Grundy NewBrain (1982)

Launched July 1982

Largely forgotten today and not even very well remembered at the time, the Grundy NewBrain is one of those microcomputers that could have been a contender in the early 1980s personal computer market.

A compact Z80-based machine, the NewBrain featured exceptionally accurate floating point numbers and very high resolution monochrome graphics, which made it attractive to scientists and engineers. It could output to a monitor and TV, and interestingly most models sold had a 16 character display built into the case itself. Internal memory was split between 32KB of ROM and 32KB of RAM, a typical configuration. Additional paged memory could be added in 64KB blocks, theoretically giving a maximum of 2 megabytes. Expansion options included printers, disk drives and pretty much everything you’d expect for a microcomputer of this era. A portable version was also produced, utilising the inbuilt display plus a battery. The compact size of the NewBrain was due in part to a complex multi-layered motherboard that you tinkered with at your peril.

Grundy NewBrain

The hardware is pretty interesting, but the story of the development and eventual demise of the NewBrain is a slice of 1980s technology drama. Originally, the NewBrain was a project at Sinclair Radionics who were looking for a low-cost competitor to the Apple II. However, Sinclair Radionics were looking at a sub-£100 machine and the NewBrain was never going to be that cheap to build. Instead of going forward with the NewBrain, Clive Sinclair instead developed the ZX80 under his other company, Science of Cambridge.

Sinclair Radionics found itself in financial difficulties. This original Sinclair company had developed small radio sets and pocket calculators, but the money ran out and Radionics was rescued by the National Enterprise Board (NEB) who transferred the NewBrain to another NEB-owned company, Newbury Labs.

About this same time, the BBC was starting work on its computer literacy project, which would involve partnering with a manufacturer to create the BBC Microcomputer. The BBC was steered in the direction of the NEB-owned NewBrain which certainly ticked most of the boxes. It should have been a done deal, but when the BBC came calling the NewBrain wasn’t ready… and rival manufacturers had gotten wind of the BBC Micro and had insisted that they be allowed to tender. In the end, Acorn won the tender and their version of the BBC Microcomputer was born.

Grundy NewBrains with and without integrated displays

So, the NewBrain missed out on being both a Sinclair machine and a BBC Micro. In the end it ended up with a rather obscure company called Grundy Business Systems, who Newbury Labs sold the design to. It wasn’t an immediate market success, but it looked promising. So promising in fact that Grundy built a lot of them… but the hoped-for sales didn’t appear and by 1983 Grundy was in serious trouble. Essentially by 1983 it was all over, most remaining stocks were liquidated and the NewBrain ended up as a casualty of the early 1980s microcomputer crash.

Although it was a limited success in the UK, it was rather more successful in the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece and – for some reason – Angola. Had it been ready when the BBC were interested then it might have been the first of a series of machines, but in the end the NewBrain’s potential was never realised.

Today these are highly collectible machines, with working systems often commanding prices of £1000 or more. Alternatively, if you are a former NewBrain owner and want to rekindle old memories, then an emulator is available.

Image credits:
Rama & Musée Bolo via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 2.0 FR
Marcin Wichary via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

IBM Selectric (1961) and IBM Datamaster (1981)

Introduced July 1961 and July 1981

Remember typewriters? You know, the obsolete technology that existed before the obsolete technology called word processors? Somewhere after people wrote stuff down by hand? No? Oh well, the IBM Selectric probably isn’t for you.

By 1961, typewriters were clunky, slow and inflexible… but businesses everywhere relied on them. IBM had a different vision of what a typewriter could be, and the Selectric was much more feature rich than most of the machines on the market at the time.

Early IBM Selectric Typewriter

One obvious different was the print head – instead of having an individual arm with each letter laid out in a complex mechanical arrangement, the Selectric had a “golf ball” print head which would rotate to find the letter you wanted. On the Selectric, the head moved from left to right rather than the paper moving from right to left. Crucially, if the operator wanted to change the font they would just stop typing and swap in a different print head.

A quite complex electromechanical arrangement made all this work, and to get the best out of the Selectric required either experience or training. But it was faster, more reliable and more flexible than traditional devices and IBM took a large share of the business market.

New versions with more features followed, although the Selectric units were incompatible with each other. Some had correcting ribbons, wordprocessing features and even local storage. Variants of the Selectric could be used as computer printers. By the time the brand was retired in 1986, IBM had sold more than 13 million Selectric devices.

20 years further on, IBM found itself on the cusp of a larger revolution. Business computers had been getting smaller, more powerful and – crucially – cheaper, which was becoming a possible threat for IBM’s large computer business.

IBM wanted its own microcomputer and had started working on creating a unit based on an Intel processor, which was a major design break for IBM who had previously used their own PALM CPUs in their machines. The results of this unconventional effort by IBM is probably not the computer that first springs to mind – the IBM PC – but instead the IBM System/23 Datamaster.

