Stereoscopic films had been around since the 1920s, but the 1950s was unquestionably the golden age of 3-D, with excited teenagers flocking to the cinema…
Browsing: Technology
This was the first practical way to play recorded music in your car and was invented by Bill Lear and developed in the 1960s by…
The selective weed killer known as “Agent Orange” became notorious for its use in the 1960s during the Vietnam War by US forces to eliminate…
Founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar, Amstrad had already built a reputation as a budget British manufacturer of low-priced, all-in-one hi-fi systems when they began…
The Lisa (pictured at right) was named after Steve Job’s daughter and was first introduced in early 1983. It worked on a Motorola 68000 at…
In 1977, 26-year-old Steve Wozniak and 29-year-old Steve Jobs marketed their new invention, the Apple II personal computer. In 1984, the revolutionary Apple Macintosh was…
Launched in 1993, Apple’s Newton MessagePad was the first ‘Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)’, a hand-held computer designed for organisational and communication tasks. The paperback-sized device…
In 1995, Apple partnered with the Bandai Company to create a gaming console called the Apple Pippin, which surprisingly was not a success. In fact,…
Early 1950s fore-runners of arcade games included photo booths which became a national craze and shuffle games which moved beyond bowling with Deluxe Shuffle Targette.…
Californian Nolan Bushnell created a game called Pong in 1971. The following year – with $250 of his own money and a matching investment from partner…
Before Automatic Teller Machines (ATM’s) were everywhere you had to withdraw your cash from a large building with human tellers and queues. OK, so we…
Cambridge-based Acorn Computers was set up in 1978 by Chris Curry – who had previously worked for Clive Sinclair – and Hermann Hauser. The company…
In 1975, Sony released Betamax – an analogue-recording and cassette format of magnetic tape for video. Advertised with the slogan that you can “watch whatever,…
A boombox (or Ghetto Blaster) – basically a large but portable cassette player with two or more loudspeakers – was first developed by Philips who…
In the days before Starbucks and Café Latté on tap from every corner coffee shop, the height of sophistication and convenience for the serious java-loving…
When they first appeared they were bulky and expensive. Three years after Texas Instruments invented the silicon chip, four function calculators (add, subtract, multiply and…
Reel-to-reel tape had never been a convenient medium: Apart from the awkwardness of handling several hundred feet of closely-wound tape, the thing had to be…
Citizens Band Radio had been around for years, but few people knew about them. 23 channels of two-way communication, frequented by curious techno-geeks, lost hikers…
1 9 7 4 – 2 0 1 2 (UK) Before the rise of 24-hour networks and readily accessible internet access, bored television viewers in…
Japanese and Dutch scientists invented the Compact Disc (CD) in 1981. It was able to record sound as microscopic changes in the surface of a…