Collection – Page 3 – MediaArchaeologyLab

Collection, Ephemera, Object of the Week

POW! WHAM! Lenticular Sign

When you look at it head on, it says “POW!”. When you look at it from the sides, it says “WHAM!”. Simple but effective. Not sure where this piece originated from; our faculty sponsor, Professor Balsamo, just brought it in one day as an interesting art piece.

Images like these are an example of Lenticular printing, which involves the interlacing of two or more images where each image has its light refracted in a different direction, resulting in the illusion of the image “changing” as you view it from different angles. I was not able to quickly find any particularly interesting articles, but the Wikipedia page for Lenticular printing is still a pretty good read if you are interested in how it works. This type of printing is also responsible for the “3D” props you sometimes see at illusionist exhibitions or for movie advertisements at the theatre, where they’ve interlaced many images to achieve the effect of the image “moving” as you view it from different angles. Our POW! WHAM! sign has only two different images interlaced, but there is a lot you can do with this kind of technique. 😊

Collection, Ephemera, Object of the Week

Godzilla (1954)

Did you know that this film is free to borrow and watch on the Internet Archive? Almost 70 years old this year, this movie still holds up as an excellent watch. It is a lot more somber than you would expect. Most people nowadays associate Godzilla with tacky merchandise and an epic scale of destruction, but originally Godzilla was posed as a very frightening consequence of nuclear war. If you have only seen Godzilla, King of Monsters!, I would still recommend giving the original version a watch-through; the ending has a noticeably different tone.

There is quite a lot of interesting retro technology featured in the film. Old telephones, antenna TVs, and automobiles, it is a fascinating movie for media archeology purposes. This movie epitomizes our lab’s motto “We dig culture.”

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

Macintosh 128k

This wonderful machine has been sitting in our lab for the entire time we have been open. Released in 1984, this was not Apple’s first computer; the Apple I released almost a decade earlier in 1976 as Apple’s first computer. However, this computer is most notable for being the very first in the “Macintosh” or Mac line of computers. Like modern iMacs, the computer, monitor, and disk reader are integrated into one package, and if you booted it up and looked at its user interface, it might look familiar if you’re a user of modern MacOS versions. It’s one of our favorite computers of the lab, so be sure to marvel at it next time you stop by 😉

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

PowerMac G4

Originally released in 1997, the PowerMac is an interesting line of computers. These computers were being released roughly alongside the iMac G3s, which you may recognize as the colorful “jellybean” computers living in our lab. You would think PowerMac G3 would refer to a single computer, but the G3 editions were actually a whole line of computers; their cases originally shared the beige design seen in machines such as the Apple //c or the Macintosh 128k but starting in January 1999, when the Blue and White model was released, they were completely redesigned. You can check out apple-history.com’s entries for the original beige PowerMac G3, the Blue and White model, and the PowerMac G4 by clicking any of these links! The PowerMac G4 included multiple different versions, including the G4 Cube which, in our opinion, has a very fun design.

Collection, Ephemera, Object of the Week

Voyager Golden Record Replica

Of course, the copy we have in the lab is not the original Golden Record, which was made in 1977 and is currently on the Voyager traveling through interstellar space. This record was designed to attempt to educate any recipients that could discover the voyager about earth, the surrounding solar system, the human species, and other similar information. It contains images and audio (transcribed onto the disk) of nature, music, speech, and a message from Jimmy Carter, the U.S. president at the time. If you want to learn more, I recommend this page from NASA on the contents of the record, as well as this page from NASA explaining the images on front of the disk.

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

Comdyna GP-6

The Comdyna GP-6 is an analog computer from the late 1960s. The first question you might ask after looking at it is “how am I supposed to use this?” After looking up the operator’s manual as well as several YouTube videos, from what I could gather you would use various banana connectors to input information about the different variables involved in an equation, each variable set to a different “channel” of the computer, and the Comdyna GP-6 would compute the result and send it to output. Most applications I’ve found online of this computer seem to be for solving differential equations. To visualize the result of the program, you would often connect an oscilloscope to the computer (shown in this paper by Ray Spiess , the inventor the computer, on page 69).

Looking at it, you may think its relevancy ended after other non-analog computers, such as the Apple Lisa or TRS-80, were produced, but according to Ray Speiss it was in production for at least 36 years after its initial creation (p. 68). The previously linked paper goes into more detail, but essentially it was a very popular machine for teaching control systems to students in universities, as well as for a few other very specialized lines of work (Speiss p.70).

