Amstrad GX4000 (1990)

Introduced September 1990

During the late 1980s Amstrad had been on a roll. The Amstrad CPC range had taken a respectable share of the home computing market, the cheap all-in-one PCW wordprocessor had been a remarkable success for small businesses and home users, the PC-compatible PC1512 and PC1640 had sold in huge quantities and Amstrad had bought out arch-rival Sinclair to produce their own take on the iconic ZX Spectrum micro.

Not everything had been a success. The deeply strange portable PCs – the PPC 512 and PPC 640 – proved to be a high-profile flop. Worse still, the next-generation PC2000 series which had been launched to great acclaim ended up as a disaster with a batch of faulty hard drives significantly damaging Amstrad’s reputation.

Amstrad’s success had been built on offering quality devices at bargain prices, typically by exploring ways to drive down costs. The CPC computers were a good example, a home computer, monitor and storage device starting at £399, all inclusive. Amstrad leveraged their relationships with makes of TV tubes and cassette players to give them a price advantage, the inclusion of the cheap-but-capable Z80 processor drove down costs further. Amstrad chose to use the CPC platform for their next venture.

Amstrad GX4000

The Amstrad GX4000 was essentially a games console version of the CPC. Stripped of the cassette drive, TV and keyboard, the GX4000 used cartridges and hooked up to a domestic TV. Still running a Z80 with 64Kb of RAM the console was modestly specified even by 1990’s standards… but at just £99 it was really cheap.

It was an elegantly packaged device, with two slightly creaky games controllers attached and video output via RF, SCART or and Amstrad DIN connector for a CPC monitor. You could add a light gun or an analogue joystick took, but expansion options were pretty limited. Still, it was pretty capable for an 8-bit platform and the related CPC had a huge variety of good quality games available for it. So, it should have been a success? Not exactly.

By 1990 the 8-bit era that had dominated the 1980s was at an end. 32-bit home computers such as the Commodore Amiga had been established for some time, and the games console market itself was in the process of moving to 16-bit platforms such as the Sega Megadrive. But technological obsolescence had never been a problem for Amstrad - a company that shipped CP/M computers well into the 1990s – where instead they were interested in value-for-money. And the GX4000 certainly seemed to have that.

But the GX4000 was a massive failure, and perhaps the key problem was games. CPC games on cassette cost a few pounds where a GX4000 cartridge for the same game cost £25 (a quarter of the price of the console). Only a couple of games were available at launch, and a combination of manufacturing delays and high costs means that just 27 games of varying quality were launched. The 8-bit CPC platform that the GX4000 ran on wasn’t something that gamers could be excited about either.

Perhaps if the GX4000 had been released a few years earlier with more (and cheaper) games plus better designed hardware, it might have been a success. As it was, the GX4000 was discontinued in 1991 having sold just 15,000 units. Of course, that makes this console quite collectable today with prices for ones in good condition going for up to £200 which would be a lot more than was paid for it in the first place..

Image credit:
Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - Public Domain

Soft Toys (1880)

Introduced 1880

The soft toy in all its forms – from teddy bears to more exotic creatures altogether – is a favourite of children the world over and many adults too. And although toys have been found dating back to the earliest human civilizations, earlier examples would tend to be made from wood or whatever materials were available, but although these could be fun to play with they certainly weren’t cuddly.

Generally speaking the invention of the soft toy is attributed to Margarete Steiff in Germany. Steiff was a seamstress who at first noticed that children liked to play with the soft animal-themed pincushions that she made. These were adapted into toys covered in felt and filled with lamb’s wool, first for children of friends and relatives and then sold commercially from her shop in 1880. The first design was reportedly a toy elephant.

Elephant pin cushion in the Steiff Museum

These became a success and Steiff’s business grew and a result, but she always insisted on making the first prototypes herself to make sure that there were no problems. In 1897 her nephew Richard Steiff joined the company and designed a stuffed toy bear which initially was not successful – but then came the teddy bear craze of the early 1900s which Steiff and other manufacturers were happy to supply.

Margarete Steiff became a successful businesswoman, and created the Steiff company which even today is probably the best-known creator of stuffed toys. And she achieved all this despite being crippled with polio from an early age which left her confined to a wheelchair and with limited mobility in one of her arms.

Today Steiff sits at the top end of the soft toy market, which has spawned many other well-known brands. The American Ty company – founded in 1986 – popularised Beanie Babies. Gund is another American company that specialise in mid-range bears and other soft toys that are characteristically understuffed to make them more cuddly. Yet another American company, Build-A-Bear Workshop, allows customers to custom make their own bears in-store and to accessorise them. Many other companies also make bears and soft toys, and there are also small-scale operations that make high-end designer toys made out of premium materials.

