shot by a robot, walking into a robot, being too close to a robot that was shot, bumping into the electrified walls or being caught by Otto would all result in death. The player does have the option of escaping to another one of the thousands of possible rooms to fight again.

Berzerk

Although the gameplay was novel, what really made Berzerk stand out was speech synthesis. Although the game itself was powered by the popular Zilog Z80 processor (clocked at 2.5MHz), the speech was provided by a TSI S14001A chip that had originally been designed for a talking calculator. The games used speech to attract players with “coin detected in pocket” and then chattered and taunted the player throughout the game.

Berzerk was a hit – gaining some notoriety along the way – and was successfully ported to Atari and Vectrex gaming consoles. Stern followed up with a successful partnership with bringing Konami games to US markets, but by the mid-1980s the bottom dropped out of the market in a huge crash that took Stern with it.

Ports and conversions of Berzerk exist to this day and aren’t hard to find, but collecting arcade machines themselves is a bit of a niche hobby. We found an original cabinet in the US for $1200, which is not much compared to some better known games.

Perhaps the lasting legacy of Berzerk was that it helped to kick start voice synthesis, although it took decades for this to became good enough to use all the time. Stern themselves were resurrected as a brand in 1999 when the assets of Sega’s pinball operations were spin off, and Stern Pinball make machines to this day.

Image credit:
The Pop Culture Geek Network via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0

Apple III (1980)

Introduced November 1980

The legendary Apple II series was one of the most successful computers ever, selling millions of units in a 16 year run from 1977 to 1993. But despite that success, Apple repeatedly tried to kill off the Apple II and replace it with something better. The Apple III was the first attempt… and one of the most disastrous.

Apple III with Profile Hard Disk

It was released to the market in November 1980, and on paper it looked like it should succeed – based on the 6502 processor like its predecessor, it had 128Kb of RAM included, supported lowercase characters (unlike the Apple II), built-in colour graphics and 80 column text and a new operating system called Apple SOS. A floppy disk was included as standard, and the Apple III also had sound.

Despite the similarity in hardware, the Apple III wasn’t compatible with the Apple II in normal operations, but it did have a special emulation mode it could be booted into. But this was one of the Apple III’s many poor design decisions – the Apple III could only emulate an Apple II with 48Kb of memory when a lot of software demanded the full 64Kb. There wasn’t any good technical reason for this either, it was purely a marketing decision. Similar access to other advanced parts of the Apple III hardware (such as the 80 column display and lowercase letters) were deliberately blocked too, but the memory limitations meant that the Apple III did not make a very good Apple II.

Unfortunately the problems ran much deeper. The physical design of the Apple III had been determined by the marketing team, not the engineering team. So when it came to squeezing all the bits in, the engineers couldn’t make it all fit. To get round this, the Apple III motherboard was designed with very narrow tracks and a large number of soldered-on components to save space. However, the quality of the manufacturing process was not up to such precise work and a large proportion of Apple IIIs were faulty out of the box.

Overheating was a major problem too – in order to keep noise and size to a minimum, the III had no fans but instead was meant to dissipate heat into the aluminium casing. Heating would lead to system crashes and according to legend, chips would pop out of their sockets and disks could melt. Other hardware problems included a faulty real-time clock which would eventually fail and be difficult to replace.

A chronic lack of software was combined with a lack of documentation, making it had for independent developers to create new software and hardware. Compared to this, the Apple II had a huge software library and the system was well-documents and easy to work with.

The launch was a complete disaster, and it soon became clear that Apple hadn’t done any real testing on this unit and the product was unfit for purpose. Sales were quickly suspended and all the sold units recalled for re-engineering. A redesigned circuit board (and the removal of the troublesome clock) fixed most of the issues and the Apple III was re-introduced to market a year later, in November 1981.

Apple III Plus

Consumers were not keen on the revised model at all, because the reputation of the early ones was so bad that it tainted the newer and more reliable models.  A lightly revised Apple III Plus launched in December 1983 did not turn around sales either and in April 1984 the entire product line was permanently cancelled.

In three and a half years of on-off sales, the Apple III had only shipped about 120,000 units – and many of these were to replace faulty ones. The entire project lost tens of millions of dollars, but fortunately for Apple it survived because of buoyant sales of the Apple II. Apple’s next main product launch following the Apple III was the Apple Lisa, which was also a high-profile commercial failure.

