Why Didn’t the Dream of a Laptop Upgrade Slot Take Off?

Yep, that's the NTT Personal Paldio PHS-321s, a phone-based modem for PCMCIA slots. Image: raneko/Flickr

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

The problem with laptops has, at least in recent years, been one of expandability. Once you buy a machine, you’re generally stuck with it, unless you’re willing to take it apart with repairs that have more in common with surgery than mechanics.

Part of this has to do with the complexity of our modern machines, but a bigger part is the fact that, simply, upgradability has become less of a concern for manufacturers.

But there was a time when laptop upgrades were a big deal—and that time was the 90s.

Here’s the story of PCMCIA, an acronym only a 90s laptop owner could love.

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“The devices may be as slim as credit cards, but the name is about as easy to read as a credit report. Happily, this may be the last time you need to say the acronym, PCMCIA.”

— A blurb from Popular Science, circa 1995, discussing the name change of PCMCIA to the easier-to-explain PC Card. (We’re using PCMCIA in every reference, just to be contrarian.) The confusing acronym, which stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association but which once earned the mocking nickname “People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms,” was also changed for another reason, according to Computerworld: the port wasn’t just about memory anymore, but about a wide variety of peripherals, such as modems.

The Poqet PC, which actually predates the PCMCIA standard. Image: Old-Computers.net

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The PCMCIA standard came about due to a need for flash memory in a tiny computer

In 1989, a computer that weighed just a pound and could fit inside a pocket was a big deal.

Portability, at this time, was not a virtue of computers. In September of 1989, Apple released its first portable Macintosh, a device that weighed 16 pounds and relied on lead-acid batteries, just like Power Wheels.

We’ve come a long way from that whole mess, and the key turning point may have been thanks to a company called Poqet Computer Company, which released a tiny DOS-based computer not long after Apple released its ill-fated Macintosh Portable. The Poqet PC, an XT-style clone with a DOS-based interface, tackled the problem of portability from the opposite direction as Apple—it went for a tiny scale, a scale too small for even a floppy drive, which would zap energy and add a lot of mechanical parts.

To make up for that, the company researched whether it’d be possible to use memory cards in its place. Problem was, most of the standards were bad, so they needed to create one.

Fortunately, they found a kindred spirit on the issue in Fujitsu, which felt that its memory-storage format had a lot of potential for PC-makers. Sensing the need, Fujitsu and Poqet eventually set the foundation for a standards organization in September of 1989. Soon, dozens of other companies were interested in hopping on board.

There was already some work on this front from the Japanese Electronics Industry Development Association, which had begun working on a memory card standardization scheme in 1985. PCMCIA initially borrowed JEIDA’s 68-pin connector setup, and over time the two groups worked together and their standards became functionally compatible.

The massive external disk drive for the Poqet PC needed twice as many AA batteries as the main device. Image: Old-Computers.net

The official PCMCIA standard came out in 1990, and the Poqet PC was first to the market with a compatible platform. The tiny laptop actually predates PCMCIA by a few months, and beyond that, the device offered a pretty nifty benefit: The tiny computer could work for months on just a couple of AA batteries. No lead acid here.

(Fujitsu soon swooped up the company.)

Befitting an agreed-upon standard, PCMCIA eventually morphed into a wide array of uses.

In 1994, for example, SanDisk designed the CompactFlash memory card, which is based on PCMCIA—effectively, it’s a smaller version of the memory cards that the Poqet and its successors used. The main difference between PCMCIA and CompactFlash beyond size is that CompactFlash has 50 pins instead of 68.

The platform ultimately became best known allowing laptops to have built-in modems, wireless cards, and other communication devices—something allowed after an update to the PCMCIA spec in 1991.

But beyond sheer storage and communication, there was a period in which it was assumed by some industry observers that PCMCIA would take over as the standard upgrade platform not just for laptops, but for PCs as a whole. In a 1993 article for PC Magazine, Winn Rosch envisioned a time when “you may even find a PC Card lurking in your toaster oven or your music synthesizer.”

Part of the reason was the versatility of the design. Putting a Sound Blaster in a 486 wasn’t hard, but it required a more technical hand than most PC owners were used to. The PCMCIA format, with its standardized design and foolproof installation process (just plug it into the slot!), made adding a hard drive into a machine something a mere mortal could do.

That said, it turned out that Rosch was only half-right. Technology eventually did come built into many of the normal devices we use on a daily basis, but it wasn’t the PCMCIA card; it was USB. (It wasn’t involved in any toasters, however, except for sheer novelty reasons.)

Look at this freaking thing! It’s a mouse that fits in a PCMCIA slot! Isn’t this insane?!

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Five interesting uses of the PCMCIA platform over the years

1. Voice dictation tools: In the 90s, IBM experimented with a hardware and software solution, Voicetype Dictation, that allows users to dictate commands to their computer. While this came in a standard ISA-style card for PCs, they also created a version of this for PCMCIA slots, according to The New York Times.
   