Ty Beanies

But a soft toy is more than just a bit of fabric with some stuffing in it. They are companions, faithful friends, a comfort in times of distress and so much more. Bears can be fearless too, recently taking over some of the streets of Paris in the COVID-19 lockdown. They are patient and non-judgmental. And even when they’ve been put away for years at a time, they are still pleased to be with you – no matter how long that might be. And they proliferate. Oh my, do they proliferate.

Les Nounours des Gobelins

Of course, soft toys can be high collectable. At the high end, rare Steiff bears or Ty beanies can sell for tens of thousands of pounds... but these soft toys will probably never be played with or even cuddled. More everyday soft toys can be found all over the place, but often there can be interesting finds in charity shops looking for a new home. Just don’t let them completely take over your house.

Image credits:
Flominator via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Caroline Léna Becker via Flickr – CC BY 2.0
frankieleon via Flickr – CC BY 2.0

PERQ Workstation (1980)

Introduced 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICL's vision of the future

 

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

Cutaway of PERQ workstation

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

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

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

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

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

Mattel Intellivision (1980)

Introduced 1980

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

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

Original Mattel Intellivision

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

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

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

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

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

Intellivsion II

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

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

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

Intellivsion Amico

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

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

Rogue (1980)

Introduced 1980

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

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

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

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

Rogue emulated running on a VT220

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

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

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

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

Nethack running on a modern laptop

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

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

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

The Rise and Decline of Sharp Mobile (2002 to 2008)

Fifteen years ago this month, Sharp released the Sharp 903 – a high-end 3G phone that was the high watermark of Sharp’s efforts to break into the European market. Distinctly different from the Nokias and Motorolas that dominated the market, the 903 should established Sharp as a contender in the market. But it faded from sight instead.

In the early noughties Asian firms were having a hard time making an impact outside their home markets, with the notable exception of Sony… but even they had to join forces with Ericsson in 2001. But the result of this was that there were some weird and wonderful ecosystems developing – especially in Japan.

Sharp were dipping their toe in the market, initially with some fairly standard devices but then starting to leverage their expertise in other technologies. In 2000 they made the world’s first camera phone – the J-SH04 – but in particular devices started to appear that used some of Sharp’s world-leading display technology.

Sharp J-SH04

In Europe Sharp started cautiously with the O2-only GX1 which sold in limited quantities. Then came the almost identical Sharp GX10 and GX10i (the latter exclusive to Vodafone) in 2002 and 2003 which were attractive but pretty undistinguished clamshells.

The next handset to be launched (in late 2003) was a ground-breaker. Exclusive to Vodafone in most regions, the Sharp GX20 featured a high-resolution 240 x 320 pixel continuous grain silicon (CGS) display which easily beat everything else on the market at the time. Added to that was a competitive VGA resolution camera with a multi-coloured LED, along with a relatively large colour external screen – all in a package smaller and lighter than the more basic GX10. The GX20 created a real buzz around Sharp’s products and consumers were eager to see what would come next.

Sharp GX10i and GX20

The Sharp GX30 built on the superb display in the GX20 and added the world’s first megapixel camera. The GX30 also had a full-sized SD slot, added video recording, Bluetooth and an MP3 player. And in early 2004 all of those things together were a big deal. Even if the software wasn’t as easy to use as a Nokia, the hardware was class leading in almost every respect, again this was a Vodafone exclusive in many regions – although some other carriers had the functionally identical GX32.

Sharp GX30

You might guess that the next phone from Sharp would be the GX40… but you would be wrong. The Sharp TM100 was exclusive to T-Mobile rather than Vodafone, but was basically a slider version of the GX20 with minimalist looks at the same CGS display that Sharp were becoming famous for.

Sharp TM100

Vodafone again had the exclusive for the next handset – the very popular Sharp GX25. Still a 2004 product, this had a similar specification to the older GX20, but it had a sleeker design and notable it tucked the antenna inside the case. Bluetooth was added into the mix but the external screen shrank considerably. The result was a smaller, lighter, more capable and cheaper phone that was cheaper than the GX20 while retaining the excellent display. One highly sought-after version of the GX25 was the attractive Ferrari edition in bright red, but some markets had other eye-popping colours available too.