Collection, Ephemera, Object of the Week

Furbies

During the late 90s, these creatures were everywhere. Did you know they were, in part, influenced by the Tamagotchi? According to this article (which is a fascinating read), one of the big inspirations for the Furby was because the main architect of the toy, David Hampton, was disappointed that you “couldn’t pet” a Tamagotchi. Another part of what made Furbies such a hit was the innovative approach taken during their development; in order to stand out among many of the electronic toys of the time, the creators of the Furby decided to make it seem as if it had a life of its own, which, as Peters explains in the linked Bustle article, is also why they can also be seen as creepy. They are supposed to learn, adapt, and talk to each other.

We are big fans of the Furby here at the lab; we think they are ugly in an endearing way, which is why we have at least three of them. We have positioned them to guard our Laserdisc collection. They don’t quite work, so we don’t know what their personal opinions on our multitude of different movies and vinyl records are, but perhaps, in the future… 😉

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

Apple eMate 300

It was one of the earlier examples of a touchscreen laptop; released in 1997 (which you might notice is extremely close to the release date of the iMac G3 in 1999), it is kind of similar to a Microsoft Surface laptop today. However, unlike the Surface, the eMate was not all that powerful, and was actually intended mostly for use in schools by young children. This is the main reason for its striking appearance, which even back in the time it was originally released looked more like a plastic toy than a laptop.

You may be surprised to learn that despite looking like a cheap toy, the Florida police department had plans to replace their computers with the eMate due to it being cheap and user friendly, as described in this article from MacWorld by Benj Edwards.

(Psst. You might also be interested to learn about the rest of the Apple Newton line of devices; where the eMate 300 is an early predecessor for a touchscreen laptop, the other Newtons were a predecessor for what we would call a tablet today. 😉)

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

Nintendo Famicon

This is an Object of the Week post from the newsletter, originally posted November 13, 2023. I believe one of the lab members owned a Famicon at the time, but I do not think we have one inventoried.

The Famicon, the shortened nickname given to the Nintendo Family Computer and more famously known in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the NES), was one of Nintendo’s first video game consoles.

However, as you might notice, the Famicon is strikingly different in appearance from the NES. Despite being the same console as the NES, it has a completely different design. Why is that? During the Famicon’s initial release in Japan, the video game industry in the US was actually undergoing a massive recession.

This Wikipedia article and this article have more information, but during 1983, the US video game market was severely struggling. There were too many video game consoles on the market and most of the games for them were awful. Additionally, while this was happening, the Famicon was not meeting immediate success in Japan; its launch was riddled with a few critical issues, and so it had to be recalled and revised before it started meeting demand. As a result of both of these things, initially, Nintendo did not plan to release the Famicon to American audiences at all. However, after the Famicon’s technical issues were resolved and it became a hit in Japan, Nintendo started slowly releasing versions of it in American arcades and, seeing its success there, started thinking once more of a US release. They eventually decided to release a completely re-designed version of the Famicon as the NES, to smashing success.

Collection, Media Devices, Object of the Week

TR-005 Television Set

Every decade or so a new technological breakthrough will come up, one that often fascinates our collective imagination. The year 1961 launched one of these collective dreams, one in which humanity could break through the outermost layers of our stratosphere and have human bodies (as well as dogs and monkeys), whimsically facing the lack of our planet’s gravitational pull. That was the one of the very first milestones in the space race, which culminated in the Apollo 11 moon landing in July of 1969.

Human fascination with space rocket technology then filled our collective imagination and spread out to consumer goods as the aesthetics of Space Age futurism were designed into household appliances, architecture, and cars in order to create the impression of technological advancement. Panasonic was one of the many companies that took advantage of this aesthetic.

In 1966, Panasonic launched the TR-005, also known as the Orbitel. A five-inch CRT screen encased by two silver plastic hemispheres, the Orbitel was designed to look Space Age, resembling an astronaut helmet or an alien spaceship. It was built using cutting edge “solid state” technology, which meant that its futuristic case was filled with circuit boards instead of the more, at the time, common nixie/vacuum tubes. In its ads, Panasonic would boast that the TV would not need to be “warmed up” before a bright, greyscale, clear image would form on its CRT screen.

While not currently located in our lab, you can still view this dreamy television set sitting proudly in one of our display cabinets at the ATEC building.

– Originally written by Murilo Paiva Homsi.