2. Memory expansion for Mercedes-Benz vehicles: Some models of Mercedes-Benz have PCMCIA slots, which sounds bizarre, but also has some major benefits, because it means that such devices theoretically support numerous kinds of flash memory for their drive consoles, particularly CompactFlash. Here’s a video (in Spanish) of the card reader in use.
   
3. Physical storage: After the PCMCIA standard gave way to the newer ExpressCard standard, some company came out with a device called the StashCard, which is basically a physical compartment for holding things—like pieces of paper you’re too lazy to dictate to your computer with your Voicetype Dictation card.
   
4. Remote controls: Also in the same subgenre of “uses for the slot now that it’s obsolete,” SlashGear pointed out in 2008 the existence of a device called the Outel USB Media Remote, which hid a computer remote control in the PCMCIA slot.
   
5. A friggin’ external mouse: Trying to carry a mouse along with your laptop can be a total pain in the butt, but a couple manufacturers decided it’d be awesome to solve that problem by creating an extremely thin mouse that fit in a PCMCIA slot and could charge inside the device when not in use. JUST LOOK AT THIS THING. IT IS A REAL PRODUCT.

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How PCMCIA keeps hanging on by a thread due to FCC inaction

As awesomely weird as that PCMCIA mouse is, it doesn’t rank as the weirdest use of the PCMCIA standard.

That honor goes to CableCard, an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to force the cable industry to let customers use third-party boxes for their cable systems. The weirdest-ever use of the PCMCIA format is the only one that maintains a modern-day legacy.

At first, there was an air of excitement around this device. In a 2004 article on the burgeoning phenomenon, New York Times writer David Pogue noted that the card, which stores subscriber information and the ability to descramble pictures, was “a bit of circuitry miniaturization that’s about 15 years overdue.”

But it was a complicated road to get to the card, as might be expected, considering the fact that this is the federal government we’re talking about. For one thing, CableCard entered the market just as PCMCIA was being replaced with the ExpressCard in PCs. And while CableCards could be installed in some televisions, the functionality was hobbled at launch, as it only supported one-way communication, meaning you could get standard cable channels but not video on demand.

Devices like TiVo often require multiple CableCard slots to record shows. CableCard is based on PCMCIA. Image: spine/Flickr

The cable industry spent years dragging its feet on the CableCard, which was bad news for TiVo, the tech company whose entire business model was reliant on customer access to these CableCards.

“Over the years we have heard that some consumers have issues breaking through these barriers when all they want to do is enjoy the very best TV experience through TiVo,” the company stated in 2010, as the FCC implemented new rules pushing cable companies to take the CableCard rules seriously.

It was just one of many headaches around this stupid card. (In 2007, Pogue wrote another article reminding folks that he wrote with excitement about the CableCard in 2004, only to see the bubble basically burst due to industry inaction.)

So we have this technology which is already based on an old standard, is sort of hobbled, and the cable industry doesn’t really like it.

Why not replace it? Well, last year, the FCC got very close to approving such a strategy, which would have created a software-based solution to the problem, effectively replacing the CableCard (which Wired eloquently called “a technological annoyance beyond many people’s willingness to endure”) with an app on your Roku or Apple TV.

There was a lot of back-and-forth on this issue. At one point, Google and other tech companies tried to push the FCC to let them make their own set-top boxes, before the FCC moved in the direction of getting rid of the set-top box altogether.

It almost went through. And then… well, let’s just say that there’s a new boss, and as a result, we’re probably going to be living with this weird bastardized version of PCMCIA for a little while longer.

But hey, if you own a TiVo, you can thank the FCC (and indirectly, the folks who built PCMCIA way back when) for making it possible, even if it’s a little convoluted.

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The PCMCIA slot, which in many ways was designed to make our laptop computers upgradeable without a whole lot of headaches, has largely gone the way of the lead-acid battery as a peripheral for our computing devices.

Even the ExpressCard slots, which were fairly common for a time, have largely faded from most modern laptops. No Macbook model has supported the expansion card format since 2012, and while some PCs still support them, they haven’t been too common for a few years now.

Heck, the group formerly known as PCMCIA doesn’t exist anymore—it was usurped by the USB Implementers Forum in 2010. Guess we don’t care about expansion devices on laptops anymore.

But despite all that, in a weird way, the credit-card-sized form factor of the PCMCIA slot is making a bit of a comeback. And it’s thanks to the very kind of community that found value in the upgradeability use case of the card slot oh-so-many years ago.

Last year, a project called EOMA68 got off the ground with a campaign on CrowdSupply, raising $199,220. The conceit of the campaign was this: It’s an open-source computer, complete with diagrams and the whole nine yards, that is portable, can fit in pretty much any casing you give it, and is—wait for it—the exact size of a classic PCMCIA card.

Why this specific size and build? Easy: Because PCMCIA cases are really tough.