IBM Datamaster

The Datamaster used many of the same or similar elements that would be seen in the PC, including the Intel CPU, expansion bus and keyboard. Instead of the PC’s now-familiar modular design, the Datamaster was an all-in-one box (not dissimilar to the original Mac) designed to be set up by people with no technical experience. It was also IBM’s cheapest computer to date.

Unfortunately for the Datamaster, it had been stuck in development hell and took a very long time to come to market. As it was being readied for launch, the team behind it were also finalising the IBM PC which was launched the very next month. The PC had learned many lessons from the Datamaster, keeping what was good and throwing out what wasn’t. The PC changed the world, the Datamaster found modest sales in die-hard IBM shops.

The Selectric was arguably the ultimate electric typewriter, and while the Datamaster wasn’t the ultimate microcomputer it paved the way for what arguably evolved into one. Both devices are quite collectable, although the Datamaster is much rarer than the Selectric. Out of the two, the Selectric might still be of more practical use... and your children may well never have seen anything quite like a typewriter before.

Image credits:
Marcin Wichary via Flickr – CC BY 2.0
Steve Lodefink via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Donkey Kong (1981)

Introduced July 1981

Donkey Kong was the arcade game that established Nintendo as a success in the North American market – introducing two of their most iconic characters in the process. But unlike many other games from the golden age of arcades, the development story for Donkey Kong begins in failure.

Donkey Kong detail

In 1980, Nintendo had attempted to break into the US with a game called Radar Scope which was a 3D space shoot-‘em-up with some advanced graphics for the time. 3000 machines were built and shipped to the States, but sales were poor and 2000 of the cabinets were unsold, prompting a financial crisis for Nintendo.

Donkey Kong was developed initially as a way to reuse the existing cabinets. Instead of a space-based game, this was a platform game where an Italian plumber attempts to climb to the top of the level while being bombarded by barrels thrown down by a primate.

The names of these characters? If you hadn’t guessed, they were Mario and Donkey Kong. Unusually for a game of the time, the characters came first and the game followed after. This process eventually meant that Nintendo had a cast of digital stars they could put into their own games which helped them grow in popularity even more.

Nintendo reworked the logic board from the original Radar Scope game, Donkey Kong had simpler hardware requirement than the shoot-‘em-up, it still possessed colourful graphics, sound effects and music all powered by a Z80 CPU. It wasn’t hard to port it to the booming microcomputer marketplace, and licensed and unlicensed clones were soon everywhere.

Donkey Kong arcade machine

As well as direct sequels (many of which were based on the same hardware) a whole range of Nintendo games built on the characters and added many more. Mario in particular went on to star in what is probably the most successful video game franchise ever including Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart and many others. Donkey Kong starred in Donkey Kong Country and many other games, often crossing over with Mario.

It’s quite possible that if Nintendo hadn’t been sitting on a couple of thousand Radar Scope machines that such a novel concept might not have been risked. As it was, the descendants of the original Donkey Kong game gave Nintendo a unique edge in the future… which turned out to be not just shoot-‘em-ups after all.

Image credits:
Wordshore via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Microsiervos via Flickr – CC BY 2.0

Ericsson T68 (2001)

Introduced July 2001

By the middle of 2001 the golden age of mobile phone design was beginning. New features were added to phones rapidly, and every handset managed to look very different from rivals. The next few years would see a wave of innovation – but for Ericsson, 2001 was also its swansong as a mobile phone brand.

Ericsson had produced a range of successful (and mostly very compact) phones but was losing money on the operation in a big way. Despite this, Ericsson continued to launch great new products and the Ericsson T68m (usually referred to as just the “T68”) was one of them. A diminutive 84 gram device, it packed in more features than rivals to create a very desirable handset.

This Ericsson T68m has seen better days

One of the main selling points was Bluetooth – one of the first phones to feature this technology. It also had a colour screen, tri-band GSM, GPRS packet data, a WAP browser, predictive text, a bitmap editor and a bunch of included games. A camera – the MCA-25 CommuniCam – was available as a clip-on extra, again making it one of the first phones to feature that particular technology.

Not long after the launch of the T68, Ericsson merged their mobile phone business with Sony to create Sony Ericsson. The T68 received a slight cosmetic makeover and had a software update to become the Sony Ericsson T68i, the first phone to carry that branding. Eventually the camera add-on became a standard accessory, helping to popularise the idea of cameraphones.

Sony Ericsson T68i with Communicam

When it eventually arrived, the replacement for the T68 was the stylish T610 and there was a successful run of handsets after that. Today, used prices for the T68i and T68m are pretty healthy with really good ones selling for £100 or more, although sub-£50 is more common. The Communicam camera add-on is available as new old stock from £50 or more, all pretty healthy for a 20 year old feature phone..