It took more than a decade to kill of the Apple II – the Mac LC from 1990 helped – by which time the Apple III had been long forgotten. Today, Apple III systems are rare but usually only cost a few hundred dollars for one in working order.

Image credits:
Adam Jenkins via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Tellegee via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0

Epson MX-80 (1980)

Introduced October 1980

It was the noise you remember most of all, the slow tortured screeching of metal pins hammering thousands of tiny black dots onto paper, for what seemed like an eternity. When you were in a room full of them, the sound was cacophonous but distinctive. Not quite like the rat-a-tat machine gun fire of a daisy wheel or the howled whistling of a modem, the din of a dot matrix printer is thankfully something seldom heard today.

The Epson MX-80 is probably the key product of its type. Introduced in October 1980, this 9-pin dot matrix printer was capable, reliable, compact and lightweight. Most of all, it was successful – the MX-80 and the Epson printers that followed it defined the way most of us printed for more than a decade.

Elegantly but practically designed, the MX-80 used a simple 9 x 9 matrix to produce typically 80 columns of text. Nine pins meant that the printer could produce “true descenders” on letters such as p and g rather than 8 x 8 matrices (as found on most computers) which could struggle. Italics, bold characters and underlining was all supported, and the printer could also produce custom graphics with a little effort.

Epson MX-80

The MX-80 was a bidirectional printer with logic seeking which meant faster print times of up to 80 characters per second. On the standard model the paper was tractor fed from a box of fanfold paper (also called continuous stationary) on the floor, typically allowing for up to 2000 sheets before the slightly awkward task of feeding in some more.

You would typically hook up the MX-80 to a small computer using a parallel port which was a big cable, but it didn’t require anything to set it up. Serial options were available, and the MX-80 F/T had a friction feed so it could use cut sheet paper. A larger MX-100 had a wider carriage for bigger paper.

It was cheap to run – mostly you’d just need a new ribbon from time-to-time, although quite expensive to buy. By modern standards it was very slow, taking up to a couple of minutes for each page. And then there was the paper…

Fanfold paper is all connected together, making one continuous piece of paper where the pages are perforated so that they can be pulled apart from each other. Most fanfold paper also has perforations along the sprocket holes on either side. If you’d waited a couple of hours for a really big document to print out, you might then want to split the paper into A4 sheets. This was an agonising manual process that involved carefully pulling the paper apart. If you didn’t pay attention then you could rip the page, and you might have to reprint it (if it was even possible to print a single page in whatever application you were using).

Epson MX-80 and Apple II

Despite all the drawbacks, it was a useful device and consumers loved it, not least because it was very cheap to run. IBM loved it too, and rebadged it as the IBM 5152 to go alongside the IBM PC. The MX-80 spawned a number of 9-pin and 24-pin successors, and despite most modern printers being lasers or inkjets, you can still buy Epson dot-matrix printers today. But where are they used?

Dot matrix printers can be found in industrial environments, warehouses and also in the aviation industry. A combination of ruggedness, reliability and low maintenance costs outweigh the slow speed, low quality and noise in those environments. Although you would be unlikely to find an MX-80 still in operation after all of these years, you can still find many examples of its descendants.

Image credits:
Cushing Memorial Library via Flickr – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Nakamura2828 via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0

TRS-80 Color Computer (1980)

Introduced September 1980

The original TRS-80 (launched in 1977) was one of the “holy trinity” of early consumer-friendly microcomputers along with the Apple II and Commodore PET. Capable though the original was, it lacked colour and sound which was what the next-generation of home micros would provide, so in September 1980 Tandy Radio Shack launched the TRS-80 Color Computer.

It had almost nothing in common with the original TRS-80 Model I except for the name. Crucially the Color Computer (often called the “CoCo”) didn’t have the Z80 processor that gave the “80” to the Model I’s name but instead it included a Motorola 6809. Indeed, the whole thing was more Motorola than Tandy – the basis of the CoCo was a Motorola-designed Videotex terminal which Tandy joined in to manufacture and market.

