Columbia Data Products MPC 1600

Introduced June 1982

No wait. Don’t go. The MPC 1600 is a hugely important milestone in computing, just one you may not have heard of. Let me explain.

Columbia Data Products MPC 1600

August 1981 saw the launch of the IBM PC into the fast-growing microcomputer marketplace. It wasn’t the most advanced microcomputer on the market, but it did have the magic letters “IBM” on it which made it attractive to corporate buyers.

Unlike other IBM products, the PC was made largely of off-the-shelf components that anyone could buy. IBM had also documented everything in painstaking detail in order to attract third-party developers to create hardware and software for the new platform. Theoretically anyone could build a machine like the IBM PC except for one major component… the BIOS.

The BIOS is an oft-forgotten part of the PC. Lying somewhere between hardware and software in the layer known as “firmware”, the BIOS provides the most basic software functions that a PC relies on. Unlike most of the rest of the IBM PC, the BIOS was strictly proprietary. However, developers needed to understand how that BIOS worked, so IBM provided full specification of the functionality. Not enough to clone the BIOS… or so they thought.

So when Columbia Data Products (or CDP) wanted to make a machine just like the IBM PC but better value, the BIOS was an obstacle. However, IBM had published the full BIOS specifications (but not the code) to help developers, CDP took the specifications and created a clean room design of the BIOS which replicated the functionality but used none of the code.

1982 ad for the MPC 1600 with funky Lear Siegler terminals

When launched in 1982, the Columbia Data Products MPC 1600 was about half the price of the IBM, but had more memory, more built-in features and more expansion. It was a quality machine in both terms of hardware and the 100% compatilibity with the genuine IBM PC, usually measured in those days by being able to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. For people who wanted an IBM PC but didn’t want to pay IBM prices, it was an attractive deal.

CDP’s sales grew quickly and expanded their range, but the problem was that they weren’t the only players in the market. Other firms joined the fray, usually competing on price and squeezing the very thin margins the clone makers had even further. Initial success gave way to red ink, and by 1985 CDP was bankrupt. However, that wasn’t the end for CDP and subsequent rescue led to a change of emphasis, and Columbia Data Products still exists today making data backup products.

Today, the chances are that the computer you use is a PC clone. It was always likely that IBM would create a beast that it couldn’t control and that clones would take over, so even if Columbia Data hadn’t been the first it would likely be someone else. But the fact remains that they were the first…

Image credits:
Ben Franske via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
PC Magazine, November 1982

Chromebook (2011)

Introduced June 2011

Chromebooks are boring. Not as sleek as a tablet, not as powerful as a laptop. They’re for people who think a chicken korma might be a bit spicy and whose automobile of choice is an off-brand South-East Asian compact people carrier which just reliably gets them, their family and the dog from A to B with the minimum of fuss.

Based on Google’s Chrome OS - derived from the open source (but still largely Google) Chromium OS which is essentially a lightweight version of Linux – Chromebooks are inexpensive laptop-like devices designed for running web applications and a somewhat limited range of native apps, plus on many devices that ability to run applications designed for Android.

Currently most Chromebooks run on Intel-compatible processors, especially lower-end Celeron CPUs. Alternatively some variant of the ARM processor can be used, but these seem to be losing popularity. Like laptops there are a variety of configurations, mostly different screen sizes and CPUs. Internal storage is usually very limited as it is expected that most storage will be done in Google’s cloud. Similarly, there’s only limited functionality available without an internet connection.

HP Somethingorother

Bland? Well, when you consider that people shell out thousands for high-end devices such as Macbooks but only use them for web browsing, they are certainly better value for money… in the same way that most expensive four-wheel drive SUVs never go further off the road than the supermarket car park. Since most Chromebooks tend to cost a few hundred pounds, they are usually a decent value proposition.

There are irritations, one of which being that Google got rid of the CAPS LOCK key to replace it with a search button. Printing can be difficult, but anyone who has tried to print from a smartphone will know that feeling too. You can’t run heavyweight native apps either because the hardware is generally underpowered and there is minimal storage space, but Chromebooks don’t pretend to be laptops. On the plus side they are inexpensive and have a real keyboard which makes them more suitable for real work than a tablet.

One key advantage is security – Windows devices are plagued with viruses and other malware, and so are Macs and even iOS and Android devices to a lesser extent. Although Chromebooks aren’t to security flaws, for all practical purposes they are much safer than using a traditional PC. On the other hand, software updates for Chromebook models have a much shorter lifespan than (say) a Windows PC, especially in early models which led to some hardware becoming obsolete in just a few years.

Chromebooks in a school environment

Did I mention they were boring? Well, really they are... but Chrome OS has a greater market share than the Mac (if you count a Chromebook as a laptop and not a door wedge), and in markets such as education they have a much larger share still. Is the idea a success? It’s a slow burn to be sure, but it does seem that Google and its partners have managed to come up with a viable alternative to Windows, Macs and tablets. Will they be around for another ten years? Given Google's habit of dropping products I would not bet on it..