Sharp GX25

Sharp returned to their clamshell-with-antenna design for the Sharp TM200 in late 2004. This was exclusive to T-Mobile and was broadly similar to the GX30 except it had a smaller external display and crucially a two megapixel camera, making it the first such device in Europe. The oversized camera assembly on the TM200 was rather pointless, but it did draw attention to its class-leading camera capabilities.

Sharp TM200

Although most of these handset had been designed with European and Worldwide markets in mind, the next product releases had a more distinctive Japanese origin. One of the stars of Vodafone’s fledgling 3G network was the Sharp 902 which was essentially almost a straight import of the 902SH handset Vodafone Japan used.

Sharp 902

The 902 was like (almost) nothing else on the market. A large 3G-capable swivelling clamshell phone, it featured a 2.4” QVGA TFT display, a 2 megapixel camera with 2X optical zoom and a flash,  video calling, expandable memory on a full-size SD/MMC card, an MP3 player, web browser and email client. The 902 looked like a compact digital camera from one side, and you could swivel the display around to act as a huge viewfinder. The 902 had plenty of “wow factor” but flaws in the camera design meant that the pictures were disappointing, and Vodafone was having a hard job persuading customer that 3G was worth having. Launched alongside it was the cut-down Sharp 802 with a more conventional 1.3 megapixel camera, although this didn’t have the same market appeal. A special bright red Ferrari edition was the most desirable version, that that still commands a premium today for collectors.

Sharp 803

Most customers were sticking with their 2/2.5G devices and the GX range was still popular despite 3G competition. Rumours of a Japanese-style GX40 clamshell with a 2 megapixel camera were doing the rounds, Sharp having impressed potential consumers with the radical design of the 902. But this crucial market seemed to be overlooked.  It meant that customers with a GX30 who wanted an upgrade but didn’t want a bulky 3G phone would have to look elsewhere.

Sharp’s next launch was the Sharp 903 and Sharp 703 – another pair of G devices. The 903 was quite similar to the 902 in design, but sported a 3.2 megapixel camera with a 2X optical zoom that fixed the flaws of the 902. The full-sized SD card slot had gone to be replaced by a miniSD slot, but strangely the phone was actually bigger than the 902 despite that. Better looking than the 902, it came in a variety of colours as well. Launched at the same time was the more conventional 703 with a swivel-less design and a 1.3 megapixel camera.

Sharp 903 and 703

We didn’t know it at the time, but the Sharp 903 was as good as it was ever going to get for Sharp fans in Europe. When the Sharp GX40 finally came out later in 2005 it was a huge disappointment. It sported good multimedia features but a very disappointing 1.3 megapixel camera and even the screen was a slight downgrade on previous versions.

Sharp GX40

Three elegant but fairly low-end phones followed in 2006 – the Sharp GX29, 550SH and 770SH. The 770SH was the most elegant with a QVGA display and expandable memory, but it was still only a 2G phone with a 1.3 megapixel camera. The 550SH was essentially a candy-bar version of the 770SH. The GX29 was a simpler phone with only a VGA camera and limited features. This time the most desirable of the bunch was the 770SH McLaren Mercedes edition which certainly looked the part even if it didn’t deliver much.

Sharp GX29, 550SH and 770SH McLaren Mercedes Edition

After this Sharp pretty much faded out of markets outside of Japan, although years later they did return with some decent Aquos branded Android handsets which developed a following but have never really sold in large numbers.

Sharp certainly seemed to be poised on the verge of a breakthrough, but what went wrong? Sharp were certainly leading in display and camera technology. Very much at the leading edge Sharp and Vodafone also bet strongly on 3G, coming up with the class-leading 902… the problem was that consumers really didn’t want 3G and sales of that, the follow-up 903 and the 802 and 703 were weak. Sharp were also very much stuck with carrier exclusive deals, mostly with Vodafone but also to some extent T-Mobile. This was good news for the carriers, not such good news for Sharp. A failure to update their 2G line also left fans with nowhere to go - and when Vodafone left the Japanese market in 2006 the ties with Japanese manufacturers became much weaker. And of course the market was dominated by Nokia, and despite their handsets lagging behind in hardware terms they were usually the best-looking devices and very easy to use.

Sharp 902 and GX25 Ferrari Editions

Today the Ferrari editions are sought-after and a humble GX25 in Ferrari livery in very good condition can sell for hundreds of pounds. The 902 can cost around £150 in good condition, but most other Sharp phones are worth much less. However many of them - especially the GX30 and 902 - would make an ideal addition to a collection.


Image credits: Sharp, Vodafone, T-Mobile
Morio 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