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.

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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.

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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.

HTC EVO 3D: the feature that time forgot

Launched June 2011

Five years ago 3D was all the rage. Avatar had hit the movies a couple of years earlier, stoking interest in 3D entertainment. Although 3D TVs were beginning to appear in the shops, these were both expensive and required special glasses. It was also impossible for people to capture 3D content to display themselves.

The HTC EVO 3D was one of a very small number of devices launched to try to widen the appeal of 3D technologies. The autostereoscopic display didn't need glasses.. although you had to put your head in just the right place to get the full effect and it only worked in landscape mode. There was a 3D camera on the back to make your own 3D videos, at the time YouTube had just launched its 3D service, so the camera was a significant feature in itself.

The 3D display was a 4.3" 540 x 960 pixel panel, which was pretty large for the time. Because producing a 3D image takes a lot of processing power with a dual-core 1.2GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM, which was impressive for the time. Everything else was the familiar territory of a HTC Android 2.3 handset, so it was always going to be a decent everyday device.

However, there were precious few 3D applications available for the EVO 3D and there was little incentive for third parties to develop applications for this platform. Consumer interest in 3D soon began to wane as well, and the expected surge in demand simply didn't happen. It wasn't an expensive device (SIM-free it was about £500 / €600 at launch), but even so it didn't sell very well.

However, if you are looking at capturing 3D images and video then the EVO 3D is still a viable and useful device. Prices for an unlocked EVO 3D are currently around £80 / €100 to £200 / €250 or so. It is unlikely that there will be much interest in 3D from phone manufacturers any time soon.. the latest handsets are concentrating more on 4K video. But perhaps if the technology is perfected, we might see devices of this type again.

HTC TyTN and HTC MTeoR (2006)

HTC TyTN

Announced June 2006

Ten years ago this month, a Taiwanese company called HTC stepped out of the shadows and launched two new handsets under their own brand. Unusually though, HTC wasn't a NEW company but it had been successfully manufacturing devices for several years which always featured somebody else's name on the outside.

HTC started out making laptops in 1997 and then moved to PDAs, notably making iPAQs for Compaq and HP. In 2002 they launched the world's first Windows smartphone, the HTC Wallaby, followed by a range of ever-better Windows devices that became very popular.. and which were highly anticipated by smartphone fans.

So, instead of just branding phones with Qtek, i-mate, Dopod, O2, T-Mobile or whatever it seemed a logical choice for this growing company to sell under its own name. After all, HTC were arguably the most innovative phone manufacturer at the time but you couldn't actually buy an HTC with "HTC" on it.

HTC MTeoR

The first two HTC-branded handsets you could buy were the HTC TyTN and HTC MTeoR. The TyTN looked more like the sort of smartphone we know today, with a 2.8" 240 x 320 pixel touchscreen, Windows Mobile 5.0, 3G and 3.5G support plus WiFi, a 2 megapixel camera plus a video calling camera and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. On the other hand, the MTeoR looked more like a traditional feature phone, but this too ran Windows Mobile 5.0 but with a more traditional 2.2" 240 x 320 pixel non-touch panel. The MTeoR had a basic 1.3 megapixel camera and supported GSM and 3G networks only.

Out of the pair the TyTN was the most successful, and although it may seem obvious today that a "candy bar" smartphone such as the MTeoR would be less appealing, you have to remember that it was competing directly against Nokia's very similar Symbian smartphones which had the same form factor.

These days the TyTN and MTeoR are long-forgotten. But HTC continued to innovate and shape the market, creating the world's first Android device and consistently outperforming most of its competition for a fair chunk of the past decade. And during the next ten years, HTC certainly went on to design some very impressive devices that were far more notable than this pair..

Nokia N9 (2011)

Launched June 2011

2011 was a time of turmoil for Nokia. Having announced in February that they were going to switch their smartphone platform to Windows, the writing was on the wall for the those smartphones running on other environments. Symbian was one obvious casualty, but Nokia's MeeGo (formerly Maemo) operating system was another.

The Nokia N9 was the final handset in a series of devices running the Linux-based Maemo OS that had kicked off in 2005 with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and ending up with the promising Nokia N900 in 2009. Despite some flaws, the N900 was a pretty decent effort and timely development could well have made a very competitive handset that could have fended off Android and the iPhone. But a disastrous decision to merge Maemo with Intel's Moblin operating system stalled development of any new devices, and the planned follow-up to the N900 never happened.