Image credits:
BUF Simrishamn via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
TechnologyGuide TestLab via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Frogger vs Centipede (1981)

Introduced June 1981

Early popular arcade games tended to be space-themed shoot-‘em-ups, which tended to appeal to male customers. However, games such as Pac-Man had a much broader audience and were especially popular with female players.

Fighting for a share of this market - and introduced roughly at the same time as each other – were Frogger (by Konami and Sega) and Atari’s Centipede. Both these games are regarded as classics of the golden age of arcade machines, but both had very different gameplay.

The origin story for Frogger is as cute as the game itself. Konami employee Akira Hashimoto was watching a frog trying to cross the road from his car, and was thinking about the difficulties the poor creature was having… which led to the inspiration for creating the game. Only the poor old frog in Frogger has an even tougher time.

Frogger machine from Seinfeld

In the game, the player starts at the bottom of the screen and tries to make it to the frogs’ homes at the top. To do this, the frog has to cross several lanes of traffic, and then cross a river on floating logs and diving turtles while avoiding alligators. There are many ways to die. Colourful graphics and a catchy soundtrack added to the appeal of the game, and it was a huge hit.

Centipede was another animal-themed game, but very different in execution. From a gameplay perspective, this was closer to a traditional shooter game, but here the adversaries were various bugs that you had to defend yourself against, primarily a long centipede which wound its way down the screen and which would split up if you shot it. Fleas, spiders and scorpions appeared with different behaviours, and the playfield was full of mushrooms which changed the course of the centipede when it hit.

Atari Centipede

Like Frogger, Centipede was a huge hit particularly with female players. Both games were widely ported – officially and unofficially – to the booming home computer and console markets. Indeed, both arcade machines shared many hardware parts with theses home machines – Frogger ran on a Zilog Z80 with the versatile AY-3-8910 sound chip and Centipede used the MOS Technology 6502 with Atari’s own POKEY sound chips which found their way into every Atari product of the time. This symmetry in hardware capabilities allowed this generation of video games to be a huge hit away from the arcades. Eventually powerful home computers and then consoles would end the golden age of arcades but by 1981 that was still some way off…

Image credits:
Arturo Pardavila III via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 2.0
Matt M via Flickr – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (1981)

Introduced June 1981

When Texas Instruments (often known as just “TI”) entered the home computer, it wasn’t a typical player. Most machines were made by startups, or companies that had specialised in calculators and electronic games. Instead, TI was a massive and long-established electronics manufacturer which could trace its origins back to the 1930s, and by 1981 it was the largest semiconductor company in the world.

Rivals such as Motorola were happy to supply all the important bits and bobs to go into these new microcomputers, but that was as far as it went. However, TI chose to leverage its considerable expertise in silicon to try to carve out a slice of the market for itself.

In 1979 TI launched the TI-99/4, based on the 16-bit Texas Instruments TMS9000 CPU. The TI-99/4 was expensive, had a horrible keyboard and was limited in expansion capabilities. Two years later, TI fixed many of these issues with the improved TI-99/4A with a massively improved keyboard, clever expansion system and – crucially – a price tag that was half that of the original. The TI-99/4A looked promising to consumers, and sales started to take off.

It was a good-looking machine, with plenty of brushed aluminium and black which was in line with the aesthetics of the time. It wasn’t cheap, but the 4A’s price ticket of $525 was at least competitive unlike the 4. The graphics and sound were amongst the best in its class, so initially at least it seemed like a compelling proposition.

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

At its heart was the TMS9000 CPU, a sophisticated beast that was essentially a 1970s Texas TI-990 minicomputer on a single chip. It should have allowed the 99/4A to be one of the most powerful microcomputers on the market, but instead it was a major source of problems. Because building a full 16-bit system would be prohibitively expensive, almost all the internal architecture is just 8-bit which negated the possible performance impact. More difficult still was the fact that the 16-bit CPU’s instruction set was twice as memory hungry as a contemporary 8-bit CPU.

To get around this, TI essentially created an 8-bit virtual machine using an intermediate language called GPL. This made coding more efficient and was a technically advanced technique, but the processing limitations of the hardware meant that all of this sophistication created a computer that was significantly slower than its 8-bit rivals, despite running with a 16-bit core.

No computer of the era was perfect though, so the TI-99/4A wasn’t disadvantaged as much as you might think. But there were other problems – and the main one was software. TI were reluctant to share information about the platform with independent developers, instead TI wanted to produce the bulk of the software and peripherals for the 99/4A themselves – and thus profit from them. In truth, the TI-99/4A was probably better than most offerings but it was much weaker than the likes of the venerable Apple II or the upstart Commodore VIC-20.