“If you put a devboard into your pocket, it’s going to get destroyed very very quickly,” creators Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton and Christopher Waid wrote on the CrowdSupply page. “This is why we picked legacy PCMCIA because you get a robust metal case.”

In a weird way, these devices fulfill the mission of PCMCIA. However, they invert the equation, so that you’re not replacing the parts around the computer, but the brains of the computer itself, in a way that keeps the user in control.

Now just imagine if the cable industry worked like that. Oh wait.

from Why Didn’t the Dream of a Laptop Upgrade Slot Take Off?

A Quick Take on Apple's QuickTake, a Pioneering Digital Camera That Flopped

"Woman photographing Golden Gate Bridge using Apple's QuickTake 100 camera that uses Kodak sensor instead of film to make electronic images for instant viewing on MacIntosh computers," from 1994. Image: John Harding/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

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

These days, Apple is pretty well known for the high quality of the cameras on its iPhones and iPads.

But there was a time when the digital photography revolution didn’t come quite so easy for the team in Cupertino. And that time came in June 1994, when the firm released the QuickTake, which TIME Magazine called the “first consumer digital camera.” (The first digital camera, it’s said, was created by Fuji in 1989.)

But the first version of the QuickTake, shown above taking a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, highlighted some of the more questionable faults of the device at the time.

For one thing, it was not high resolution: It could only shoot photos at a maximum resolution of 0.3 megapixels, or 640x480. For another, there was little in the way of space on this thing: At the maximum 640x480, it could only store eight photos. At the smaller 320x240 (roughly the same resolution as a Sega Genesis, but with the ability to capture more colors), it could store 32.

And finally, it was not cheap: PC Magazine put its initial starting price at $749. You weren’t going to get analog quality from a digital camera—at least not at this juncture. Pro photographers were understandably skeptical.

Apple released a handful of upgrades that got past some of the initial camera’s flaws, but the sales weren’t there and Apple’s heart wasn’t in it. Steve Jobs eventually killed the project, along with a whole lot of other pet projects, in 1997.

Of course, the hidden tale behind this device is that it really only has Apple’s branding on it—the company didn’t build the device. Instead, as Mashable explains, Kodak did all the heavy lifting on the QuickTake 100, but was wary of releasing the device under its own name, for fear of damaging its film business.

This turned out to be a fatal mistake for Kodak, as other companies—neither named Kodak or Apple—would soon come out with their own variations on the QuickTake that improved on the technology in every way.

Apple itself ditched Kodak for Fuji for the QuickTake 200, Cult of Mac notes. The change gave the cameras compatibility with the primitive SmartMedia flash memory cards, as well as a design that matched the film cameras of the era. But the upgrade wasn’t enough to change the fortunes of the QuickTake brand. The technology was quickly superseded, by the way: As Mac enthusiast Andy Baird notes on his website, these cameras are basically useless in the modern day.

Apple was fine, of course—they were really only dipping their toes into this sector. But Kodak wasn’t.

from A Quick Take on Apple's QuickTake, a Pioneering Digital Camera That Flopped

The Story of FMX, a Wannabe Radio Standard That Was Killed in a Very Public Way

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Recently, the Norwegian government—which has helped the country become first-movers on the electric car front—decided that it wanted to be ahead of another kind of curve.

It was a curve that not everyone was ready for, however. Norway recently decided to drop FM radio, in favor of a modern equivalent, digital audio broadcasting (DAB). This early move comes with a lot of risks—in this case, leaving portions of the Norwegian population without a working radio—as does every other attempt to mess with the technology that drives the airwaves.

Today I’d like to highlight one of those attempts, an effort to improve the FM signal that was taken down in a very public way.

We’re making noise about signal over here.

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Why attempts at building a better radio standard have failed with surprising consistency

New standards in the radio industry have come up repeatedly over the years, and few of them have stuck.

For example, did you know that there’s an existing standard for broadcasting AM stations in stereo? According to Meduci, LLC, a manufacturer of AM stereo receivers, approximately 66 radio stations in the United States support this standard, known in the industry as C-QuAM. The standard has been around for 40 years, since 1977, when it was first published in an IEEE journal, but has only seen take-up more recently as a direct side effect of it being included as a feature with HD radios. It’s niche, but if you’re looking to hear Rush Limbaugh’s voice in a slightly nicer frequency, you can certainly find a way to listen to it if you have the right device.

Perhaps the most fascinating of these attempts to improve the radio signal, however, is that of FMX. Formulated in the late 1980s as an update to the FM standard, it intended to solve a major weakness with FM that had been lingering since stereo had been added in the early 1960s: When you move to the edges of the coverage area, the sound quality gets really low.

As you can probably tell by the fact that it’s generally still an annoyance in many vehicles today, FMX failed to solve that problem.

But the reason why it failed to solve that problem is more complicated than saying it didn’t work. There were both technical and political issues at play.