Image credits:
The Norwegian Telecom Musuem via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Science Museum Group - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Renault 4 (1961)

Introduced July 1961

One of world’s most successful single models of car, the Renault 4 sold over eight million units in 33 years of production. It was an enduring success, utilising several technologies which were novel in the 1960s but commonplace in later years.

Although the Renault 4 is shaped like a small station wagon or estate car, it was actually the world’s first mass-produced hatchback. It was also front-wheel drive, at a time when almost everything else on the road was rear wheel drive. Indeed, the engine was in the front as well when rear-engined cars were still a thing.

Renault 4

The design was modern by early 1960s standards, and the target market was people who up until then had been buying the Citroën 2CV. Despite the rival 2CV having been introduced in 1948, it was still a strong seller due to its practicality and simplicity. However, the Renault 4 offered more power, more comfort and lower maintenance costs.

Unlike modern cars, the Renault 4 is built on an independent chassis with the body being placed on top. The chassis provided all the structural strength, allowing more windows and thinner pillars in the car itself giving better visibility. A range of engines were available – the smallest was in the Renault 3 (fundamentally the same car as the Renault 4), giving 22 horsepower. The Renault 4 had up to 32 horsepower. The rival 2CV thrashed around on just 12 horsepower at the time.

It was a practical car, and comfortable too. Although it maybe lacked the charm of the 2CV, it went on to be a massive sales success worldwide. Licence-built versions of the Renault 4 were made in such diverse countries as Argentina, Ireland, Morocco, Australia, Mexico and Yugoslavia. There was a popular van ("fourgonnette") version, plus a pickup and dozens of quirky custom versions made by converters and enthusiasts.

Renault 4 fourgonnette

After the Renault 4’s launch came a host of other front-wheel drive hatchbacks, both from Renault and other manufacturers. The 4 lingered on though, with French production going on until 1992 (and until 1994 in Slovenia). Eventually it was replaced with the first-generation Twingo which successfully built upon the 4’s design philosophy – becoming a modern classic in its own right.

Today the Renault 4 is a rare sight on British roads – much rarer than the rival 2CV – with prices starting at just a few thousand pounds for a slice of Gallic charm. 

Image credits:
Spline Splinson via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0
Gzzz via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0

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

Sony Ericsson P910 (2004)

Sony Ericsson P910

Announced July 2004

Fifteen years ago, if you wanted a smartphone your choice was either Windows or Symbian. And if you wanted the latter, then the best smartphones were probably made by Sony Ericsson.

The Sony Ericsson P910 was the third generation of the P-series of Symbian touchscreen devices. Running the UIQ platform, these smartphones came with a touchscreen while it was still quite rare. Back in those days, Nokia was still very much in non-touchscreen territory.

The 2.9” 208 x 320 pixel screen was not the only notable feature of the P910 – the other was the unique flip-out keypad which had a tiny QWERTY keyboard on one side and a standard number pad on the other. When closed, the pad covered part of the screen and the P910’s software would adapt to the screen size as needed. In addition to the keys, the P910 could be used with a stylus or finger and there was a jog control too.

Connectivity was a bit limited, with GPRS data only – so no 3G, WiFi or even EDGE. Internal memory was expandable with Sony’s Memory Stuck Duo Pro cards. There was a basic camera on the back. The main feature was the operating environment which included a web browser, support for various email clients plus of course any compatible applications that you wanted to download onto the phone.

The P910 was moderately successful, but back then smartphones were still a niche market so it was pretty rare to see one. However, it helped to create a template for the smartphone revolution that happened a few years later.

Sony Ericsson did produce a number of other UIQ phones after the P910, but ultimately it was a dead end. Today you can pick up a decent network-locked P910 for around £35 or so, but unlocked examples and ones with accessories can cost much more.

Image credit: Sony Ericsson

Samsung S9110 (2009)

Samsung S9110

Introduced July 2009

The Samsung S9110 looks like a smartwatch, but instead it came several years before what we’d think of as a modern smartwatch, and it instead a complete feature phone shrunk down to the size of a wearable.

The most obvious feature of the phone itself was a 1.76” 176 x220 pixel touchscreen mounted on the front, the S9110 also supported Bluetooth, had an MP3 player and voice recognition and even a web browser. Internal memory was just 40MB and wasn’t expandable, and the S9110 took an old-fashioned mini-SIM car which must have taken up a fair amount of its internal space. A 630 mAh battery was quoted as giving 300 hours of use and the whole thing weighed 91 grams.

It was all very clever and this sophisticated gadget was a bit like something out of a James Bond movie. But it was also pretty useless… and it didn’t really need to be a phone at all, it might well have been better as a Bluetooth add-on to a more normal phone instead. As you might have guessed, the S9110 wasn’t a big seller and neither were the rival devices launched at the same time.

Ultimately the watch phone was a failure, and the modern smartwatch has fared little better.
It did have its fans though, and in those pre-smartwatch days it was one of the best ways of fulfilling that particular gadget need, with second hand ones selling for hundreds of pounds. Today you’d be lucky to find one at any price.