But there was trouble brewing, and it was the Commodore VIC-20 which would deliver it in a giant tankard with a single raised finger painted on the side. Commodore’s boss – the legendary Jack Tramiel – loathed TI for nearly bankrupting his business during the pocket calculator wars of the 1970s. The VIC-20 ran on the 8-bit 6502 CPU (built by Commodore subsidiary MOS Technology) which was cheap, fast and well understood by programmers. The VIC-20 wasn’t as sophisticated as the TI-99/4A, but it was about half the price… at first.

Tramiel dropped the price of the VIC-20, TI followed suit. A price war emerged with both Commodore and TI dropping the prices until both units were shipping at less than $100. TI was haemorrhaging cash at this price point, but sales were good and it thought it could make the money back on software and peripherals. It couldn’t. TI started to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in this price war, driving the whole corporation into a sea of red ink. Even cost-cutting in production couldn’t turn it around – late 99/4As swapping to a cheaper beige case rather than the snazzy aluminium-and-steel one.

Late model fully-expanded TI-99/4A

TI couldn’t sustain these losses, and in late 1983 it announced that the TI-99/4A would be discontinued. Production ended in the spring on 1984 and TI cancelled the interesting TI-99/2 and TI-99/8 systems that it was working on. Instead TI switched its efforts to 8088-based PCs running DOS, machines that were better than the IBM PC but weren’t IBM PC-compatible. In retrospect this was not a winning market strategy either. On and off TI stuck with the PC business, coming up with the TravelMate line of laptops which were quite successful, but TI sold their PC business to Acer in 1997.

Ultimately TI went back to concentrating on making the components that make the world go around apart from one consumer product – calculators. Yes, the product that so ired Jack Tramiel is still a profitable line for TI and outlasted the Company that dared to challenge it.

Image credits:
Max Mustermann via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 2.0
Leigh Anthony Dehaney via Flickr – CC BY-NC 2.0

Nokia 6111 vs Samsung E530 (2005)

Nokia 6111

Introduced June 2005

A long time ago we weren’t so bothered about the technical specifications of our phones… how they were designed – the look and feel of the things – was often more important. One common design feature was to make phones small and curvy, and the rival Nokia 6111 and Samsung E530 phones were certainly that.

The Nokia 6111 was the best known of the pair, one of a small number of slider phones from Nokia. With a diminutive size and heavily curved corners there was no doubt that the 6111 was a looker. When closed it measures 84 x 47 x 23mm and at 92 grams it was lightweight as well. On the back was a competitive 1 megapixel camera with an LED flash and rudimentary video capabilities. The 1.8” 128 x 160 pixel screen wasn’t all that great but as with all Nokias of this type it was incredibly easy to use. The was an FM radio built in plus a few games (more could be downloaded) and it supported Bluetooth too.

Although this was a GPRS-only phone, it did include a version of the capable Opera web browser.
The most popular silver and white version looked a bit “girlie” but there were darker colour combinations too which looked less so. Launched at the height of the slider phone craze in the mid-noughties, the Nokia 6111 was quite a success.

Although Samsung were the king of the slider market in 2005, for the Samsung SGH-E530 they returned to their rather more traditional clamshell market. The E530 was all about curves, from the gentle curve of the clamshell case to the gentle contours of the keypad inside.

Available in a much wider variety of colours than the 6111 – including pink, orange, white, purple, blue and silver – the E530 did lean more definitely to the “girlie” end of the market. The built-in apps reinforced this with a calorie counter, fragrance chooser, biorhythm calculator and shopping list.

Samsung E530

In hardware terms the E530 beat the 6111 in a lot of respects. Although it still had a 1.8” display the Samsung was a much sharper 176 x 220 pixels, plus there was a smaller external display too next to the camera which could be used for selfies. The 6111 had a crude LED flash where the E530 didn’t, but the E530 had better battery life.

In software terms, the Samsung wasn’t quite as polished as the Nokia but it was certainly very usable.  You could use the Samsung as an MP3 player, even though like the Nokia, the Samsung lacked expandable memory but the E530’s internal 80Mb was much more useful than the paltry 23Mb in the 6111. Both came with four games included with other Java games available for download.

If you quite fancied the technical specs of the E530 but wanted something a bit less feminine then the Samsung E720 offered almost identical features but in a different package. Offering many variations on fundamentally similar handsets is something that Samsung still do today (with more than 500 “Galaxy” devices launched to date).

The Samsung E530 had better technical specifications and a more detailed design, but it was the Nokia 6111 that sold. Today the 6111 is commonly available for about £10 to £30 but with the rarer Cath Kidston versions coming in at rather more. The Samsung E530 is much rare and tends to range in price from £50 to £100. Either phone is a refreshing change from today’s identical-looking slabby smartphones however, and whatever you might think of the gender stereotyping they are both good looking devices.