TRS-80 Color Computer 1

 

The 6809 was a bit more sophisticated than the Z80 and the rival 6502, and the more powerful Motorola 68000 was still an expensive and rather niche device. This was combined with a Motorola MC6847 graphics chip and there was an optional sound and speech cartridge.

Although the CoCo had pretty powerful graphics capabilities it was complex to get the most out of them, and the machine had some odd quirks such as being unable to display pure white and lacking lowercase character support. At launch the CoCo had 4, 16 or 32KB of RAM but later models shipped in 16 or 64KB configurations, and the last series of Color Computers could support up to 512KB.. and wonder of wonders, even lowercase text.

Over eleven years the hardware evolved somewhat with three distinct series of computers being made with different case colours, detailing and keyboards. The third and last series had improved graphics, built-in software and better support for peripherals. The larger memory allowed the sophisticated OS-9 operating system to run which brought a modern operating system to this fairly simple 8-bit machine.

TRS-80 Color Computer 2

Production ended in 1991, which wasn’t bad for an 8-bit machine. It was more popular in North America than in Europe, but the same Motorola reference platform emerged in the somewhat CoCo-compatible Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 a few years later.

For collectors, the CoCo isn’t an expensive buy and is commonly available in the US, however those run on a different voltage and have different video standards to European ones. Plenty of software emulators are available if you fancy tinkering on more modern hardware.

Image credits:
Adam Jenkins via Flickr - CC BY 2.0 - [1] [2]

PERQ Workstation (1980)

Introduced 1980

Sometimes influential bits of technology are ones you might never have heard of. The PERQ Workstation is probably one of these. Probably never selling more than a few thousand units, the PERQ nonetheless offered a lucky few a glimpse of the future.

What made the PERQ special was that it was the first commercially-available system with a GUI. Although Xerox had pioneered the idea with the Alto in the 1970s, these were never a commercial product. The Alto went on to inspire the Lilith workstation, but this too wasn’t something that you could buy. But the PERQ was something that you could actually buy… if you were the right type of customer.

Designed by the Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC), the PERQ attracted the attention of British computer giant ICL who built a version under licence. Even at first glance the likeness between the PERQ, Alto and Lilith were obvious with the large portrait-orientation monitor and large under-desk computer system. All three computers used a device for moving the cursor, in the case of the Alto and Lilith it was a mouse but the PERQ used a digitising tablet.

(L to R) ICL PERQ 2 (with mouse), Norsk Data ND-100, ICL PERQ 1 (with tablet)

From the point of view of the user, the screen and tablet were the most important elements. The display itself was the same size as an A4 piece of paper with an astonishing (for the time) 768 x 1024 pixel resolution. The tablet offered more precise control than a mouse but it performed the same function. Inside was a complicated set of discrete components roughly equating to a 16-bit CPU with up to 256 Kb of memory. In addition to a floppy disk there was a 24Mb hard disk, but crucial to the idea of the PERQ was networking – it supported both Ethernet and Cambridge Ring.

The PERQ was always meant to be more than a nice computer with fancy graphics (a perquisite in fact), but instead it was meant to form part of a much larger integrated network compromising of shared storage devices and file servers, print servers, wide area networks and large-scale mainframes for batch processing. Essentially the PERQ would form a component of a recognisably modern network of devices… but this was in 1980 and really nobody much was doing this sort of thing outside of labs.

ICL's vision of the future

 

The operating system was called POS (PERQ Operating System) which was a pretty simple platform. A Pascal compiler, text editor and some demonstration programs were included to show off the GUI, but in the early days you’d have to write or port software to it yourself. It wasn’t an expensive system for what it was - about $20,000 – considering that it had the power of a small minicomputer. Other operating systems were also developed - including Flex, Accent and the Unix-like PNX.

Cutaway of PERQ workstation

The original PERQ was a niche success. The PERQ 2 followed in 1983 with a lighter-coloured cabinet, more memory, better internal storage and a three-button mouse rather than the digitiser. All was set for the PERQ 3 – a very different design based around the Motorola 68020 and running ICL’s PNX as the default OS. The display was boosted to an impressive 4096 x 2130 pixel landscape screen, and it would have more memory and access to more peripherals.