Image credit: Samsung

Multics (1969)

Artists rendition of early MIT Multics system

Launched July 1969

These days the computer you possibly interact with most often is your smartphone, and that is most likely to be an Android or iOS device. Both those operating systems are related, descended from the Unix operating system developed during the early 1970s.

Unix-like operating systems are not just found on smartphones – they are everywhere from web servers and huge mainframes to embedded devices and smart TVs. Over the decades it has been around, the influence of Unix is almost universal with only Microsoft’s Windows operating system offering any competition at all.

But what came before Unix? Just as your ARM-powered smartphone is spiritually descended from the 8-bit BBC Micro, Unix itself was borne out of another project: Multics.

Originally a project between General Electric (GE), Bell Labs and MIT. GE sold its computing business early on to Honeywell and Bell Labs dropped out. After five years of development, Honeywell released the first version of Multics to general users running on Honeywell 6000 series mainframes – with the Multics versions later named the DPS-8.

Multics was arguably the world’s first modern operating system, a highly-secure multi-tasking and multi-processor system it was also fault tolerant and the hardware could be reconfigured while the system was still in use. Multics also introduces the now-standard hierarchical file system, supported the concept of “daemons” (system processes that carry out tasks, in Windows these are called “services”). Multics also allowed every part of the system to be accessed as if it were a file, and introduced the concept of dynamic linking – Windows users would recognised these as being the ubiquitous DLLs we see today.

I kept hold of this manual for 30 years.
Just for this blog post.

It was highly advanced, secure and pretty user-friendly. But it was not really a success. Multics was limited to running on certain types of hardware - expensive hardware. A typical installation would cost several million dollars, back in the days that several million dollars was a lot of money. And in an attempt to be sophisticated, it was maybe too sophisticated.

So where does Unix fall into all this? Two engineers working for Bell Labs in the early days were Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie who didn’t like the over-sophistication of Multics but did like some of the features – notably the file system and command line. Instead of making a computer system that could run on expensive multiprocessor mainframes, they designed something that would run on cheaper single processor minicomputers. They called it Unix, a play on the word Multics… Unix was for uniprocessor computers, Multics for multiprocessor ones.

In some ways Unix was similar to Multics, but in most fundamental ways it was completely different, because Kernighan and Ritchie could see where the design decisions of Multics were leading it to be an expensive niche product. At its heart, Unix is the antithesis of Multics.

Unix grew and evolved from its roots on the DEC PDP-7 to run on a huge variety of hardware. The match the choice in hardware, a wide variety of different versions of Unix were created. Somewhere along the way the Unix-like Linux and Mach operating systems were created which in turn spawned Android and iOS. Unix wouldn’t have been Unix without the influence of Multics.

Multics itself continues in development until the mid-1980s. Not long after that, Honeywell sold its computer business off to Groupe Bull. Despite all this, Multics hung around with the last system being shut down in October 2000. 31 years of history isn’t bad for something that wasn’t really considered a success.

Today, Multics memorabilia is pretty rare and it’s unlikely anyone has a complete system in their attic. However, the OS was open sourced some years ago and as a result there are some simulators available for you to try. If you are interested in learning more about this historic operating system, the Multicians.org website is utterly comprehensive and details just about everything you would ever want to know.

Image credits: MIT, Conrad Longmore

Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979)

Introduced July 1979

These days music is something that we enjoy on the go. We take for granted the ability to listen to music wherever we are, and to listen to whatever we’re in the mood for. On the train, on foot, in the car, in bed… listening to music is often a very personal experience.

It wasn’t always this way of course, and if the old days a typical way of listening to music would be an LP record on a record player. Which was fine, at least some of the time, but you could only listen to pre-recorded records in the vicinity of the record player itself. And although portable record players did exist, they were more luggable than convenient.

The invention of the Compact Cassette in the 1960s came up with a medium that was smaller and more durable than the LP, and crucially it was something that people could record onto themselves. Cassette technology improved through the 1970s which made it a popular medium for listening to music – and even for recording your own mix tapes – but cassette decks were still fixed in place and portable cassette player were still bulky and tended to be tinny.

The executives at Sony however recognised that the Compact Cassette had more potential, and it 1979 they launched the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, a portable cassette player powered by batteries which played back on stereo headphones.

Here was a device that you could attach to your belt or put in a bag… or squeeze into your pockets if they were big enough. And although cassettes may not have had the music quality that records had, the stereo headphones were a revelation to many users. Instead of listening to music, the Walkman put the music straight into your head.

It was an enormous success. Sales far exceeded expectations, and production of cassette-based Walkmans continued well into the 21st Century. Part of the appeal was down to the inherent “Japanese-ness” of the technology, but part was also down to opening up new ways of listening to music that weren’t available before.