Image credits: Nokia and Samsung

Range Rover (1970)

1973 Range Rover

Introduced June 1970

The development of the Range Rover is a very long and quite interesting story which you can read about if you want. But the very short version is that the Rover Company wanted something to follow-on from their successful Land Rover utility vehicle. This search started in the 1950s and surprisingly it took nearly two decades to come up with something that they thought was good enough to bear the “Land Rover” name… and more crucially something that might sell.

The original Land Rover was strictly an off-roader. On road it was awful to drive, slow and Spartan on the inside. Attempts to convert it into a Station Wagon over the years had not met with sales success. But in the US, cars like the International Harvester Scout and the Ford Bronco showed that there was indeed a market for utility vehicles that could be used as an everyday car.

Development of the Range Rover (codenamed “Velar”) started in the mid-1960s, and it combined lessons from the Land Rover’s impressive off-road manners with Rover’s ability to make a quite luxurious and usable car, but perhaps the key added ingredient was the legendary Rover V8 engine. The Rover V8 a powerful and lightweight engine that had originally been developed and abandoned by Buick. Buick’s loss was definitely Rover’s gain and the V8 engine spent 46 year in production (ending only when Rover collapsed).

In the Range Rover, the V8 gave the car the power it needed to shift its substantial weight in a fairly speedy manner. Inside were things like (gasp) comfy seats and carpets. Peculiarly it was designed as a two-door car, although coachbuilders such as Monteverdi would sell you a four-door conversion. It took until 1981 for a factory-built four-door Range Rover to become available and in 1992 a long wheelbase version cemented the idea of it being a luxury car and was probably the best-looking of all the original Range Rover models.

Late model four-door long wheelbase Range Rover LSE

It had idiosyncrasies. The split tailgate wasn’t to everyone’s taste and it had the turning circle of a bus. But it stayed in production (as the Range Rover Classic) until 1996, two years after the launch of the P38 which replaced it and an astonishing 26 years on the market during which it was continually developed as a product.

Today the Range Rover is very much a luxury car, but one that has lost none of it’s off-road capabilities. A 1970 Range Rover could cost you a shade under £2000 (about £32,000 today) where today a base model will cost around £81,000 with typical prices being £100,000 or more. An original Range Rover Classic in fair condition can cost between £15,000 to £25,000 with really good ones nudging the price of a new one. Even though the timeless design doesn’t really look 50 years old, buying and maintaining one of these might well be a labour of love.

As a car, the Range Rover really launched the idea of a luxury SUV in Europe and fifty years later the things are all over the place, love them or loathe them. Today more than a third of new car sales in Europe are of SUVs like the Range Rover, and in the US the figure is about than half the market. The rise of car leasing also means that people don’t have to spend so much at once to get one of these huge beasts. Far from being a niche, the SUV is now becoming the mainstream choice.

Image credits:
Vauxford via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0
nakhon100 via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0

IBM PS/1 (1990)

IBM PS/1 Model 2011

Introduced June 1990

By 1990 the PC-compatible marketplace had changed a lot since the launch of the original IBM PC (model 5150) in 1981. No longer just the choice of businesses, PCs had largely replaced an eclectic range of incompatible home microcomputers that had dominated the earlier 1980s. It was increasingly common to see PCs in the home, but they weren’t generally IBM PCs despite IBM inventing the platform.

IBM had tried to break into the home computing market in 1984 with the IBM PCjr, a short-lived crippled version of the PC that was a sales catastrophe. Apparently unperturbed by this, in 1990 IBM tried to break into the same market again… and they repeated many of the same mistakes they had done years earlier.

Worse still, IBM’s attempt to redefine the business PC market with the IBM PS/2 launched a few years earlier was floundering. Instead of moving the market from DOS and the old ISA hardware architecture to OS/2 and Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) it seemed that IBM just split the market between themselves and competitors such as Compaq who were improving the old platforms instead.

In 1990 IBM tried a shift in direction with the new IBM PS/1. Rather more based on traditional PC architecture than the PS/2, it was designed for home users who wanted to be able to unpack something from the box and get working in minutes Models such as the 2011 made this really easy, and when assembled they booted into a friendly screen allowing easy access to DOS, Microsoft Works on online services if they had been included.

IBM PS/1 Model 2133

A Mac-like simplicity to the hardware had some drawbacks – it wasn’t really expandable and the non-standard power arrangement where the computer was powered by the monitor (like the Amstrad PC1512) meant that you were stuck with using the IBM PS/1 monitor for ever.

The hardware was excellent though, and it wasn’t stupidly expensive (competing with Compaq on the likes of price), but consumers were not that interested. It didn’t help that IBM had to create a completely new sales channel for the things as traditional IBM dealers didn’t sell to consumers, but in the US large-deal with Sears who bundled access to Prodigy with the computers. On early models DOS was included in ROM, which made the machines very quick to boot up.

