This Is What 1970s Motion Capture Tech Looked Like

Re-Exposure is an occasional Motherboard feature where we look back on delightful old tech photos from wire service archives.

In February 1969, the creators of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, George Schlatter and Ed Friendly, thought it'd be great to put a computer in charge of making a variety show. At least that's what they said, anyway.

That was the conceit of Turn-On, an ABC series that replaced a laugh track with a Moog soundtrack and loaded the result with raunchy jokes. In his autobiography What's So Funny?: My Hilarious Life, initial guest host Tim Conway explained what viewers were tuning into:

To give you an idea of what Turn-On was like, in one sketch I was arrested and brought to a police station where I was allowed to make one phone call. I picked up the receiver and made an obscene call.

Surrealistic and context-free in the culture of 1969, it quickly became one of the most infamous examples of a show cancelled after its first episode. According to Conway, it was infamously removed from the air mid-broadcast in Cleveland, and many West Coast stations decided not to air it at all.

It's more tall tale than series at this point; actual video of on the show is hard to find. The only clip of the show even on the internet is of a short, voiced-over part of its unaired second episode that showed up on ABC News nearly two decades later. But we know that it included a whole lot of wacky technology—the Moog was still brand-new, and the animation was ambitiously ahead of its time.

Which brings us to the above photo. The shot shows a Turn-On dancer wearing a very primitive motion capture system that's controlling a character Pixar would never touch, but if you look closer, you'll notice that the motion capture system is built from Tinkertoys. Tinkertoys!

Here's the crazy part about this: It looks like it's fake, but it's totally real. It relies on a technology called Scanimate, a "data suit" that a developer named Lee Harrison III first built in 1960s. The Tinkertoys held in place potentiometers, which picked up signs of movement that were then controlled by a nearby computer.

According to a 1998 Medialab article from IEEE, Harrison's technology won a 1972 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences award, was involved in building the slick animated TV logos of the 1970s, and helped inspire the much more advanced technology that followed—which is in pretty much every Hollywood movie.

So even if we can't find the first episode of Turn-On, its fingerprints are pretty much everywhere else.

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This Build-It-Yourself Watch from the 70s Was Impossible to Put Together

Re-Exposure is an occasional Motherboard feature where we look back on delightful old tech photos from wire service archives.

Why don't we generally buy our watches in kit form? Why are they usually pre-manufactured?

The answer to that question brings us to this photo of the Black Watch, a product produced by Sinclair Radionics in the 1970s. 

"It's simple—anybody who can use a soldering iron can assemble a black watch without difficulty," a 1975 ad for this device promised. "From opening the kit to wearing the watch is a couple hours work."

It was the product of a very bright man—Sir Clive Sinclair, one of the greatest technologists in British history—but there were many, many problems with this setup.

For one thing, it was a bear to put together. In the June 1976 issue of the hobbyist magazine Practical Wireless, a reviewer described the arduous process, which required hours of hands-on work and a multi-day process to get the watch properly set. At one point, the author described the use of a slightly unusual tool to connect the batteries.

"The idea of using two wooden clothes pegs (of the spring type), two drawing pins and a piece of insulated wire solved the problem," the article explained. "This enabled the batteries to be fitted one at a time and made the procedure comparatively easy."

And even when you did get the LCD watch put together, it had numerous problems, according to Planet Sinclair: It was susceptible to static from clothing, it ran at different speeds based on the outside temperature, and the batteries had a tendency to die out quickly or even explode.

On top of all this, there were supplier and manufacturing issues. According to a 1982 InfoWorld article, Sinclair's first manufacturing partner backed out, and its replacement partner, ITT, struggled to produce them at scale and had static problems of its own—often ruining the watches before they even got to consumer.

The watch faced numerous returns and nearly bankrupted Sinclair Radionics, which had to be bailed out by the British government. 

Sir Clive Sinclair is brilliant in many ways, but he probably should have left this idea on the shelf.

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This Trippy Image Shows How Supercomputers Helped Build Better Jet Engines

Re-Exposure is an occasional Motherboard feature where we look back on delightful old tech photos from wire service archives.

Most people have likely never seen a supercomputer in person, let alone sat on one, as the vintage Cray supercomputers memorably allowed people to do.

But for those unfamiliar with these multi-million-dollar supercomputers, perhaps one of the most awesome and interesting use cases for them is perhaps jet engine design.

Above, computer scientist John Aldag (a Cray employee) is shown in 1983, using a Cray machine to virtually test the compressor blades on the front of a jet for any inconsistencies that might show themselves. (Aldag had deep familiarity with graphics related to Cray machines, by the way, once helping to produce a paper titled "Requirements, Status and Plans for Graphics on Cray Computers" that he presented to the Cray user group in 1986.)

So why a use an extremely expensive Cray supercomputer for this? Why not an IBM PC?

A 1997 press release from Stanford University, announcing the launch of Department of Energy-funded supercomputer simulations for aircraft engine design, breaks down the benefits of testing compressor blades using high-powered supercomputing technology such as Cray's:

The first component in an aircraft jet engine is the compressor, which raises the pressure of the air flowing through the engine. The efficiency of the engine is strongly dependent on the quality of the air flow through the compressor. Improper flow patterns can cause compressor-blade vibrations that can cause premature engine failure. A good engine design requires large investments in testing because the flows that occur in compressors are not now adequately predictable. A goal of the center is to be able to predict these complex flows, predict the compressor performance under all possible operating conditions, and investigate flow-driven blade vibration problems, thereby dramatically reducing the need for costly testing.

In other words, jet-engine design is such an important thing not to get wrong that aerospace companies are willing to spend a whole lot of money to get it right.

As a result, this use case remains an important part of Cray's business, even today.

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This Tiny Terminal Was France’s Version of AOL

Re-Exposure is an occasional Motherboard feature where we look back on delightful old tech photos from wire service archives.

When the internet went mainstream in the United States around 1995 or so, many of its benefits had already embedded themselves deep into French society—but not through the internet.

That was thanks to a fateful decision by France Telecom to replace the country's telephone books with a videotex-style system that could hold far more information than the actual books could. The resulting Minitel, first formulated in 1978 and distributed nationally starting in 1982, was a clever idea, years ahead of what the rest of the world was doing. In France, it essentially nationalized computer-based services and made them something the average citizen had access to.

Minitel quickly evolved beyond phone books, as well. The 1987 photo above, just as an example, shows a Minitel user looking up information during the annual Paris-Dakar Rally offroad race.

It was a clever and important idea, but its long-term potential was limited, in part because the French government, in an attempt to protect the media, only allowed registered newspapers to make services for the Minitel.

The most successful types of services were, of course, adults-only. A 2015 episode of the popular podcast Reply All highlighted how the Minitel effectively evolved to include some of the world's first text-based sex chat lines, under the Minitel Rose, or Pink Minitel, monicker. Because it was really easy to fake gender using a text-based sex chat, it meant many of the people paid to chat were men pretending to be women.

Minitel made a few people rich, but when a platform emerged that could allow anyone to create content without a license (AKA the internet), its days were quickly numbered.

"Basically, Minitel innovated from 1978 to 1982, and then it stopped," Benjamin Bayart of the French Data Network ISP told the BBC in 2012.

The idea was so innovative that it didn't die until roughly three decades after its launch. But, fortunately for everyone, the internet quickly surpassed it.

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