The technology, for what it’s worth, did have the right folks supporting it: The brainchild of Tom Keller, an engineer with the National Association of Broadcasters, and Emil Torick, who worked in the same role for the CBS Technology Center, FMX was intended to fix stereo’s weaknesses in low-quality areas. The best part? It was backwards compatible. It would reduce noise and improve the fidelity of FM stations for stereos with upgraded equipment, but those with cheap beater radios would still have the same staticky-in-outlying-areas experience that they did before.

An October 1989 Radio-Electronics article that discussed the FMX controversy. Image: Internet Archive

Paul Riismandel, a radio industry observer who co-founded the industry news outlet Radio Survivor, notes that the FMX technology wasn’t the first of its kind. For example, Dolby attempted to bring its noise-reduction technology, common in cassette tapes, to radio stations in the 1970s, but its offering was generally ignored due to the fact that proprietary equipment was needed. (Over at the Internet Archive is a sample of what Dolby FM sounded like during a 1978 Minnesota Public Radio broadcast.)

But FMX likely got further than most due to two factors that became apparent in the 1980s: The fuzziness of radio stations in fringe parts of the broadcast areas, and the pristine sounds of the compact disc, which was becoming popular at the time.

“FMX was a way for radio to compete with this new digital technology and adapt to listener expectations,” Riismandel noted.

But the FMX technology proved controversial within the radio industry due to two separate incidents that cost the technology its momentum. The first came about during the 1986 summer edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Chicago. In an attempt to show off the technology to tradeshow attendees, the Chicagoland FM station WFMT, which was known for pumping classical tunes on a very powerful FM signal, switched to FMX technology as part of a secret test to demonstrate the technology in the wild.

The station’s own engineers weren’t even told of the move. It was supposed to go completely unnoticed by anyone except the handful of Summer CES attendees who were checking out the FMX demo.

Problem is, it was very noticeable to regular listeners. Rich Warren, a longtime Chicagoland-area radio pro, reported in the Chicago Tribune that WFMT had received numerous complaints about its signal quality during the week of CES.

“We applaud CBS’ attempt at such a system. But as it presently exists there is a compatibility problem,” noted the station’s chief engineer, Alfred C. Antlitz. “Thus we cannot broadcast with the system. It seems to cause increased multipath distortion for listeners. Perhaps if CBS reduced the system’s noise reduction capabilities the problem might be reduced.”

Warren, a prominent figure in Chicago radio who to this day hosts the long-running folk music program The Midnight Special on WFMT, appeared to be completely turned off by the hiccup, comparing the technology to Sony’s Elcaset flop.

“With any luck, by next January it will be just a memory,” Warren wrote.

It almost was, thanks the the November 1986 closure of the CBS Technology Center, the industrial design house which produced FMX, along with numerous other important broadcasting technologies.

But FMX survived the closure, with NAB agreeing to take on the technology and spinning it off, with the help of investors, as Broadcast Technology Partners (BTP). From there, the engineers involved in FMX took the lessons from the experiment’s initial stumble and kept improving it, with the goal of ensuring that the WFMT incident was a mere hiccup rather than a long-term problem.

It was actually something else that did FMX in.

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“These improvements fail to take hold because their effects are subtle, and require new equipment in order to benefit from them. On top of that, broadcasters bear the cost burden of upgrading their facilities.”

— Radio Survivor’s Paul Riismandel, explaining why upgraded radio technologies such as FMX, AM stereo, or Dolby FM struggle in the radio market. He compares the situation to a chicken-and-egg situation: “Broadcasters are understandably reluctant to upgrade if listeners don’t have compatible equipment, and listeners are reluctant to upgrade if there aren’t many enhanced broadcasts to tune in,” he noted. In this sense, Norway’s decision to pull off the band-aid in a harsh way makes some sense, as the closest parallel to this switchover, the move to drop analog television in favor of digital, required an act of Congress to pull off in the US.

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How FMX was basically killed by a single MIT lecture

In early 1989, FMX had improved enough that more than 100 radio stations were genuinely interested in turning it on. But around the time, the technology faced its second major setback, this time closer to a body blow than a mere stumble.

It came thanks to a noted Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Amar Bose, who at the time was considering bringing a certain fancy home radio to the market through his namesake company. (Fun fact: I wrote about him recently. What a coincidence!)

Bose had taken up an interest in the FMX effort because he was trying to figure out if his company’s forthcoming Wave radios would need to support it, but he started doing the math, and he concluded that the numbers simply did not check out. Then he did some real-world tests and was even less impressed.

In January of 1989, Bose shared his findings with the world during an MIT lecture. BTP wasn’t happy about Bose speaking out—something the engineering professor alluded to before presenting his research.

From the Feb. 28, 1989 issue of MIT's The Tech.

“I have been threatened with legal action, placing me under heavy personal liability, if I proceed with this lecture,” Bose said, according to an April 1989 New York Times article recalling the incident.

The threat from BTP didn’t stop Bose or his colleague, William Short. In the lecture, he made the case that the technology worked much better in the lab than in the field, and that, if used in the real world, the quality of radio reception would be severely degraded by the use of FMX, no matter if the technology was installed or not.