Consumers were cool about the PS/1 though, preferring other brands where they were available. IBM was still seen as a business PC, and the incompatibilities of the PS/2 range rubbed off on the PS/1 even though it was a different hardware platform. IBM stuck with the range though, making the machines more expandable and more standard in terms of hardware and software.

The range lasted until 1994 when IBM replaced the PS/1 range with the architecturally similar but more appealing IBM Aptiva range which continued until IBM’s exit from the home PC market in 2001. Today the PS/1 is an uncommon beast but it commands decent prices of about £500 to £700 or depending on model.

Image credits:
Kungfoocow369 via Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
Science Museum, London – CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Nokia 6630 (2004)

Nokia 6630

Launched June 2004

By and large, smartphones were pretty rubbish a decade and a half ago. But the Nokia 6630 was a good deal less rubbish than most of them.

There’s no escaping the 6630’s hamster cheeks charm when you look at it, early 3G phones such as this were quite chunky compared to their 2G cousins, and the 6630 certainly shows it. The 6630 was a Symbian Series 60 smartphone as well, and having both 3G plus smartphone capabilities in one device was pretty rare.

Add to that a decent 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, expandable memory, a multimedia player web browser and a decently powerful 220 MHz ARM CPU to run applications on, the 6630 was a pretty good handset all around. Video calling was an optional extra which needed a desk cradle, but although 3G devices were sold on their video calling capabilities, hardly anyone actually used it.

The 2.1” 176 x 208 pixel display is tiny by modern standards, and the 6630 lacks GPS or WiFi which are two essential ingredients to today’s smartphones. But the Nokia 6630 was certainly getting there, and can be considered one of the predecessors of the legendary N95.

Today you can pick up a 6630 for about £30 upwards depending on condition and accessories.

Image credit: Nokia

Nokia 6260, 6170 and 2650 (2004)

Launched June 2004

Cast your mind back and think of a classic Nokia. Perhaps you are thinking of the 3210, the 6310i or the N95. Whatever you are thinking of, it’s probably one of Nokia’s signature monoblock or candy bar designs. But Nokia could also make some interesting clamshell phones, and in June 2004 they launched a trio of innovative designs.

Nokia 6260

Sitting at the top of the pile was the Nokia 6260. Not just any old clamshell phone, but a Symbian S60 smartphone to boot. This was Nokia’s first attempt to put Symbian in a clamshell, and this was certainly competitive with other similar devices with downloadable native apps, a 176 x 208 pixel display and expandable memory.

But really, that was all boring stuff… because the 6260 also came with a novel rotating display. Possibly inspired by similar devices coming out of Japan, the 6260 could be used like a traditional clamshell or have the screen twisted around to create a sort of touchscreen-less tablet. Or if you wanted you could use it in pretty much any position in between.

The clever screen is perhaps what gave the 6260 its “wow factor” rather than the powerful Symbian OS underneath. Ultimately, the sort of users who liked Symbian weren’t really drawn to clamshell designs. Nonetheless, this is a very collectable Nokia handset with typical prices being £70 or more.

Nokia 6260

Nokia 6170

Where the 6260 had hidden depths, the lower-cost Nokia 6170 didn’t. A very basic phone in terms of technical specifications, the 6170 came with a gorgeous design that made this a very desirable handset.

Not a million miles away from the 6260 in terms of understated squared-off design, the 6170 was clad in an etched stainless steel housing. Even the NOKIA name was discretely etched into the steel, and the phone looked just as good on the inside as on the outside, along with a small colour display.

The lack of Bluetooth was certainly a hindrance in what could have otherwise made a decent business phone, but overall the 6170 was quite usable despite its simplicity. Today, examples in decent condition will cost around £30 or so.

Nokia 6170

Nokia 2650

2004 was certainly in the middle of Nokia’s “weird period” when it came to design, and given that their only other foray into clamshell design was the fabric-clad 7200 you might think that Nokia would want at least one sober design. Well, instead the Nokia 2650 was the weirdest to date.

On the outside, the 2650 looked like nothing at all. A plastic case with NOKIA written on it, an exercise in utterly minimalistic design. But open the 2650 up and it revealed an amazingly retro-futuristic design of flexible plastic that looked like a cross between a prop from a Sci-fi show and a sun lounger.

A very basic (and inexpensive) phone underneath, the 2650 always polarised opinions and even fifteen years later it a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. It does however represent the sort of fresh thinking that phone designers had a decade-and-a-half ago, an approach which is sorely lacking today. Again, £30 or so will get you one in decent condition if you want one.

Nokia never really did crack the clamshell market, and of course in the long run it didn’t matter anyway. But Nokia handsets from this era are highly collectable, and these three are certainly no exception to that rule.

Nokia 2650

Image credits: Nokia

HTC Hero (2009)

Announced June 2009

By the middle of 2009, Apple was hitting its stride with the seriously good third-generation iPhone 3GS. However, the rival Android platform was still in its first generation with devices such as the Samsung I7500 Galaxy and T-Mobile G1 which didn’t quite have the same level of polish.