Of course, eventually other ways of playing music became more popular. You can digitise thousands of songs and store them on your smartphone, or you can stream them with a service such as Spotify. You’d think that cassettes would be extinct, but in recent years they’ve enjoyed something of a renaissance, and a significant role for the original Walkman TPS-L2 in The Guardians of the Galaxy boosted the retro appeal further.

Today the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 is highly collectable with prices for units in good condition being in excess of £400. If you want something less iconic but a bit more high-tech, £20 or so can buy you a portable cassette player that can even convert your tapes to MP3.

Image credit: Yoshikazu TAKADA via Flickr

Samsung i8510 INNOV8 (2008)

Samsung i8510 INNOV8

Launched July 2008

Ten years ago – despite the iPhone being in its second generation – the most popular type of smartphone was Symbian running on a traditional “candy bar” device, much like the Nokia N95. And of course it’s Nokia that most people would immediately associate with this type of handset, but they weren’t the only players in this particular game.

Launched ten years ago this month, the Samsung i8510 (marketed under the name INNOV8) was very much a smartphone in the Nokia tradition... except of course this was not a Nokia. It was something better.

If you were a fan of the Nokia N95 and N95 8GB (and there were many of those) then you might have thought that the replacement N96 had taken a bit of a wrong turn with its emphasis on the integrated DVB-H TV receiver. The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 sat in the same segment, but instead of a TV receiver it packed in a class-leading 8 megapixel camera instead (giving the phone the “8” in “INNOV8”). It packed WiFi, GPS and 3.5G support along with an FM radio and expandable memory, plus a front-facing video calling camera.

Giving the high-end Nokia N-Series phones a run for their money, the i8510 INNOV8 was a well-built and elegant device which certainly attracted its fans. But even though Samsung could prove that they could out-Nokia Nokia, the fact remained that most Symbian fans would simply prefer a Nokia instead. It wasn’t quite the success that Samsung were looking for, and it turned out to be Samsung’s penultimate Symbian smartphone with the Omnia HD in 2009.

For collectors of esoteric Symbian devices, the i8510 isn’t very common today but typical prices seem to be £40 or so.

Nokia Lumia 1020 (2013)

Nokia Lumia 1020. Check out those megapixels.

Introduced July 2013

Let’s say that you are one of the world’s most famous brands, and you make a smartphone which easily has the best camera that any smartphone in the world has ever had, and then you add all the modern features that all the rivals have on top of it. Sounds like a recipe for success, yes? Well, in the case of the Nokia Lumia 1020… it wasn’t.

The headline feature of the Lumia 1020 was definitely the camera. Featuring a stonking 41 megapixels combined with optical image stabilisation (OIS) and a large sensor, this smartphone’s camera completely stomped on its rivals.

This remarkable “PureView” camera had first been seen in the Nokia 808 – Nokia’s very last Symbian smartphone – a bit over a year earlier. The clever folk at Nokia had tweaked it a bit in the meantime, and crucially had added OIS to make pictures even sharper. By default, the 1020 actually took 5 megapixel cameras that were vivid and sharp by using oversampling, but you could also use a Pro Camera app that could save both a 5 megapixel picture and one up to 38 megapixels at the same time. If you wanted to edit the photo and zoom into some detail later, then the higher resolution was probably for you. The Lumia 1020 could also effectively emulate an optical zoom by providing 4X near-lossless zoom with the huge megapixel count.

The rest of the hardware was no slouch either – a 4.5” 768 x 1280 pixel display, 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of internal storage, NFC, 4G support and even an FM radio plus all the things that every other smartphone had. The camera could also take 1080p HD video and there was a 1.2 megapixel selfie camera on the front too. It was a bit of a big beast and it certainly wasn’t cheap, but what was there not to like?

The catch was… this was a Windows phone. Nokia had been punting Windows devices for a year and a half, and despite being critically acclaimed it turned out that consumers weren’t really that interested. The Windows 8 OS shipped with the Lumia 1020 was elegant and complemented the hardware precisely, but it simply did have whatever it needed to have to steal customers from Android and iOS. The seamless support for Office 365 did appeal to corporate customers though, and quite a few did start to migrate from BlackBerry to Windows. But it wasn’t enough.

Nokia did start on the path to produce a successor – the Lumia 1030. But by then Microsoft were in charge and they tried to drive Windows Phone sales by pursuing the value end of the market instead. Although 2015’s Lumia 950 did revisit the PureView camera with a decent enough 20 megapixel unit, Windows Phone was largely irrelevant by that point.

Today an unlocked Lumia 1020 in good condition can cost you less than £40, where the earlier Nokia 808 will cost you several times more. Today, Android devices such as the Huawei P20 Pro come close in terms of camera specifications, but no mainstream camera phone to date has topped the Lumia 1020’s 41 megapixel camera.

Image credit: Nokia

Nokia Lumia 1020: Video

Check out some more shots of this epic cameraphone in the video we made to cover its launch five years ago.