Bose had done his homework, asking BTP for information on the technology they used, getting ahold of said technology, then conducting tests of his own using the campus radio station. And he was ready with a whole lot of data. Radio Electronics reported in October of 1989 that “those in attendance received a massive document detailing the mathematical modeling, computer simulation of the effects produced by FMX, and a summary of results obtained from actual broadcasting experiments that led to those startling conclusions.”

What Bose found was greatly disappointing. But the disappointment was felt on the part of FMX’s creators as well—disappointment in Bose’s research, that is. BTP’s Emil Torick, who was at Bose’s presentation, strongly disagreed with the professor’s findings and argued the whole situation was an attempt to manipulate the media and tear apart FMX as a technology.

“We feel there is grossly misleading information being presented here which is not a representation of the real world,” Torick told UPI at the time.

It was a dramatic scene, with Bose and Short at one point in a showdown with Torick, who criticized the duo for what he called “a grossly misleading conclusion wrapped in what Mr. Bose calls beautiful mathematics.”

Rich Warren, the Chicagoland radio personality who winced the first time FMX reared its head, was ready with another takedown piece after Bose’s lecture.

“The effects of multipath on an FMX encoded signal are increased distortion, increased noise, stereo soundstage motion, volume level changes and even timbre changes, he concluded,” Warren wrote in a Chicago Tribune piece. “I have heard the tapes of the worst-case FMX broadcasts and they sound horrendous. It even adds distortion when listening in mono.”

In the months afterwards, BTP tried to defend itself, making the case that the FMX technology had been tested, successfully, in the wild elsewhere, with few complaints from the public. But Bose’s argument came at a pivotal time for the technology, and the negative PR in the end killed BTP’s chances of taking FMX mainstream.

“At that point we needed more money for additional R&D, but there were limited funds and licensing problems,” FMX co-inventor Tom Keller recalled in an article honoring Torick after his 2010 passing. “Even though we had some very successful stations, the system died a slow death.”

It’s not every day that a single two-hour lecture kills a major industry initiative.

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“Standards-setting in broadcast is as much a political process as it is a technical one,” Riismandel tells me, and it makes a whole lot of sense.

There are a lot of stories like that of FMX, though not nearly as dramatic or played out on such a public stage.

(One recent example is the fight by broadcasters to convince smartphone-makers to add FM radio capabilities to their devices. Approximately 43 percent of phones sold in the US have built-in FM chips installed but not activated, according to the National Association of Broadcasters. NAB has been making the case in recent years—somewhat in vain in Apple’s case—that smartphones should support the ability to listen to FM radio, something they could technically do if it was enabled by manufacturers.)

The politics of the matter usually limit uptake—or, in some cases, encourage it. In recent years, HD Radio gained prominence and uptake in the US after the Federal Communications Commission picked it as the prevailing standard over a number of other technologies, including the DAB standard that Norway is using.

HD Radio, which adds a data layer to traditional AM and FM broadcasts, started slow and has generally stayed in that setting, but it nonetheless found a niche, thanks in no small part to many modern cars including HD Radio functionality (22.5 million cars had it as of 2015). Even so, it’s still failed to turn the needle for some. In 2014 for example, one radio-industry researcher told the St. Cloud Times that the technology had seen “no meaningful uptake or adoption.”

Nothing against the Norwegians or anyone else attempting to make radio fidelity better, but maybe these attempts to update and/or replace AM and FM radio just aren’t worth the trouble.

Maybe radio was meant to be analog all along, in its fuzzy, imperfect form. We have podcasts for everything else.

from The Story of FMX, a Wannabe Radio Standard That Was Killed in a Very Public Way

Help: Does Anyone Know the Story Behind This Giant Computer?

Image: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty

A little over a month ago, I started writing this great column for Motherboard called Re-Exposure, which highlights fascinating historic tech photographs like Jay Leno taking part in an AOL chat, the Atari-linked history of Chuck E. Cheese, and Andy Warhol’s excellent taste in computers.

But sometimes the photos on these wire services are so old that the details are nonexistent. Case in point: Above, this wonderful, amazing photo of a gigantic calculator inside a control room at a textile factory. It’s so huge that it doesn’t look real—like they would’ve been better off with an abacus instead. It looks like a science fiction version of computers pulled directly out of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

It’s sitting in the Getty Images archive as an editorial photo, so it happened. But this house-size calculator—if that's even what it is—doesn’t appear to exist out the confines of this photo.

Here’s my best guess about the photo: In 1959, the Italian company Olivetti, then known for its typewriters, created one of the earliest mainframe computers. Italy’s first one, in fact. And the Olivetti Elea 9003, as it turned out, was given to a textile firm named Merino, which is renowned for its wool.