However, HTC was pushing things forward and their third Android smartphone was the elegant-looking HTC Hero. In technical terms, this wasn’t a million miles away from HTC’s earlier Magic handset, but it had a better camera and a much sharper design.

HTC Hero

Unlike the somewhat retro G1 and Magic, the HTC Hero looked very modern. At the bottom of the handset was a distinctive kick or chin, which bent out from the handset. Unusually, the Hero had a little trackball mounted in the kick, something that lingered in HTC devices for a while, an addition to a set of physical buttons that the iPhone lacked. This was also the first HTC with a 3.5mm jack plug for headphones.

The sharper design wasn’t just in terms of hardware. The Hero ran Android 1.5, a fledgling version of this now ubiquitous OS. Early versions of Android were rather rough around the edges, so HTC added their “Sense UI” interface on top of it to make it nicer to use. HTC were pretty good at this sort of thing, having reskinned Windows Mobile on their other smartphones for some time.

It did pretty well in terms of sales, but problems getting carriers to roll out updates to Android 2.1 left some customers annoyed and for most customers there would be no official updates beyond that. In comparison, Apple fully supported the 3GS for four years. Even a decade after the launch of the Hero, the short support lifespan of certain Android phones is an issue.

Image credit: HTC

Apple iPhone 3GS (2009)

Apple iPhone 3GS (2009)

Launched June 2009

The Apple iPhone 3GS is – possibly – the best smartphone ever at the time it was launched. A bold claim perhaps for a product line that had been around for two years, but there's a saying the third time's a charm and perhaps it applies here.

Earlier generations of the iPhone were well-received, but fundamentally flawed and displayed the lack of maturity of the product. Two years in and the 3GS finally fixed many of these faults. One of the main ones was that the 3GS was the first iPhone that could record video. Almost unbelievably, the first two generations couldn’t do these even when it was a standard feature on just about every other phone on the market. The camera on the back was improved from 2 to 3 megapixels for stills photos, which while still pretty good in terms of quality still lagged behind the competition in terms of pixel count.

The 3GS also added MMS support, a digital compass, copy-and-paste, a landscape keyboard and 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. It was also twice as fast as the iPhone 3G, which was a key selling point.

There were still a few features lacking – the 320 x 480 pixel display was beginning to look a bit dated, and there was no front-facing camera… but video calling still wasn’t really a thing a decade ago. Overall though, no excuses needed making for this generation of the iPhone, unlike the first two.

Reportedly, Apple shifted a million units in the first weekend and then around 30 million over the life of the device, far more than the previous two generations added together. The iPhone was supported by Apple until September 2013, giving over four years of software updates and setting a standard that still puts most rivals to shame.

Although it’s an important device, it’s not a particularly collectible one and unlocked models can be had for a few tens of pounds.


Image credit: Apple

Sliced bread (1928)

Lightly toasted sliced bread circa 2009

Introduced June 1928

There’s a common phrase “the best thing since sliced bread”. But have you ever considered exactly what time period that refers to? Yes? Well, wonder no more… because sliced bread is ninety years old this month. Apparently.

It’s a product you are possibly familiar with, having been around for thousands of years, presumably with a great deal of uneven sawing and cursing along the way. Having the bread pre-sliced not only made it easier, but it made bread more popular too.

All this convenience has to be a good thing, right? No downsides and all that? Well, bizarrely in 1943 the United States made sliced bread illegal.

Of course if you eat sliced and unsliced bread you might have spotted one downside with the sliced version – it dries out more quickly. Unsliced bread is protected by the dry crust, but when you slice it you expose the moister interior to the atmosphere. To protect sliced bread from drying out, it needs to be wrapped and in 1943 that meant using waxed paper.

They take this very seriously in Chillicothe, Missouri

Claude R Wickard - head of the War Food Administration – decided that the waxed paper could be better used for something else. Aircraft carriers, tanks and atom bombs perhaps. In New York, local bigwig John F Conaboy tried to clamp down on illegal sliced bread sellers even harder. You might suspect that neither Mr Wickard nor Mr Conaboy prepared much in the way of food in their households. The ban was finally lifted in March 1943, presumably after the Manhattan Project said they were more concerned about wonky sandwiches than saving waxed paper.

The city of Chillicothe, Missouri has a website dedicated to the product launched in their town, which also appears to have been created in 1928. Today both sliced and unsliced bread are commonly available in most food stores.

A few years after the ill-advised ban on sliced bread, the Second World War also produced another kitchen helper – the microwave oven. As far as many households were concerned, that really was the best thing since sliced bread.