By 2011 the die had already been cast in favour of Nokia's rivals. Despite this, the nearly two-year gestation period for the N9 was coming to an end and Nokia were too far into the project to cancel it. Just as the N9 was about to be launched, Nokia slashed staff in the MeeGo division and it was clear that whatever was going to be produced was likely to be not only the first, but also the last MeeGo consumer device from Nokia.

Despite being primed to disappoint, the N9 instead created quite a stir. Housed in a brightly-coloured plastic unibody case, the N9 set the design standards that were then picked up by the Lumia range. On the front was a relatively large 3.9" 480 x 854 pixel AMOLED display, on the back was an 8 megapixel camera and inside was a 1GHz processor with 1GB of RAM. The operating system was the main feature though, and MeeGo was different from everything else on the market with a highly polished swipe-based interface that still managed to have a traditional Nokia look and feel. The N9 was beautiful but doomed.

Despite the wait, Nokia fans were keen to get their hands on the device. But Nokia had other ideas, and deliberately didn't make the N9 available in major markets such as the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain or Italy. Instead, the N9 was launched in secondary markets only. Why would they produce such an interesting device and then deny access to it? Well, Nokia were also working on their first Windows device (the Lumia 800) which was physically very similar to the N9, and presumably they wanted to ensure success by not having the N9 to compete. Well, we know how that turned out.

A strange thing happened though - people still wanted the N9, so there was a lively market on eBay with devices selling for €400 or more. Prices have subsided a little since then,  with prices ranging between about €80 to €300 depending on condition. Much rarer is the Nokia N950, a phone given to developers that has a QWERTY keyboard which can command prices of €1000 or even more.

There are perhaps few devices that highlight the failures within Nokia as well as the N9 does. A brilliant device in many ways, it came out far too late and was killed off at birth by a company that had moved on to a different.. and ultimately unsuccessful strategy. Had this launched a year or 18 months earlier then it would have had an easier time up against the somewhat uneven Android platform that was eating Nokia's sales. But as it is, the Nokia N9 is an interesting and rather sad footnote in the tale of the decline of Nokia.

Acorn BBC Master (1986)

Launched 1986

Thirty years ago we were seeing a great shift from away from the first generation of 8-bit home computers to 16 and 32-bit platforms such as the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. But 8-bit computing wasn't dead yet, and low cost devices such as the Amstrad CPC 6128 and PCW along with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128 showed that there was still life in these simple devices yet. The Acorn BBC Master belonged firmly in the second camp, an improvement over the original BBC Micro launched five years earlier. There were various models of Master available, but the most common one was the Master 128.

Although the original BBC Micro was a popular and technically capable device, one key problem it had was the lack of memory. The 6502 processor at its core could only directly address 64KB of memory, 32KB of which was used by the ROM and up to 20KB was used by graphics.. and a about half of the meagre amount left was allocated to the system. The BBC Master 128 got round this problem by allowing memory to be addressed in banks which could be paged in and out when needed.

The Master added two cartridge slots and a slightly upgraded processor, and crucially video memory was now separate from main memory. As ever, the array of expansion ports was impressive - there was a floppy disk interface, optional network interface, A-D convertor port, serial and parallel port, plus expansion ports and most interesting of all a "Tube" interface for a second processor.

The Tube allowed for a second 6502 processor, or a Zilog Z80 allowing CP/M capabilities or even a National Semiconductor 32016 which could run a variant of Unix. When running with a Tube coprocessor, the Master simply handled the input and output which allowed the Master to run theoretically anything that could be squeezed into one of the beige expansion boxes.

There were other versions of the Master too, notable the Master Compact with a difference case design and integrated 3.5" disk, the Master AIV (used in the BBC Domesday Project) and the Master 512 with an Intel 80186 CPU and 512KB of RAM. In one form or another, the Master was around until 1994 when it was finally discontinued. It proved quite popular, primarily in the UK education market.

Although it had some interesting features, it was hardly a groundbreaking machine. As it turns out, Acorn were developing something that would change the world - the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes that was launched the next year. But more about that another day. These days the price a BBC Master ranged between around £50 to over £200 depending on condition and peripherals.

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