Pac-Man (1980)

Introduced in Japan, May 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penny Black (1840)

Rare block 4 of four unused Penny Blacks

Introduced May 1840

These days we mostly communicate with each other electronically – at the press of a button a message can be transmitted the anywhere in the world in a fraction of a second. But of course that wasn’t always the case, and not so long ago you would often rely on having to write a letter. On paper, in an envelope and typically written out by hand.

Postal systems had been around since at least 500 BC and possibly even earlier, but they tended to be haphazard, open to corruption and often only accessible to governments. Although this situation improved, by the 19th century most postal systems were still complex and unreliable – sometimes operating on a post-pay principle where the postage would be paid by the receiver, who might decline to pay (sometimes after reading the letter).

Reform was needed and in the spirit of Victorian innovation the government started to look for solutions. Eventually a proposal by Rowland Hill was accepted for an inexpensive, simple-to-use and universal postage system that would become the model for the rest of the world.

Before Hill’s reforms the price of postage depended on the distance the letter had to travel, making the system complicated to use. It was also expensive, so the volume of mail was quite low, and the Post Office was haemorrhaging money as a result. Instead a system was proposed where a letter of up to half an ounce (14 grams) could be sent prepaid for a uniform rate of just one penny, regardless of distance.

Penny Black Detail

To show that postage had been paid, a piece of gummed paper was cut out and stuck to the envelope – called a “stamp”. It was a peculiar thing to call a sticky bit of paper, but it referred to some older postal systems where the envelope was stamped with an actual stamp. This small piece of paper had a portrait of Queen Victoria on it and was black in colour, becoming known as the “Penny Black”.

Introduced in May 1840, the Penny Black and the postal system it represented became the model for every other country, and the stamp itself became an icon. But it didn’t last long. The black colour of the stamp made it very hard to see cancellation marks, meaning that the stamp could sometimes be carefully removed and re-used, so in February 1841 the stamp was redesigned in a red colour – and this version in one form or another continued in production until 1879.

The system was simple to use and inexpensive (one penny in 1840 terms is worth about 42 pence today). It was a huge success, and it allowed people from all classes to communicate with anyone else in the country, reliably and for a modest amount of money. Over the next few years the same model was adapted by most other countries, and an era of low-cost and reliable communication was born.

Today of course the Penny Black is very collectable, with prices typically starting at about £50 for a used one in decent condition and then heading upwards to thousands or tens of thousands of pounds. Given the short period of time that the Penny Black had been available, combined with the fact that the hobby of stamp collecting didn’t really exist until stamps did, it does add a certain rarity value to these stamps – but every semi-serious collector will either own one or aspire to it. Alternatively you could buy the modern day equivalent – a British first-class stamp currently costs 76p which is 182.4 times more expensive than the original.

Image Credits: [1] [2] 
Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons - CC0 1.0

DAI Personal Computer (1980)

Later model Indata DAI Personal Computer

Introduced 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acorn Atom (1980)

Acorn Atom

Introduced 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the archives: Microsoft KIN, Nokia N70, N90, N91, N8, 5140i, 8800, BlackBerry Pearl 9100

Some product launches are merely bad but the Microsoft KIN (2010) cratered so badly that you you could see it from space. On the other hand, the Nokia N-Series  represented Nokia at its best, starting with the Nokia N70, N90 and N91 (2005) and ending (at least for the Symbian N-Series line) with the N8 just five years later.

April 2005 was a great year for Nokia, with the somewhat rubbery but almost indestructible Nokia 5140i and the elegant Nokia 8800. Back to 2010, and the BlackBerry Pearl 9100 combined RIM's smartphone know-how with a traditional form factor that made it a success.

Image credits: Microsoft, Nokia, RIM

Fanta (1940)

Introduced 1940

This year sees the 80th anniversary of the launch of Fanta – the fruit-flavour fizzy beverage that is one of the most popular soft drinks brands in the world. But the history of Fanta is complicated and it involves the Second World War and Nazi Germany.

Coca Cola opened its first bottling plant in Germany in 1929 – a few years before Hitler came to power. It became the most important market for Coca Cola outside the United States and by 1939 it had dozens of factories in Germany alone to keep up with demand. Of course to some extent, doing business in Germany in the late 1930s meant doing business with Nazis and although in retrospect this was probably a bad thing, many European and American businesses still do business with repressive regimes today.
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"Fanta Klassik"
- a modern recreation of the original recipe

In 1939 of course the Second World War started in Europe, and by 1940 the German operations of Coca Cola were struggling because of a combination of blockades, embargoes and… well… all-out war. Although the United States (home of Coca Cola) was officially neutral until December 1941, supplies of key ingredients dried up effectively leaving Coca Cola in Germany with nothing to sell.