OpenMoko Neo1973 (2007)

OpenMoko Neo1973

Launched July 2007

We’ve mentioned this many times before, but 10 years ago saw the launch of one of the most successful consumer products of all time, the Apple iPhone. An elegant device, the iPhone is really an appliance that locks customers in to the Apple ecosystem with strict limits on what they can do with the device. But what if there was another way? OpenMoko certainly seemed to think so with an approach where everything was “open” instead of “closed”.

Launched ten years ago this month, the OpenMoko Neo1973 was designed purely on open source software that users could theoretically do anything with. Even the hardware was designed to be hackable, and a knowledgeable user could do virtually anything with what was in effect a tiny open source computer. For people who wanted to tinker with the OpenMoko kernel or do other advanced tasks, a debug board would become available too.

The phone itself seems a bit primitive by today’s standards. A 2G-only device lacking even WiFi, it had a small (but very sharp) 2.8” VGA resolution screen, GPS, Bluetooth and a microSD slot which could take SDIO peripherals. The Neo1973 by default ran a version of Linux called OpenMoko Linux… but of course there was nothing to stop you adapting another OS for the platform and many people did.

A chunky design with a hole in the bottom for a lanyard, the design was unusual even for its time. The 1973 in the name referred back to the world’s first mobile phone, the 1973 Motorola Dynatac. The “Neo” indicated a hopeful new chapter in the world of mobile telephony.

It didn’t quite work out the way OpenMoko expected, and the Neo1973 was a bit of a niche item with a small but highly enthusiastic group of users getting involved. 2008 saw the launch of the OpenMoko FreeRunner which added WiFi and some other hardware enhancements. Development fizzled out in 2010, but a firm with the fruity name of Golden Delicious Computers went on to make the BeagleBoard based GTA04 after that. The ongoing Neo900 project also takes on board some of the OpenMoko ideas.

Although it only ever remained a device used by enthusiasts, in retrospect it can be seen as a precursor to devices such as the Raspberry Pi (launched in 2012). That device was more of a return to the bare-bones boards of the 1970s, and crucially it was cheaper and easier to work with than the OpenMoko designs.

OpenMoko handsets today are very rare but don’t seem to be expensive when they come up. Although the OpenMoko project is no longer active, there’s still a wealth of information about them on their Wiki.

Zilog Z80 (1976)

Launched July 1976

During the late 1970s and early 1980s the majority of home microcomputers ran on one of two processors: the MOS Technologies 6502 or the Zilog Z80 which was officially launched forty years ago this month.

A relatively sophisticated 8-bit processor, the Z80 found its way into a variety of computer systems such as the Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 and Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and PCW range, Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 plus a variety of less-known systems. In business it found its way into a very wide variety of CP/M systems including the Osborne 1 and Kaypro II.

It also found itself into embedded systems, calculators, musical instruments and communications systems. In some ways the versatility of the Z80 predated today's ARM cores, with Z80s popping up all over the place.

What may surprise you is that even after 40 years of production, you can still buy new Z80s (part numbers Z84C0008PEG or Z84C0010PEG) for about €3.50, in the original 40-pin configuration. Not bad going for a simple 8-bit CPU.

Image Credit: Mark Ramsey, Flickr

Apple I (1976)

Apple I at the Computer History Museum, California

Launched July 1976

Forty years ago this month, Apple introduced their first product - the Apple I (also known as the Apple-1). Billed as a "fully assembled" system, in fact it was just a bare board to which the user had to add a power supply, case, keyboard, monitor and to be of any use a cassette interface was available too.

Based on the 6502 processor launched the previous year, the Apple I was a major step-up from the KIM-1 single board computer, although it was more than twice the price at $666.66 (around $2400 in today's prices). The KIM-1 was a primitive device compared to the Apple, which had 4KB of RAM as standard (expandable to 48KB), could output 40 x 24 characters on a composite video display, and when supplied with the cassette interface it could run BASIC.

Only around 200 units were ever produced, many of which were traded in for Apple II systems introduced in 1977. Maybe 60 or so Apple I machines still exist and examples can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Each system was hand-built by Steve Wozniak in the garage of the parents of Steve Jobs.

Apple I signed by Steve Wozniak

The Apple I was on the market for a little over a year before it was replaced by the Apple II, the iconic 8-bit computer that sold around six million units. Technologically it wasn't much of a step up from the Apple I, but the II really was a fully assembled device that anyone could use rather than a hobbyist system. The Apple II continued in production for 15 years.

Although it sold in tiny numbers, the niche success certainly helped set up the Apple II and that is certainly a machine that transformed the early microcomputing scene. But if you want to see one.. go to a museum.

Image credits [1] [2] 

Lear Siegler ADM-3A (1976)

Lear Siegler ADM-3A

Announced July 1976

Once upon a time, there was a California company that produced a radically designed and rather beautiful device that transformed the way people dealt with technology. Over the years, this particular product gained a cult following that took on an almost religious fervour. You might be forgiven for thinking that this company was Apple, but it wasn’t. Instead this company was called Lear Siegler International (LSI), the year was 1976 and the product was the ADM-3A.