Looking for answers, I reached out to a wide variety of sources. The Woolmark Company, which owns the Merino brand, never got back to me. But the museum that houses Olivetti’s history did, as did Mondadori Portfolio, the Italian photo house that owns this picture. Neither could offer any additional insight: The only info about the picture that Mondadori had was on the back of the photo, which the Getty caption sums up: "Two Italian engineers watching a big electronic calculator placed into the control room of a textile industry. Italy, 1960s."

And Lucia Alberton of the Associazione Archive Storico Olivetti (Olivetti Historical Archive Association) could offer no information about the photo, other than this: “I can surely tell you that the computer you can see in the picture is not the Elea 9003.”

The 1959 Elea 9003's keyboard and central console. Image: Christian Jensen/Wikipedia

The mystery behind this photo is eating at me a little, so I’m gonna release this out to the world. Motherboard readers, can you tell me anything about this amazing photo of two scientists working in the coolest control room of all time? I'm just a tweet away at @ShortFormErnie, or you can ping Motherboard at letters@motherboard.tv.

from Help: Does Anyone Know the Story Behind This Giant Computer?

This Photo Shows How Computer Chips Were Made in 1975

A Motorola engineer looking at masks for chip engraving in 1975. Image: Henry Groskinsky/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

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

“It looks like a three-dimensional skyline. You can get totally lost in it.”

Last year, photographer Christoph Morlinghaus gained notice in Wired for a project of his that involved taking very high-resolution shots of microprocessors throughout computing history. Some of the chips he shot, like the Cyril GXm, were underpowered minor players in computing history. But they still look interesting.

So how do they get these impossibly complex designs into the processors? That leads us to the photo above, featuring a Motorola engineer in the 1970s, taking a close look at the drawn transistors of a computer chip. These sheets, all color-coded, would soon be printed onto a piece of silicon, giving a tightly-wound processor more computing ability than one could ever get from a printed circuit board on its own.

A major innovation came about in the computing space roughly a decade prior, when it was realized that transistors could be drawn into complex integrated circuits. Those circuits, tightly packed and incredibly detailed, are printed at tiny sizes onto silicon wafers. This process, invented by Texas Instruments researcher Jack Kilby, got around a major problem at the time—the “tyranny of numbers,” or the idea that you can only fit so many transistors into a certain amount of space. By making the transistors tiny, you can fit a whole lot more, clearly. (Though it makes the chips more susceptible to dust, hence the existence of “clean rooms.”)

But what about putting them on the chip? That involves a process called photolithography, which shrinks the circuit designs to a tiny scale and embeds them onto purified silicon. This YouTube clip, featuring UK-based Microsoft Research director Christopher Bishop, does a good job of explaining the photolithography process. Initially, Bishop asks a young girl to write her initials on a grain of rice, which she clearly can’t do. Then he hands her a clear sheet of paper, has her put her initials on that, then uses a combination of light and lenses to display a picture of those initials on a grain of rice. When printing on silicon, chemicals are added to the process, effectively “printing” the design to the wafer.

It’s kind of like microfilm, except on steroids—and it’s the basis behind pretty much every computing device you use.

from This Photo Shows How Computer Chips Were Made in 1975

Before There Was Netflix, Hong Kong Had the First On-Demand Streaming Service

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Recently, I got a little grumpy over at Product Hunt, due to an undercurrent of snark around the fact that Netflix still has a DVD service.

The reason for this was that too many people were skeptical about whether such a service was still necessary. It absolutely, totally is, and I’ll give you one reason why: Netflix’s DVD service has roughly 93,000 options, while its streaming service (between shows and movies) has fewer than 8,000 options—ensuring that DVDs will have a reason to exist for quite a while.

Why such a big difference? Well, it’s because running a streaming service and sussing out the contracts is really freaking hard. (Hollywood is a tough negotiator.) And, by the way, Netflix wasn’t the first to do video-on-demand in this way.

Let me tell you about who was.

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“If interactive television cannot work in Hong Kong, it can’t work anywhere.”

— William Lo, the head of Hongkong Telecom’s interactive division, speaking to The Economist in 1998 about why he felt the company’s about-to-launch video-on-demand service, iTV (or interactive TV, no relation to Apple’s long-rumored vaporware), was likely to succeed in the city-state.

Among the reasons the telecom firm was so willing to spend $200 million to test the idea: The autonomous territory has one of the world’s highest per-capita incomes; the relatively small size of the region made it easy to cover the territory with fiber-optic cable; and consumers in Hong Kong had a clear taste for both technology and entertainment. Cable television, which only came to Hong Kong in 1993, had saturated 25 percent of the market at the time iTV launched. No matter the case, making iTV happen wasn’t cheap: The company reportedly invested $1.5 billion in the entire project before it had served a single customer.

A prototype of iTV, as shown in an Associated Press news clip. Image: YouTube

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iTV had really huge ambitions. Almost embarrassingly huge.

In a lot of ways, iTV wanted to be everything to everyone. The company's promises were massive—far beyond those that Netflix has ever made. That’s because, with the internet relatively young, it in some ways wanted to be the primary way that users experienced those tubes.