The PERQ 3 was in full development in late 1985 which was about the same time that PERQ Corporation (the new name for Three Rivers) started to get into serious financial trouble in the face of competition from the likes of Sun and Apollo workstations. ICL was also beginning to fancy itself as a “services” company and had lost interest in the PERQ too. Crossfield Electronics took over the project and did develop some high-performance workstations in the late 1980s but ultimately without the backing of a big player the PERQ was doomed.

Although the PERQ was ultimately a business failure, these innovative workstations when into exactly the right sort of environments to influence future computer designs – many of the ideas of the interconnected environment the PERQ was designed for would really only be adapted by businesses decades later. It wasn’t just the first computer with a GUI that you could actually buy, it was a glimpse into the entire future of computing.

The most likely place to find a PERQ today is a museum, and that’s probably the best place for them as early models might electrocute you if not careful, or catch fire. If you are technically minded you could try a PERQ emulator or perhaps you might consider that there's a little bit of PERQ in every modern computer system.

Image credits:
Rain Rabbit via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
ICL Technical Journal – November 1982

Mattel Intellivision (1980)

Introduced 1980

Games consoles have been through several waves of being “a thing” to being “not a thing” and back to being “a thing” again. The Mattel Intellivision – launched to the general public in 1980 – was released nearly at the top of the wave… which unfortunately meant that it was all going to be downhill for this interesting console.

The Intellivision had been tested in Mattel’s home market of California at the end of 1979, and in 1980 it was ready for release across the United States. More sophisticated than the Atari VCS, the Intellivision was designed as more than a games console and Mattel hoped that… well, it could be an intelligent television (hence the name).

Original Mattel Intellivision

It was unusual in several ways. Firstly, the processor was quite unlike anything else that rivals had. The General Instrument (GI) CP1610 was a 16-bit processor with an instruction set closely based on the venerable PDP-11 which was hardly an obvious choice compared to the then-common MOS 6502 and Zilog Z80. A dedicated sound chip and graphics far superior to the Atari VCS certainly caused a splash when it was launched.

One notable hardware feature was the complicated gaming pad with a control pad and 14 buttons. The controllers took some practice to use, and while they were useful for complicated games they were a pain for games where a simple joystick would have worked better. Indeed, unlike other consoles many of the games actually required you to read the instructions before you started.

It was competitively priced at $299 (about $900 in today’s money), it had a reasonable amount of games and better graphics and sound than the Atari. After a somewhat slow start, the Intellivision started to sell strongly – shifting more than three million units up to 1983.

The Intellivision was always meant to be an expandable system, with a “Keyboard Component” which included a 6502 processor, extra RAM and a cassette drive. This add-on was meant to turn the Intellevision into a videotext-capable microcomputers. However, the project was badly delayed and was a high-profile failure resulting in fines from the FTC. Only a few thousand were sold, and most of those were bought back by Mattel when the project was cancelled – making it an exceptionally rare component today. Instead an add-on called the “Entertainment Computer System” was created which was much cheaper and less ambitious. A voice synthesiser called “Intellivoice” was also launched but had only a few games launched for it before that too was cancelled. An online service called PlayCable was trialled but cancelled.

Add-on woes aside, the Intellivision was selling well – and not just under the Mattel name. Bandai, Sears, Tandy, GTE and Sharp had their own versions. A cosmetically updated Intellivision II was launched in the US and Brazil in 1983 which was cheaper to make and less bulky. Mattel had plans for the Intellivision III and IV which would have been progressively better…

Intellivsion II

..but then in 1983 the bottom fell out of the console market. There were too many different consoles on the market, margins were getting very thin and competition from cheaper and more powerful microcomputers led to a disastrous market crash. Up until that point Mattel Electronics had been profitable and had continued to grow in terms of staff and investment – but suddenly it started posting enormous losses.

Mattel Electronics collapsed over six month period in late 1983, and Mattel sold on the remains for just $20 million in early 1984. But that wasn’t the end of the story. New owners INTV Corporation launched the INTV System III along with some unreleased Mattel games and a few they created themselves, the System III continued in production until 1990.

You might think that the story of this slightly weird games console would end there, but it didn’t. In 2014 the Intellivision Flashback was launched, packaging many popular games into a more modern hardware platform while retaining the same esoteric controller. Scheduled for release in October 2020 is the Intellivision Amico which reimagines the Intellivision concept on modern hardware.