Image credits:

Peter O'Connor aka anemoneprojectors via Flickr

Jimmy Emerson, DVM via Flickr

Nokia 6600 (2003)

Nokia 6600

Launched June 2003

Although Apple might like you to think that they invented the smartphone, in truth they’d been around for a decade or so before the ubiquitous iPhone. One successful early example is the Nokia 6600, barely recognisable as a smartphone today… but it certainly ticked all the boxes fifteen years ago.

The Nokia 6600 took a lot of technologies that were quite new and put them all in a single high-end device. Firstly though this ran the Symbian operating system which meant that users could install native applications on it (using a PC and a cable). It came with a relatively large 2.2” 176 x 208 pixel display, had a highly noticeable VGA resolution camera on the back (capable of taking video clips), it came with a multimedia player, MMC expandable memory, Bluetooth and it supported GPRS data.

You could read email and browse the web (slowly) and Symbian at the time had all sorts of applications available for it. For the time, the Nokia 6600 was an advanced piece of kit, and it was quite successful in sales terms, shipping 2 million units. Today it is largely forgotten, but good examples start at just £30 or so for collectors.

Image credit: Nokia

Porsche 356 (1948)

Porsche 356, circa 1950

Introduced June 1948

Just three years after the end of the Second World War, the (then) Austrian firm Porsche came up with a little two-sweater sports car called the Porsche 356. Arguably the first modern sports car, the 356 created a template for a lightweight but relatively powerful vehicle that many others copied.

Although sales were slow to begin with, after a few years this sleek sports car started to pick up sales and became available as a coupé, convertible or roadster. Various engines became available, with a typical unit being the 59 HP 4 cylinder 1.6 litre air-cooled engine. Not a lot by modern standards, but with an aerodynamic car weighing as little as 771 kg it didn’t need to be a fire-breathing monster.

The engine was in the back above the drive wheels, a configuration which gives the fun of driving a rear-wheel drive car with the advantage that most of the weight was above the drive wheels which led to better handling. The 356 found success in motor racing, but it was equally at home pottering around the restaurants of the Côte d'Azur instead.

The production run was from 1948 to 1965, with four models and a pretty slow evolution of specifications and design over that period. The Porsche 911 was introduced to replace it in 1963, but 356 production continued a little while after that.

76,000 356s were built, with around half still existing. Prices for a used one seem to range from around £70,000 to over £250,000 depending on condition and exact model, although it’s of note that Porsche will still look after the car for you. Several companies (such as Chesil) make modern reproductions at a fraction of the cost.

Image credit: Matthew P.L. Stevens via Flickr

Space Invaders (1978)

Space Invaders (Midway version)

Launched June 1978

Forty years ago this month, Japan saw the launch of a simple little arcade game called Space Invaders. The premise was simple – five rows of pixelated aliens marched slowly across the screen while a laser cannon at the bottom tries to pick them off, accompanied with a basic four-note soundtrack and some sound effects. Simple it may have been, but Space Invaders became an enormous success.

The game came at a point when the technology was just becoming good enough to produce a compelling game. The Space Invaders machine itself ran an Intel 8080 CPU (a predecessor of the 8086) with a Texas Instruments chip producing the sounds (this in the same month as the launch of the Speak & Spell). A monochrome monitor in portrait mode gave a graphics resolution of 224 x 256 pixels, and in some versions of the game coloured strips across the screen gave the impression of a colour display when it wasn’t.

As with many classic games of the era, Space Invaders embraced the technical limitations of the hardware. The blocky aliens became a design icon, the simple but hypnotic soundtrack attracted curious onlookers. The fact that the very last invader raced across the screen in an adrenaline-fueled finale was simply a side-effect of the processor having less work to do.

The gameplay was simple enough but compelling, and Space Invaders machine soon started to rake in the money. A lot of money. A machine could pay for itself in a month or even less, and they soon started to pop up in all sort of places worldwide that hadn’t previously dabbled in arcade games, such as supermarkets.

There were two basic formats – creator Taito turned the game into a table-top format and cabinet with a joystick, while US licensee Midway used a cabinet with buttons replacing the joystick. Between them, the arcade versions raked in hundreds of millions of dollars of profit… and from then on there were adaptations for games consoles, home computers and a raft of sequels and spin-offs spanning generations.

Today prices for reconditioned original Space Invader machines can be £4000 or more. Alternatively for a few pounds you can buy an authentic reproduction of the original to play on your smartphone.

Image credit: Wally Gobetz via Flickr

Video: Reconditioned Taito Space Invaders machine

Science of Cambridge MK14 (1978)

Science of Cambridge MK14

Launched June 1978

Before the Sinclair ZX80 – and before Sinclair even was Sinclair – came the Science of Cambridge MK14. A low-cost kit computer, the MK14 was similar to the successful MOS KIM-1 and a number of other kits launched in the late 1970s.