A 1997 story about the service from Varsity magazine, a publication of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s journalism school, highlighted how executives were calling the initiative “a 24-hour private cinema and shopping mall at home.”

The piece, featuring an interview from Hongkong Telecom’s Lo, spoke of the concept (already being tested in trials at the time of the piece) in bold terms, including implying that the set-top box would bring impressive levels of interactivity to homes. Banking services were planned. In other words, this wasn’t just a prototype for Netflix, which wasn’t even mailing DVDs by this point, but a juiced-up WebTV.

Helping support the boldness of the claims was the company’s own research. The company claimed that 80 percent of the people they interviewed were likely to want to use a video-on-demand service, and that 70 percent of current cable subscribers would see iTV as a complement for cable—not a replacement.

Lo tried to sell the concept with examples that had clearly gone through the marketing department.

“Imagine you are extremely tired after a full schedule of work,” he told the student publication. “You suddenly remember you have to serve dinner for 20 people tomorrow. You find that there is no food left and the supermarket is closed. Desperately, you just want to watch a good movie to ease your nerves.”

That was the windup. Immediately after came the pitch: “This annoying experience may occur every day in modern people’s lives, and iTV’s services provide a solution.”

There are plenty of innovations that pledge to change the world, from Casio’s promise that it could replace an entire band with a keyboard to… well, WebTV’s promise to bring the internet to your living room. But in some ways, iTV wasn’t looking to change the entire world (at least not at first), but instead make the lives of as many as 6 million people really, really, awesome.

The firm it held a launch ceremony for its video-on-demand service on March 23, 1998, less than three weeks before Netflix mailed its first DVD.

Hongkong Telecom didn’t just have to sell the public on the service. It had to build the entire infrastructure, strike the deals, and put all the technology into place for a perfect launch.

But the launch wasn’t perfect.

A service with 780 hours of movies seems so quaint nowadays. (YouTube screenshot)

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Why iTV failed to live up to the massive pre-release hype

Consumers in Hong Kong obviously had plenty of reason to be excited about video-on-demand, especially as the service was completely new and unprecedented on the world stage.

A commercial for the service sold the potential of a ton of entertainment for the time—780 hours of movies, 95 hours of music, 150 hours of radio, and the ability to go shopping when you weren’t trying to take in any of that entertainment. And the price wasn’t too bad, either—for the first three months, $188 a month in Hong Kong dollars, or about $24 in US dollars at the time.

Archival footage from the AP showing early models of iTV.

But the reality of the matter was a bit cloudier. Just 90,000 households subscribed to iTV at its peak, according to CNN. (The number looks particularly rough in light of the fact that so much money was spent on the service, and that Hongkong Telecom had lined up 40,000 pre-orders.) The service struggled in large part because of a combination of technical issues and consumer confusion.

In a 1999 Wall Street Journal article, written about a year after iTV’s introduction, the newspaper highlighted the story of Dennis Leung, a heavy user of the platform.

“Saturday between five and six I was trying to pick a movie, I had my beer, my snacks in front of me, the movie all picked out—and it took me 45 minutes to get the movie loaded,” Leung told the Journal.

The problem was that the movie he chose, Batman and Robin, had been loaded by too many users at once, which caused content-licensing issues, and he kept running into an error message. (The error message was not, as it turns out, “iTV is trying to protect you from a terrible movie.” That would be a useful error.)

And more problematic, wrote the Journal’s Christina Mungan, was that the financials—already a pain point due to the infrastructure costs—didn’t add up due to the low subscriber numbers and the set top boxes.

“It charges subscribers at most $35 a month for services that the company expects would be profitable at about $50 a month,” she wrote.

And like Netflix, licensing issues proved a major challenge as well. The device was actually supposed come to market in 1996, but was held up by a film-licensing rigamarole made more complicated than necessary because Hollywood saw Hong Kong as a piracy hotbed, and not without cause.

The result was that the device, expected to revolutionize computing throughout the territory, only caused a minor ripple effect. It proved a better lesson for telecom firms in other countries looking to get into the video-on-demand market than it did an actual standalone business.

iTV was a pioneer. And it took all sorts of arrows.

Janice Lee, a broadcasting executive for PCCW who headed marketing at iTV in the 90s, said that the sheer number of things that the platform could do confused the public.

“It was wonderful technology, very ahead of its time,” Lee told Businessweek in 2006. “But we were asking too much of consumers.”

Apparently, PCCW felt the same way, because they let the service die on the vine after acquiring Hongkong Telecom in 2000. By 2002, the service was dead.

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So the bad news is that iTV flopped. On the plus side, it wasn’t the basic idea that was the problem, but the execution.

And it wasn’t like that $1.5 billion investment was all for naught, either. Hongkong Telecom got in early on fiber-optic cables, and that made Hong Kong an attractive market for the tech sector, which could play with innovative ideas that were still trickling out on dial-up connections in other parts of the world. (It also made people using the internet in Hong Kong very happy.)

