No, I thought it odd too – until I caught this old advert of a Tandy 1000, with Bill Bixby himself touting the advantages of a Tandy over a PC! Of course Bill didn’t know how well the PC was going to do, so we can’t really blame him. In fact we should really make sure we don’t make him angry over this. You wouldn’t like it when he’s angry..
Service and support – clearly superior. The thing I remember about Tandy was that they were dodgy electrical shops in the UK where I could buy ends for my audio cables – and at the same time walk around looking at the mountains of tat on offer. I’m pretty sure they’re the same company as Radio Shack in the US.
In true Tech Snake form, I give to you another retro tech advert!
This one is for the grey beast that was the Atari Lynx. A "handheld" console, released at the same time as the Nintendo Gameboy in 1989, Atari thought it to be a winner with full screen backlit colour graphics. However I think what let the system down ultimately was the size, price and availability (of the console and new games).
Looking at the advert, there are two things that really strike me about it – 1, how big are the pockets that kid has in his jacket? And 2, how does he get a power supply in a school toilet??
Born from the bowels of the Microsoft Research Labs, Songsmith was deemed not to be a product by the head-honchos there. And for good reason. The software creates a backing track after listening to the microphone of your singing. The problem is the music sounds as though it’s coming out of a Casio keyboard from 20 years ago.. An interesting idea, I think everyone agrees, but the execution & actual output from the program sucks.
But then, how they ever thought they would sell the product with this advert is anybodies guess. Made using the creator’s own money, it demonstrates the software and how well it works – don’t worry if you don’t make it to the end – it’s a bit of an abomination.
AAAGGHHHH!!! Well there is good news from this evil creation – For one thing this particular video has gone viral (for all the wrong reasons of course) but most importantly, people have taken it into their hearts to isolate the singing from well known songs and pass it through Songsmith – and the results are hilarious!
In what seems like a bit of a tradition here, I’ve stumbled into another YouTube video with a retro computing slant. This advert touts the “enormous 64K memory” and a price of less than £230!
A great machine, that I will be covering in the “Retro” section of Tech Snake soon.
This reminds me of something from Terminator, as the machines rise to take over the earth with Skynet – only scarier. It just shows you though that reality can be stranger than fiction sometimes..
Microsoft announced that Sky have launched their new online services, using Silverlight – the online video competitor to Adobe’s Flash. But is it significant enough?
Silverlight, although a great idea, will never have the wide appeal that Flash does – and the reason? Simply because Flash is already installed on the vast majority of machines. I don’t see why providers of online video or other media would see a benefit in using a Silverlight-based player – the risk to losing hits is too great at this point in time. The best way for Microsoft to get Silverlight on people’s machines would be if they started bundling it with Internet Explorer, but then that would be deemed anti-competitive. I guess it’s catch-22 for Microsoft’s Silverlight unless they can make bigger chips into Adobe’s Flash dominance.
Unbelievable to think that this was cutting edge, and in the same way so long ago.. An early 80’s advert for the Atari home computer systems (like the VCS/2600)
Situated in Japan, the Canal City shopping centre has an amazing 2D waterfall, that has precision nozzles controller by computer – meaning they can create text, objects, or anything else in the water. Originally found on Gizmodo.
I didn’t know that people were this badly into engineering things out of lego, and trust me this is definitely engineering, in every sense of the word. But, yes, one person, naming himself “barebos” on YouTube, has created a V8 engine (32 valve no less) that took him 4 to 5 months to build from scratch! You can also check out some of his other creations that he’s put up on the popular video-sharing website.
Pushing around the internetz, minding my own business, I fell upon an old Gizmodo article of a year ago about a cat that you can buy, from Japan. No ordinary cat, no, but a robotic electrocute your-family-and-take-over-the-house sort of kitty. Scarily realistic, you would wonder if children would be able to sleep at night after seeing this thing for more than 5 minutes.. But then you find out, what’s even stranger is that this metallic feline is aimed at people that can’t own animals, for whatever reason. Kill it I say, and save the free world.
Microsoft announced that Sky have launched their new online services, using Silverlight – the online video competitor to Adobe’s Flash. But is it significant enough?