The ADM-3A was a dumb terminal, similar in concept to the DEC VT52 launched the previous year, and following on from the almost identical looking ADM-3 also from 1975. A simple device comprising pretty much of just a keyboard, screen and communications ports, it would plug into a contemporary computer which could range from a multi million dollar mainframe to a hobbyist microcomputer costing a few hundred dollars. The ADM-3A was much more usable than the ADM-3 though, supporting both upper and lowercase characters and having a cursor-addressable screen (like the VT52), both features the ADM-3 lacked.

Two things made the ADM-3A stand out. The first was the relatively low price of $1045.. which although equivalent to about a whopping $5500 today (much more than a top-of-the-range iMac) was actually a fair bit cheaper than the competition.

But perhaps the main thing that made it stand out was the design. Most terminals of the time were boxy affairs, but the ADM-3A curved instead. A clamshell design with a hinge in the back, the ADM-3A’s lines followed the shape of the CRT, swooping down to the base where the mainboard was installed. The curves were echoed almost everywhere, on the front, around the CRT and on the base. In fact, the only real appearance of straight lines was at the front where the keyboard was.

Lear Siegler could also produce the ADM-3A in different colours, which was a simple process of changing the plastics used in the moulding. But hang on... curves, different colours... doesn’t that sound a bit like the original Apple iMac G3? There are certainly some interesting parallels there.

The price of the ADM-3A steadily dropped, hitting just $595 in 1981 (equivalent to about $2000 today), shipping 150,000 by that point. Those were huge numbers of the time, and ADM-3As could be found hooked up to mainframes, Unix systems and even rudimentary home computers. Helping to introduce computing to the masses? That does sound a bit like another California corporation, doesn’t it?
 

Now, you might be wondering about the “Lear” name in the company. Lear Siegler was founded by the merger of two companies, one of which was Lear Avionics founded by William “Bill” Lear*. Lear later went on to build executive jets that still bear the “LearJet” name today, although he sold his interest in Lear Siegler in 1962. LSI still exists today, although simply called the Lear Corporation, and it employees 136,000 people… which is more than Apple does.

But there’s another parallel between Lear Siegler and Apple – the ADM-3A was launched at the same time as the original Apple I, Apple’s first commercial product. Coincidentally, the Zilog Z80 microprocessor was also announced in July 1976. All-in-all, it was a pretty good month for landmark technologies.

You can still buy a used ADM-3A today, although most of the available ones seem to be in the US with prices at typically $400 to $500. And in case you don’t know what you would do with one, one particular mad genius interfaced one with a Raspberry Pi. Oh yes... as for cult there was a Usenet newsgroup called alt.religion.adm3a in the 80s and 90s, presumably created for followers of the One True Terminal.

* Lear invented the first car radio for Motorola, created the 8-track tape and pioneered business jets plus a whole lot of other stuff. He was a very clever guy. Eventually the LearJet corporation ended up as part of the giant Bombardier group, but the Lear name still lives on in the Lear Corporation which has a history of the company here.

Image credits [1] [2]

Motorola FONE / MOTOFONE F3 (2006)

Motorola FONE F3

Launched July 2006

The Motorola FONE can make phone calls, it can just about send text messages.. and really that's about it. That was pretty basic even a decade ago, so what was it about the FONE that makes it a landmark device?

Launched ten years ago this month, the Motorola FONE F3 (also known as the MOTOFONE F3) was the first mass-market consumer device to feature an E-Ink display. These days this type of display is very commonly found in eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle, but the FONE beat the Kindle to market by a year.

The display had very low power requirements and could always be "on", unlike a conventional LCD display. And because an E-Ink screen works better in full sunlight, it was easily more usable outdoors than indoors. The display was also fairly cheap to manufacture (although development costs must have been phenomenal), meaning that the FONE was just about the cheapest handset you could buy.

However, the screen itself was very primitive. Unlike a Kindle that can display anything, the FONE was limited to a set of six 14 segment characters on one line to display a loose approximation of letters and numbers, plus six 8 segment characters on another line for numbers. There were a set of predefined icons which could be either on or off. Despite the lack of sophistication, this arrangement did work pretty well.

There were two versions of the FONE, an F3C for US CDMA networks and the plain F3 for the rest of the world. The FONE stayed on sale for a number of years, and is still available today for about £20 or €25 in good condition, which is pretty much what they cost new ten years ago.

As for electronic ink displays.. well, they didn't really take off on phones (apart from the esoteric Yotaphone range), but instead they are very common in eBook readers, fitness bands and as charge indicators in battery-powered devices. In particular the lack of colour and incredibly slow refresh rates limit their usefulness. So in the end, E-Ink wasn't really the breakthrough that it could have been, but it still fills a very important technological niche.