Intellivsion Amico

Today the Intellivision is quite collectable, with prices varying widely usually depending on the number of packaged games – prices in the US commonly start at less than $100 and go up to $500 or so. Alternatively the upcoming Amico is slated to be $249, although that will be a very different experience to the original. Either way this 40 year old game system still seems to have its fans today..

Nicolas Nova via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Andy Simmons via Flickr - -CC BY-ND 2.0
Intellivision Entertainment

Rogue (1980)

Introduced 1980

Before the microcomputer boom of the late 1970s most computers were large, expensive but powerful multiuser machines (“minicomputers”) such as the DEC PDP-11 and VAX. These expensive machines were meant for serious work, but even so a few games had been written such as Colossal Cave and Star Trek.

These were often complex games, but they were severely hampered by the rudimentary output capabilities of the computers involved. Although minicomputer terminals had evolved through the 1970s leading to designs such as the versatile VT100, it wasn’t always easy to leverage the new features into programs.

Cursor addressability was the key feature first seen in the era of the VT52 – the ability to move the cursor to anywhere on the screen and display text. It seems simple today, but the earliest terminals were basically printers-with-a-keyboard (teletypes) and it took a long while for glass teletypes to evolve into the video terminals that could support recognisably modern applications.

By 1980 the newly-developed curses library was making it much easier to use the advanced features of these terminals, and around 1980 a pair of students – Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman – were intrigued by the possibility of writing a game on the UCSC computers systems where they were studying.

Rogue emulated running on a VT220

Rogue broke out of the mould of earlier minicomputer games which either tended to be quite simple or weren’t worth playing once you had beaten them. Rogue was a satisfyingly complex Dungeon-and-Dragons style game, set on several levels of mostly randomly-generated maps. The player roamed these ASCII maps as a wandering “@” sign, with 26 different types of monster represented by letters of the alphabet - V = vampire, O = orc for example. The player could accumulate a variety of weapons, armour, scrolls, potions and rods (wands) to help them on their task.

26 levels down in the game you would find the ultimate prize – the Amulet of Yendor, which you could then take back to the surface? The turn-based gameplay did give the player plenty of time to consider their next move in tricky situations, but on the other hand death was permanent – if slain by a monster or your own stupidity you would have to start over.

Michael Toy then moved to Berkeley from UCSC and met with Ken Arnold who had developed the curses library, the game evolved further and by the mid-1980s commercial interests were involved, porting the game to a variety of 1980s micros including the Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and many more.

It was a hard game to master, and you could easily spend hours and hours trying to tackle deeper and deeper part of the dungeon. The fact that it was simply made up as ASCII characters didn’t really matter because of the rich gameplay – and most micro versions used some simple graphics to enhance the game further.

Nethack running on a modern laptop

Rogue was always a closed source game though, so many open source variants followed. Nethack is probably the most popular of these, with richer gameplay that Rogue but still mostly stubbornly sticking to ASCII.

Of course modern computer games can offer something of the rich gameplay of Rogue-like games along with impressive graphics and sound effects, but Rogue and its derivatives linger on and continue to be developed.

Image credits:
Artoftransformation via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Mad Ball via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0

Missile Command (1980)

Missile Command screenshot

Introduced July 1980

It’s the height of the Cold War, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation is always just around the corner. Everything you know and everyone you love could be swept away in an instant and there would be very little you could do about it.

So, for some escapism what about a game where everybody dies in a nuclear conflagration? Welcome to 1980 and Atari’s Missile Command.

The golden age of arcade machines featured many escapist games, usually of the shoot-‘em-up variety. As with microcomputers of the time, arcade machines were being propelled by improvements in microprocessors and other silicon chips leading to a rapid improvement of hardware. Missile Command used a 1.25 MHz 6502 CPU with an Atari POKEY chip handling sound. Graphics were 256 x 231 pixels in 8 colours, and unlike Lunar Lander and Asteroids, Missile Command used a raster scan monitor.

