Quebec researcher Jean-Christophe Laurence recently showed tech gadgets that have fallen into disuse (floppy disks, ColecoVision game cartridges, Fisher-Price turntables, etc.) to schoolchildren and asked them to figure out what they were once used for. “Oh, I though it was a bomb,” one child says when examining an 8-track player. Great stuff. (Thanks Reddit and Geekosystem.)
You are currently browsing the archive for the Videos category.
Tags: Jean-Christophe Laurence
A driver education class for first graders in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1954. Not such a bad idea, really. Jimmy Stewart narrates.
Tags: Jimmy Stewart
Depending on how you define OXO, Tennis for Two was either the first or second video game. A paddle contest displayed on an oscilloscope, the game was created by physicist and pinball fan William Higinbotham, who debuted it in 1958 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Oh, and Higinbotham also helped build the first atomic bomb and later became an outspoken opponent of nukes. From his 1994 New York Times obituary:
“William A. Higinbotham, a physicist who developed electronic components for the first atomic bomb and then became a leading advocate of controlling nuclear weapons, died on Thursday at his home in Gainesville, Ga. He was 84.
The cause was emphysema, his family said.
Mr. Higinbotham was a group leader in electronics at Los Alamos, N.M., where the first atomic bomb was developed during World War II. But he soon helped establish a group of scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, that warned about the risks posed by nuclear weapons unless they were tightly controlled.
Mr. Higinbotham has also been called the grandfather of modern video games. In 1958, as a senior physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, he built for the laboratory’s annual public show what was very possibly the first video game — a tennis game that was displayed on a tiny cathode ray tube.”
Tags: William Higinbotham
Bold futuristic designs during the race for space.
Tags: André Courréges
“Here we are playing ping pong when we ought to be working,” says Ralph Baer, the inventor who subsequently created the Magnavox Odyssey home gaming system. The pre-Pong match takes place in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Tags: Ralph Baer
David Fincher is likely to receive an armful of Oscar nominations for The Social Network, but before he put himself on the map by directing Se7en, Fincher turned out the commercials for AT&T’s prescient 1990s “You Will” ad campaign. The compilation of spots below predicts teleconferencing, Skype, e-books, GPS, etc., though renewing a driver’s license at the ATM still sadly isn’t a reality. Tom Selleck provides the voiceover narration. (Thanks Reddit.)
Tags: David Fincher, Tom Selleck
For some reason a chick impersonates a monkey as part of the attractions at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. It was a far simpler time.
With a helpful rotary dial.
The Scott Paper Co. created a $1 paper dress in 1966 as a promotional gag, but the disposable outfit became a fashion trend for a while during the 1960s. A simple mini-skirt was just a few bucks, but a paper bridal gown could run about $15. Some background from a 1967 Time magazine piece:
“NEED MERCHANDISE DESPERATELY read the urgent telegram. The West Coast’s Joseph Magnin Co. was about to open ‘News Stand’ boutiques carrying paper dresses in its 28 stores; informal sales had proved so successful that the chain was nervously awaiting an onslaught of customers. The same happy nervousness is now sweeping other stores across the nation. Paper clothing, apparently, is here to stay.
It was only one year ago that Scott Paper Co. introduced disposable duds as a promotion gimmick with a sleeveless shift selling for $1. It was so shapeless that it recalled a paper bag; scoffers put it down as just a paper gag. But for a country already accustomed to throw-away cups, plates, napkins and diapers, paper clothing seemed only a logical next step. Scott sold 500,000 dresses in eight months, and the strong response had other manufacturers and designers joining the paper chase.”
Filed under “Really Bad Ideas” is this 1950s commercial in which a face cleanser proves its mettle by removing radioactive dirt from a model’s cheeks.
Lon Safko is a social media expert today, but he’s also the innovator behind the first voice-activated computer, the SoftVoice Computer System. This 1986 news report documents his achievement and explains how a common injury inspired the creation, which now has a permanent home in the Smithsonian.
Tags: Lon Safko
“You will sit there and suffer through the tortures of the damned,” this trailer’s announcer says with far too much confidence. I would have just gotten up and walked out of I Drink Your Blood. Plotwise, this piece of cinema would appear to pivot on the misdeeds of a young brat, who uses a dog with rabies, a syringe and trays of pastries to turn townsfolk into a mass of rabid murderers. Fakest blood, guts and mouth foam ever.
Of the three versions of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a story about enemies secretly living among us, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version was the one that had the weakest sociological context to play off of. The 1956 original was made in the age when McCarthy and HUAC were conducting a witch hunt for alleged communists in our midst. The 2007 version was filmed in a time when terrorist sleeper cells were a reality. So why is Kaufman’s version, which largely is a satire about the rather mundane evil of the self-help industry, so much more effective than the others? Sometimes talent trumps context.