Instead of going with the 6502 or Z80, Clive Sinclair’s firm instead decided to go with the esoteric National Semiconductor SC/MP INS8060 CPU. This 8-bit CPU never really became popular, except for finding a niche in embedded systems of the era. The MK14 had just 256 bytes of RAM, expandable to 2170 bytes. Input was a 20 key keypad, and output was via a calculator-style display although it was possible to output basic text and graphics to a VDU. The architecture of the MK14 also allowed easy modification and the addition of peripherals such as a cassette interface.

Even for four decades ago, the MK14 was very basic. But at just £30 (equivalent to around £240 today) it was also very cheap – much cheaper than anything similar on the market. Science of Cambridge went on to sell tens of thousands of these, providing enough money for Clive Sinclair to launch the ZX80 a couple of years later. But it also provided a launch pad for the career of Chris Curry, who went on to become one of the founders of Acorn Computers  who eventually went on to change the world.

Despite selling in the thousands, MK14s are rare today and one in working condition might set you back £800 or so. Alternatively you can play with a MK14 emulator for free.


Image credit: Alessandro Grussu via Flickr

Apple iPhone 3G (2008)

Apple iPhone 3G (2008)

Launched June 2008

Launched ten years ago this month, the Apple iPhone 3G was Apple’s first smartphone.

“But wait,” you say “obviously it wasn’t. The original iPhone was Apple’s first smartphone!”

The original iPhone - launched in January 2007 – had plenty of potential and a lot of “wow” factor. But by modern standards, it wasn’t a smartphone at all. You couldn’t download applications to it, it didn’t have GPS or high-speed cellular data, it couldn’t record video and it only had one pretty basic camera on the back, so no selfies for YOU.

Added to that, the original iPhone was slow and very expensive and it didn’t sell in particularly big numbers. It really was a very elegant but extremely overpriced feature phone.

The iPhone 3G was a game-changer. Despite looking almost identical to the original and with a name that indicated that the main feature was 3G data support, the iPhone 3G was the first iPhone to come with the App Store through the new iPhone OS 2.0 operating system. Not only did this give the iPhone 3G a huge base of different apps to run, it also made adding those apps easy.

On top of that, the inclusion of 3G (and 3.5G) data meant that it was usable on the move. The new iPhone not only had GPS but also a mapping application and turn-by-turn navigation. It still couldn’t record video though and it only had the single basic camera, but it was faster and crucially cheaper too. It was a significant step in the right direction.

It was clearly a much better device than the original (even though that iPhone also got the App Store) and it was the iPhone 3G - not the original iPhone – that actually gave consumers what they wanted (apart from the ability to record video). The 3G was a proper smartphone in the modern sense, and it was this smartphone that drove nearly 7 million units worth of sales in the last quarter of 2008, finally giving Apple the sales breakthrough it was looking for.

Image credit: Apple, Inc

Texas Instruments Speak & Spell (1978)

Speak & Spell circa 1978

Launched June 1978

If you were a child of the late 1970s or early 1980s, then the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell was one of those “must have” toys that every child wanted, even if they didn’t get it. Designed as a fun way to learn spelling, it also came with different cartridges for word games and it was available in several different languages.

Originally introduced in June 1978, the Speak & Spell is possibly primarily remembered for the somewhat tinny synthesised voice, but the Speak & Spell was actually a marvel of innovation in a number of ways and it stayed in production in one form or another until the early 1990s.

What made the Speak & Spell work was TI’s new speech synthesiser chip, the TMC0280 (alternatively named the TMS5100). Using a system called linear predictivecoding, TI managed to create a speech synthesis IC that was practical to roll out in low-cost applications running on contemporary 1970s hardware.

Outside, the Speak & Spell was about the size of an A4 pad, although it was fairly heavy at 474 grams (a little over a pound). Early versions had raised keys and a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) with a handy carrying handle on the top. Power was supplied by 4 C-cells or an A/C adapter. On the top was a carrying handle, and the whole thing was finished off in brightly coloured plastic.

It wasn’t the only product that TI made based on the same technology, the Speak & Read and Speak & Math also came in a similar package. Over the years the keyboard was replaced with a more childproof membrane keyboard which eventually changed from an alphabetic to QWERTY layout, the VFD display was replaced with an LCD and the handle moved from the top to the bottom to the top again. The last versions of the Speak & Spell were introduced in 1992.

Circuit Bent Speak & Spell

That really should have been the end of the story, but the Speak & Spell ended up having a weird afterlife. It turned out that the electronics in the device were easy to modify, and “circuit bent” versions appeared that could make new and interesting sounds, and the Speak & Spell found a home in electronic music in both modified and unmodified forms.

Prices vary depending on age and condition, but a good early one could set you back £100 or so. There are usually much cheaper, later ones too. Overall the Speak & Spell was a real technological marvel, and somehow we didn’t end up all speaking like robots. Whether or not it help to improve spelling overall is a matter for debbate.

Image credits:

Pino Dita via Flickr

Christian Riise Wagner via Flickr