Coca Cola’s German boss - Max Keith – then set about looking for a product he could actually make and sell along with others in the company. What was settled on was fairly unappealing from the ingredients list – milk whey, beet sugar and apple leftovers from the food and cider industry. This got the name “Fanta” from the German word “Fantasie”… and a brand was born, indeed it was only the second beverage that Coca Cola had ever made.

The product varied a bit over the war years, sometimes switching in artificial sweetener and sometimes using other fruits or fruit by-products. But Fanta sold in millions of cases and was a huge success throughout Nazi Germany. The occupied Netherlands also made its own version using elderberries.

At the end of the war, Coca Cola took back control of their German subsidiary – including all the profits made during the war – and then shut down Fanta production and switched back to Coca Cola. But in the 1950s increased and more varied competition from rivals PepsiCo led Coca Cola to revive the brand. Variations of Fanta spread throughout Europe, and the classic orange Fanta that we most associate with the brand was invented in Italy in 1955, using locally-sourced oranges.

Fanta continued to grow, both in the countries it was sold in and in the bewildering variety of flavours. The flexibility in the brand allows it to be adapted to local tastes, and it also means that short-term special editions can be made to boost sales further.  Today the brand has evolved massively since its origins in Nazi Germany… but it doesn’t stop some very weird conspiracy theories coming up.

Interestingly, this American company prospered under the Nazi regime – even when the United States and Germany were at war. This is a ripe ground for conspiracy theorists, but several American companies ended up having their German subsidiaries orphaned in this way. Ford Germany made trucks such as the V3000 and engine parts, GM’s German branch of Opel also made large numbers of trucks and military vehicles, IBM’s involvement was darker still. Many other companies found themselves in this position with a greater or lesser degree of collaboration with the Nazi authorities, but it seems that both Max Keith and Coca Cola Germany resisted the dark side and just stuck to making fizzy drink.

A collection of Fanta cans from the 1960s

The other interesting thing is just how unappetising the original recipe for Fanta sounds. Apple pomace is the sort of thing that ends up in animal feed, and milk whey sounds very out of place in a fruit drink even though it is quite sweet-tasting and nutritious. It might not be an obvious way to make a soft drink, but considering some of the theories about what it in Coca Cola it does seem rather tame by comparison.

In 2015, Coca Cola recreated something approximating the original Fanta for its 75th anniversary, calling it “Fanta Klassik”, however a misjudged tagline of “we’re bringing back the feeling of the gold old days”  could be misinterpreted as the “good old days” being Nazi Germany, when really it was talking about the 1960s. Nonetheless it was a popular (if temporary) retro concoction, but if you want to recreate the taste of 1950s Italy you could just have some orange Fanta instead..

Image credits:
Illustratedjc via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
José Roitberg via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

RS-232 (1960)

Mouse using a serial interface

Introduced 1960

Known to many as just a “serial interface”, RS-232 is a surprisingly old communications standard that was once everywhere and even today it refuses to die. A simple way to connect a computer with a peripheral or other computer, the RS-232 interface could be used – with a bit of effort – to connect just about anything to just about anything.

The RS-232 interface is a “serial” interface because it transmits data one bit at a time in two directions, compared with contemporary “parallel” interfaces that typically transmitted 8 bits at a time in one direction.

The standard defines one end as the DTE (Data Terminal Equipment – e.g. a computer) and the other as the DCE (Data Circuit-terminating Equipment – e.g. a printer) connected together using a cable with 3 or more wires and terminated using 25-way D-type connectors. The number of wires in use varied depending on how many features you wanted to use, and many implementations ditched the large 25-way connector for something smaller, typically a 9-way connector on a PC.
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RS-232 Breakout Box

Connecting DCE-to-DCE or DTE-to-DTE would require a special cable, and indeed it was possible to make custom cables quite easily depending on your needs, or you could simply use one of many adapters between different types of connector or equipment. Typical transfer speeds could vary between 50 baud (bits per second) to 9600 baud, 19200 baud or even higher.

A typical early use of RS-232 would be to connect a terminal to large computer system, or in later days a PC to a printer, modem or mouse. Indeed, on the PC the serial port lingered into the 2000s until the more versatile but fundamentally similar Universal Serial Bus (USB) became the de facto standard for connecting things together.

Because most computers either had a built-in serial interface or one available as an add-on, if you had (or made) the right cable then you could transfer files between utterly different and usually completely incompatible systems. The first challenge was to acquire a copy of an application such as Kermit and apply it to both systems, but once you had that it was a reasonably trouble-free way of moving data about.

Although RS-232 interfaces are less common than they used to be, they can still be found on industrial and laboratory equipment, communications gear and even home entertainment systems. But perhaps the RS-232’s most peculiar lasting legacy is this song…

Image credits:
Konstantin Lanzet via Wikimedia Commons
MdeVicente via Wikimedia Commons - CC0 1.0

Spitting Image - RS232 Interface Lead