Missile Command arcade machine

The gameplay was this: the player had to defend six cities at the bottom of the screen from waves of nuclear weapons (represented with a line with a blob on the end). The player would launch their own missiles from three bases into the sky to destroy the nukes, and those bases themselves can be destroyed. As the game progresses the player is attacked by missiles with multiple warheads, bombers and satellites. The game ends when all six cities are destroyed, and invariably they ARE destroyed.

Unusually, the primary control for the game was a large trackball which emulated the sort of thing that real military bases would use for controlling systems. Combined with the (then) advanced graphics and sound, it made Missile Command a distinctive and popular gaming experience.

Although the game was distributed by Atari in North America, Atari chose to partner with Sega to distribute it in Europe. This gave Sega a useful foothold in the arcade game market. In Asia-Pacific markets a smaller number of Taito cabinets were made. But as a classic video game, it was ported to many platforms from the 1980s onwards and there are still licenced version and clones available today. Or if you still have Flash installed on your computer, you can play it for free here.

Image credits:
John Cooper via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
James Brooks via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Pac-Man (1980)

Introduced in Japan, May 1980

The Golden Age of Arcade games is in full swing by May 1980, and it sees the launch of a gaming icon – Pac-Man. Developed in Japan by Namco, it followed on from their successful Galaxian shoot-‘em-up, but Pac-Man was a completely different type of game.

As with Galaxian, Pac-Man was powered by a Z80 processor, it had colour graphics with sprites and a dedicated graphics co-processor and a three-channel sound chip. Utilising and impressive array of technology from the era, the capable hardware platform allowed for a much richer gaming experience than earlier generations.

The game itself – first called Pakkuman and then Puck Man before becoming Pac-Man - is familiar to most, but in case it somehow passed you by, the player controls the Pac-Man (essentially a circle with a chomping mouse) who is chased around a maze by four ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde). Pac-Man’s job is to eat all the dots in the maze, if caught by a ghost he loses a life… but various power pills around the maze allow Pac-Man to eat the ghosts instead. The ghosts have different personalities and between them try to chase and trap Pac-Man.

With appealing graphics and sound, Pac-Man was a fun game to play – and it was also something different from the alien invasion or war games that dominated arcades. A slow burn at first, when Pac-Man hit the US in late 1980 it became a smash hit and the most popular game around, shipping 100,000 cabinets by 1981.

After arcade success came conversions to home computers and consoles, official and unofficial and of varying quality, and then there were endless sequels (notably Midway’s Ms. Pac Man), board games, TV shows, toys and other things you could spend your cash on. The franchise raked in billions of dollars and created an iconic character recognised throughout the world. Although there are many different ways to play Pac-Man today, if you want an original cabinet in good condition then you can expect to pay several thousand pounds.

Image credits:
Peter Handke via Flickr - CC0 1.0
Marcin Wichary via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

DAI Personal Computer (1980)

Later model Indata DAI Personal Computer

Introduced 1980

The early microcomputer market is full of hits and misses. Sometimes products fail due to no fault of their own, sometimes they have flaws which are their undoing, and sometimes it is just bad luck. The DAI Personal Computer combines all of these and perhaps if the dice had fallen differently it could have been one of the successes of the early 1980s.

DAI stood for “Data Applications International”, and during the 1970s this Belgian company had developed computers and expansion cards based on their own standard called DCEbus, related to the then-popular Eurocard standard. The story goes that Texas Instruments (TI) in Europe approached DAI to make a computer that they could sell, as TI’s corporate bosses were only looking to sell the upcoming TI99/4 in the US as it was going to be compatible with North American NTSC TVs rather than European PAL ones. DAI designed a system to show TI with a physical design based on TI’s own Silent 700 data terminal.

TI changed their mind, and decided to make a PAL version of the TI99/4 after all… so they didn’t need the system that they had paid DAI to design and they were free to market it themselves. Despite having a bumpy start, the DAI computer looked promising… but the whole history of the computer itself was going to be a whole series of bumps.

In the Netherlands, educational broadcaster Teleac was looking for a computer system to accompany an upcoming series about microcomputers (launched some years before the BBC did the same). They were interested in the DAI, and this looked like a promising tie-up that would give the upcoming product a boost. But production problems in the Belgian factory plus difficulties in sourcing the ROMs from the US meant that the DAI was never going to be ready in time, and Teleac chose to go with the Exidy Sorcerer instead.