The Kaufman version stars Donald Sutherland as Matthew Bennell, a San Francisco Health Department inspector who spends his days making surprise visits to restaurants, trying to differentiate between capers and rat turds. His staid life in interrupted when his secret office crush, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), begins having problems with her boyfriend. The thing is, Elizabeth doesn’t only feel that her beau has changed suddenly and drastically, but that people all over San Francisco are becoming emotionless and creepy overnight. Matthew doesn’t agree initially but is forced to see her point after a number of shocking occurrences. Meanwhile, a personal-growth guru (Leonard Nimoy) uses feel-good palaver to try to calm every one down as the city falls into chaos. “You will be born again into an untroubled world,” Matthew is ominously told at one point, and he and Elizabeth and their friends realize they have to run for their lives before they too are transformed into drones.
Kaufman and cinematographer Michael Chapman, who would soon work his magic on Raging Bull, use San Fran’s quirky beauty to amazing advantage: every sloping sidewalk seems sinister, steam in an old dry cleaner becomes a fog of suspicion, each exotic flower doubles as a weapon. What results is one of the best genre pictures ever made, and one that wisely knows that paranoia knows no particular season and the fear that things aren’t what they appear to be never goes out of style.•
Tags: Brooke Adams, Donald Sutherland, Joseph McCarthy, Leonard Nimoy, Michael Chapman, Philip Kaufman
As this PSA reminds, it was very recently that people were permitted to smoke in offices, on airplanes, and wherever else they wanted to. Added bonus: Judd Hirsch in a gas mask.
Tags: Judd Hirsch
“Every home will have a computer plugged into a central brain,” the narrator predicts, very accurately, in this 1967 BBC clip. Thankfully, they don’t still sound like locomotives.
Let’s murder nature and replace it with plastic crap.
Lots of cool crap for the home that people in the ’50s thought that we would have today. The table-top dishwasher is excellent and very unnecessary.
I posted the video of the touch-tone phone being demonstrated at the World’s Fair in Seattle in 1963. It took eight years, but that techonology was finally being sold to the masses in 1971 in this hyperbolic television spot.
“The 300-year search for the power to damn mankind is over,” says the announcer of this schlocky ’70s trailer, and now that that’s taken care of, I can finally relax. The Devil’s Rain was a 1975 screamer starring William Shatner, Ida Lupino, Ernest Borgnine (in some sort of a pig mask, though it may have been his actual face), and other actors who were down on their luck. It also seems to have been John Travolta’s feature debut. The trailer boasts that the movie was made with the participation of Anton LaVey, the American founder and High Priest of the Church of Satan. A proud moment for cinema.
Tags: Anton LaVey, Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, John Travolta, William Shatner
A satire about an unspeakable future in which the world is ruled by a global corporatocracy, athletics have devolved into blood sport and people pop happy pills, Norman Jewison’s thoughtful 1975 drama is a paranoid vision that today seems a little too familiar for comfort.
In the not-too-distant future, a few corporate executives make decisions for everyone in the world. Borders and war and disease and poverty have been eradicated, so why is everyone downing pills and looking for brutal diversions to stave off the pain? One such despicable entertainment is rollerball, a human demolition derby with a body count that’s a welter of roller derby, football, martial arts and motocross. Jonathan E. (James Caan) is the swaggering star player of rollerball. Trouble is, the game isn’t supposed to have any stars. It’s been contrived to demonstrate to the masses that individual spirit equals futility, and that it’s best to stand at attention when the corporate anthem plays. One high-ranking executive (John Houseman, in all his scary gravitas) tells Jonathan that he needs to retire gracefully, but Jonathan, having felt slighted by the corporate overlords in the past, says no. That leads to the game’s violence being ratcheted up even further, as the suits try to eliminate the rebellious rollerballer.
When Jonathan’s teammate and best buddy, Moonpie (John Beck), is left comatose after a brutal battering by the Tokyo team, a doctor matter-of-factly describes his condition: “There is no consciousness, just a deep coma…no dreams…nothing.” Jonathan refuses to sign papers authorizing the doctors to pull the plug on Moonpie, deciding that he will hold out hope that some dreams are still possible. Then he returns to the arena for further battle.•
Tags: John Beck, John Houseman, Kames Caas, Norman Jewison
From what I gather, Lucan was a jaw-dropping ABC drama about a young man, raised by wolves in the Minnesota wild until he was 10, trying to assimilate into society. Will he revert to his lupine ways? Let’s hope. All kinds of special.
It was in 1961 that IBM programmed a computer to sing for the first time. The computer was a UNIVAC and the tune was the cute 1892 ditty, “Daisy Bell.” It was in 1968 that HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey crooned the same song in a creepy, sickly voice. The full lyrics, if you’d like to sing along:
“Daisy Daisy Give me your answer do
I’m half crazy all for the love of you
It won’t be a stylish marriage
I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two”
Software designer Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad as part of his 1963 thesis at MIT. It is among the most influential programs ever written, opening the door for the development of the Graphical User Interface, which helped make computers amenable to the masses. This 20-minute program demonstrates how remarkably advanced the system was, transforming what had been an elaborate adding machine into an “intelligent” machine.
Tags: Ivan Sutherland