Sharp 903 (2005)

Announced July 2005

Ten years ago, Vodafone was attempting to leverage its Japanese subsidiary to come up with some exciting 3G phones to help promote their push into this new market.

To this end, the Sharp 903 was launched, replacing the year-old Sharp 902. The 903 featured a 2.4" QVGA display, a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and optical zoom, it came with miniSD expandable memory, Bluetooth, a music player with stereo sound, a barcode scanner plus OCR support, and of course it supported UMTS data with a download speed of 384KBps.. which doesn't sound like much these days, but it was six times faster than GPRS.

Sharp 903

Featuring a similar swivelling clamshell design to the 902, the 903 was a big beast and was in many ways very much better than all the competition. So why didn't this catapult Sharp into the big league?

There were several hurdles to Sharp and Vodafone's plan to break into European markets. Firstly, 3G handsets were expensive and they didn't really do much. Websites didn't render well on those little screens (and this was way before site operators made mobile versions of their sites), and the phones were big and tended to have poor battery life.

But there was another factor too.. Vodafone were looking at selling off their Japanese operations and in 2006 the unit was bought by SoftBank. This change of ownership meant that the relationship between Vodafone and its Japanese partners cooled off considerably, and although Sharp did release a few lower-end devices through Vodafone after that, they never again challenged for the high-end.

Commodore Amiga (1985)

Commodore Amiga 1000 (1985)

Launched July 2005

Launched 30 years ago this month, the Commodore Amiga was an early 32-bit computer that featured dedicated graphics and sound chipsets and is widely regarded as the first multimedia computer. It was also a highly expandable system running on an efficient operating system, and as such it was one of the key contenders in late 1980s and early 1990s home computing.

Starting off with the original Amiga 1000, the popular Amiga 500 followed on in 1987 and continued on through several models until Commodore's bankruptcy in 1996. Afterwards other Amiga models appeared from other manufacturers with different processors and upgraded operating systems, but these were strictly niche products for Amiga fans looking for an upgrade. The currently-available derivative is the AmigaONE X1000.

Easily outclassing everything else on the market, the Amiga launched at a time when the IBM PC was taking the lion's share of the market. Nonetheless, it was a successful product for its time and is fondly remembered by owners.

In a wider context, the Amiga showed the value of adding dedicated hardware for multimedia where before all processing would have to be done by the main CPU. Effectively the Amiga line was the first widely available system to feature a dedicated GPU, something that is commonplace today in smartphones and tablets.

As an aside, the Commodore name has been revived several times, and the company currently bearing the name is in the process of launching the Commodore PET smartphone, named after Commodore's influential 1970s computer line.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Motorola PEBL U6, Q8 and RAZR V3x (2005)

Announced July 2005

Ten years ago this month, Motorola was still riding the wave of success created by the iconic RAZR handset. But they were finding it a struggle to find new products to capitalize on their surge in popularity, with several devices that had been announced.. and then cancelled. However, in July 2005 we saw a trio of products being shown off that Motorola hoped would change things.

Despite its popularity and radical design, the RAZR was simply a cosmetically different addition to the V500 range that Motorola had been making since 2003. The Motorola PEBL also used the V500's underlying technology, but this time it came in an elegantly curved case that looked like a pebble. Inside the keypad was a flat affair inspired by the RAZR. Overall, the PEBL was a pretty limited device with support for 2G only, it had a little 1.8" 176 x 220 pixel screen and a 0.3 megapixel camera. The PEBL couldn't play music, but it did have Bluetooth.

The PEBL had the same shortcomings as the RAZR, so was only a modest success. The Motorola "4LTR" phones (RAZR, PEBL, ROKR) are among the more collectible Motos and are readily available for a minimum outlay.

Motorola PEBL

The Motorola RAZR V3x had a confusing launch, at various points being called the Motorola V1150 and Motorola V3x (dropping the RAZR label). Despite some cosmetic similarities to the RAZR V3, the V3x was a very much more advanced handset with 3G, a music player, expandable memory and a two megapixel camera plus video calling capabilities.

As with all 3G phones from that era, the V3x was a lot bigger and heavier than its GSM competition. The V3x was a niche success with 3G-only carriers such as the Hutchison 3 network. As with the PEBL, the V3x is readily available for not much money.

Motorola RAZR V3x

The Motorola Q (later called the Motorola Q8) attempted to take a bite out of the BlackBerry market. It was a Windows smartphone with a rather familiar looking keypad, and although not a huge success it did spawn a couple of sequels with the Q9h in 2007 and Q11 in 2008.

It's hard to remember now, but BlackBerry was becoming a seemingly unstoppable force at the time, and rivals could not compete with the quality of their push email service. After all, why buy something that wasn't as good as a BlackBerry when you could just buy a BlackBerry.

The GSM version of the Q8 is very rare today, however the CDMA version is commonly available, but won't work outside the US.

Motorola Q8