Despite these setbacks, the DAI finally launched in 1980, and (if you noticed it at all) it was a quite different machine from most of the competition, in good and bad ways. Inside was an Intel 8080 processor rather than the more common Z80 or 6502 CPUs. The 8080 came out in 1974 and it was pretty basic by the standards of 1980, it wasn’t particularly fast and it struggled with handling precise floating point numbers, although you could add a maths co-processor. Inside was 48KB of RAM, of which up to 32KB could be used up by graphics. Some clever trickery with an adjustable on-screen palette meant that the DAI could display far more colours than you would expect.

Sound was built in (with three stereo channels plus a noise generator) and there were a whole bunch of I/O ports including DAI’s own DCE bus which meant that you could expand the hardware with number of peripherals, including floppy disks and hard disk drives. Perhaps partly to make up for the pedestrian processor, BASIC on the DAI was compiled at run time rather than interpreted which made programs run very quickly.

There were problems – there wasn’t much software, documentation was poor, after-sales service was abysmal and the system was very expensive. Financial troubles plagued both the manufacturer and distributors, and in 1982 DAI (the company) went bankrupt, with production being taken over by another company called Indata. Production carried on until 1984 when the DAI fell victim to the great microcomputer market cash of the early 1980s.

Despite all this, the DAI had a strong hobbyist following which helped to develop software, write documentation and keep the systems running. Overall the DAI was ahead of its time in many aspects, and perhaps with a bit more luck it might have been a success. Today, the DAI Personal Computer is a rare find and in good condition could cost you €1000 or so.

Image credit: Thomas Conté via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 2.0

Acorn Atom (1980)

Acorn Atom

Introduced 1980

The late 1970s saw the introduction of the first microcomputers that you could just take out of the box and use and home or at work, and eventually this would lead to an explosion in the numbers of home computers available in the first half of the 1980s.

Somewhere in between these two points was the Acorn Atom – not one of the original micros that changes the world, and not one of the later ones that sold (for a while) like hot cakes. However – like almost all Acorn computers – the Atom is part of a vitally important heritage that had profound effects on the way we interact with technology today.

Acorn’s first successful commercial product had been the Acorn System 1 launched the previous year. Little more than a board computer with a keypad and some interfaces, the System 1 was incredibly basic but had potential.

The System 1 developed into the Systems 2 to 5, rack-mounted systems that were not dissimilar to the pioneering RM 380Z which had achieved some success in education and scientific markets. These Eurocard systems had evolved quickly into capable systems, but despite this the rackmount form factor was never going to work in the home.

Back: Atom, BBC Master Compact, Electron, BBC Micro
Front: BBC Master

Acorn took most of the key components of the Acorn System 3 and stuffed them into an all-in-one unit that was based on the Acorn System keyboard. Featuring a 1MHz 6502 processor, 2Kb of RAM (upgradable to 12Kb), a fast built-in BASIC plus a variety of colour graphics modes and sound the Atom was certainly competitive with other systems on the market.

The standard storage was a cassette drive, but you could add floppy disks, printers or other peripherals. Unfortunately a fully-loaded Atom would tend to overheat, a challenge that could often be fixed by the not-at-all-dangerous act of rewiring the mains power supply.

You could buy the Atom for £170 assembled or for £120 as a kit, more expensive than the rival Sinclair ZX80 but much more sophisticated. It was a relative success, selling in tens of thousands of units and setting Acorn up well enough financially to make several follow-ups.

So why is it so important? Well, the Acorn Atom developed into the very successful BBC Micro which was followed up by the Acorn Archimedes and that gave us the ARM processor which is probably what powers your smartphone. It took just 8 years for Acorn to evolve from single board computers to an architecture that would change the world.

Probably partly because they didn’t sell in huge numbers and those that did would mostly be in the UK, the Atom is an uncommon find today. Be prepared to pay several hundred pounds if you want one in a good condition, or even more if it has accessories. Or alternatively you could just tinker with an emulator for free...

Image credits: Simon Inns via Flickr [1] [2] - CC BY 2.0

Nintendo Game & Watch (1980)

Nintendo Game & Watch - original "Ball" game

Launched April 1980

Legend has it that one day Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi was observing a Japanese worker playing with a pocket calculator when he suddenly had an idea to take the basic components of a calculator and turn them into a handheld game.

It wasn’t an entirely new idea. Mattel’s rudimentary Auto Race game in 1976 was arguably the first, with the Coleco Electronic Quarterback machine of 1978 also proved popular. Both of those games were bulky and used simple LED displays, however technology had moved on and by the end of the 1970s inexpensive LCD displays were appearing all over the place – including in a range of low-cost and very portable pocket calculators. There were even pocket calculator game books which – with some effort – could make these little gadgets more entertaining.

Yokoi’s design took the LCD display, but instead of having it display numbers it could display a series of predefined graphics instead. Inside was a 4-bit Sharp calculator battery, and power was provided by button cells which kept the size and weight down. This was launched as the Nintendo Game & Watch (as it also included a clock).

The first game was simply called “Ball” and it was a simple enough game where you had to throw and catch a ball, but many more followed. Each game required its own hardware, typically with “A” and “B” variants with different gameplay. At first the games had a single screen and simple control buttons, but dual screen ones followed and in 1982 a handheld version of Donkey Kong also introduced the now ubiquitous D-pad controller. Screens also got bigger and layer ones had coloured sections printed onto the display to give a bit more visual interest.

Rare Super Mario Bros Game & Watch

Dozens of different versions came to market over the next decade or so with games titles many of which featured the Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong, plus a whole lot of Disney characters and ports of arcade games. Nintendo placed a lot of emphasis on gameplay because of the strictly limited hardware, which had the effect of making the games both addictive and relatively inexpensive.

Millions of Game & Watch devices were sold, but in the end technology had moved on. Yokoi had also designed the Nintendo Game Boy, using lessons learned from the Game & Watch but in a much more flexible package where new games could be loaded on with a cartridge.

In fact Gunpei Yokoi had been a prolific designer of products for Nintendo, starting with successful toys such as the Ultra Hand in the 1960s. Not all the products were successful, but his design philosophy of (roughly translated) “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” is still an important part of the way Nintendo designs products – in other words, using existing and inexpensive technologies in innovative ways rather than pursuing the highest technology available. Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996 to form his own company, but he was killed in a car accident in October 1997. However, his influential legacy lives on.

Today Game & Watch devices are very collectable, with rare items such as the yellow Super Mario Bros (YM-901) selling for thousands of pounds, with more common or later ones such as Donkey Kong 3 selling for less than £100.

Image credits:
masatsu via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Sturmjäger via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

Sharp PC-1210 (1980)

Introduced 1980

These days most of us carry around a powerful little computer with us all the time, but where did it all start? To go back to the beginning of pocket computing we have to travel back 40 years to find the Sharp PC-1210.

Sharp had been making LCD calculators since the early 1970s and by the end of the decade they were competing successfully in the nascent microcomputer market. Back in those days one of the main uses of a micro was BASIC programming, and the Sharp PC-1210 was certainly capable of doing that. Well, to an extent.

Sharp PC-1210

Powered by twin 4-bit CPUs with a quite usable QWERTY and numeric keyboard, the PC-1210 also had a 24 character dot matrix display. You could also buy an optional interface for a cassette or printer, making this potentially a very versatile little thing.

Perhaps the biggest problem was memory – just 896 bytes of RAM in the original model, although carefully managed to make it usable. Later versions (the PC-1211 and PC-1212) increased this to 1920 byes which was a lot more useful.

The PC-1210 and its successors were a niche success, and over the years the range was improved and diversified into products aimed at engineers, mathematicians and scientists on one hand and people who wanted a personal organiser on the other. Somewhere in the 1990s these personal organisers fizzled out to be replaced by PDAs and then smartphones.

Today the Sharp PC-1210 series is a pretty uncommon find, and many seem to have faulty screens. However later models are available too, and prices vary from a few tens of pounds to several hundred depending on conditions and accessories. Alas, Sharp are not in the computer business anymore and have struggled to make a profit in recent years. In 2016 they were effectively taken over by Taiwanese giant Foxconn – and surprisingly both companies have recently branched out into coronavirus masks in addition to electronics.

Image credit: Armin.maas sb via Wikimedia Commons