While iTV was still gaining its footing on the market, Microsoft scored a deal with Hongkong Telecom to bring Windows-based set-top boxes, a service it called Zoom, to the Hong Kong market.

And PCCW, after acquiring Hongkong Telecom, followed up on the basic idea of iTV and greatly improved on it, creating NOW Broadband, a service comparable to Verizon FIOS that proved much more successful than the initial effort. By early 2006, the company had roughly one-half of the world’s 1 million users using internet-based video-on-demand.

“This time around, we want to train them,” PCCW’s Lee told Businessweek in 2006. “Give them enough to chew on, but not too much.”

Video-on-demand did work in Hong Kong, and it did so before Netflix launched its own streaming service in the US. It just didn’t succeed with iTV.

Nowadays, 1.3 million people subscribe to PCCW's Now TV, according to TeleGeography, making it Hong Kong’s largest pay-TV provider. Not bad for a territory currently with a population of around 7.1 million people.

And the service is constantly improving. Here’s proof: Last year, the service’s set-top boxes gained access to Netflix.

In a way, it was kind of like they were going back to their roots.

from Before There Was Netflix, Hong Kong Had the First On-Demand Streaming Service

From Bankruptcies to Backstabbing, the Story of Chuck E. Cheese Has It All

Nolan Bushnell, creator of Chuck E. Cheese, poses in one of the company's franchises in 1985. Image: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

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

It’s not too common these days to see an arcade exist separately from another kind of entertainment—that is, there’s usually some kind of dining experience that comes with the video games in 2017. We have the guy behind some of the earliest video games to credit for that.

Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, came up with the Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre concept in 1977, initially as an effort to promote Atari’s own games. After Bushnell left the Warner-owned Atari, he bought out the rights to the concept and it became his primary meal ticket for a time. (Above, Bushnell is shown in an 1980s-era promotional photo.)

Read more: The Founder of Atari Wants You to Embrace Our Robotic Future

Pizza Time was noted for its ability to mesh food, animatronic characters, and video games into a single experience. (It was also, with its mascot Chuck E. Cheese, ahead of the pizza rat meme by more than 35 years.) But it could be a bit of sensory overload for people not used to computers—usually parents more than kids.

“Pizza Time is a whirling combination of garish lights and nonstop electronic noise that is quite unlike any other pizza parlor or video game arcade. It is part Star Wars, part Disneyland, and part social phenomenon,” InfoWorld’s Scott Mace wrote in 1981, in an special section titled “Countering Computerphobia.”

The concept of Pizza Time was an important one, and set the stage for similar concepts like Dave & Busters, which was founded in 1982. But fast expansion and financial losses caused the firm to default on a $50 million bond in early 1984, forcing the chain’s bankruptcy. Bushnell bailed out just before that happened.

Fortunately, another chain with a similar concept was ready to help. Showbiz Pizza Place—which came about in 1980 after a planned Pizza Time franchisee abruptly backed out of a contract due to concerns that competing animatronic technology would outpace what Bushnell had created—had quickly grown into major competitor of Pizza Time. The rivalry, for a time, was strong. And when Pizza Time went bankrupt, Showbiz, with its mascot bear Billy Bob Brockali, was ready to save the day.

The chains eventually merged, and that’s how we got the modern day Chuck E. Cheese.

from From Bankruptcies to Backstabbing, the Story of Chuck E. Cheese Has It All

How the Commodore Amiga Turned Andy Warhol into a Computer Artist

Image: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

Commodore tried to upstage Apple by bringing out Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry for its Amiga launch event. It didn’t work, but Warhol showed genuine excitement for the platform.

Apple’s decision to go big and flashy with its launch of the Macintosh meant that there were some copycats.

Among those copycats in the mid-80s was its most prominent home-computer competitor: Commodore. In 1985, the company brought the Amiga to the public eye in a flashy event at the Lincoln Center in New York City, which you can watch over this way.

The first model of the Amiga had a number of major advantages over the initial iteration of the Mac, including its broad color palette, its impressive animation capabilities, and its ability to multitask. (These capabilities later came in handy in the world of cable television.)

Amiga’s software engineering head, Bob Pariseau, was the guy doing most of the talking during the launch event. He was fine, but he was no Steve Jobs.

Fortunately, Commodore had something better than Steve Jobs: Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry, who came out to demo the machine’s artistic capabilities.

“Are you ready to paint me?” Harry gamely asked Warhol.

After doing a flood fill on a digital snapshot of Harry—impressive then, and similar to Warhol’s silkscreens, but soon something that Microsoft Paint users worldwide could recreate painlessly—an interviewer asked Warhol how the Amiga compared to other machines he had played with.

“I haven’t worked on anything. I waited for this one,” Warhol responded.

It wasn’t actually the first time Warhol had used a computer—the Computer History Museum notes he had briefly played with an early Mac at a birthday party for art-world heir Sean Lennon—but Warhol quickly embraced the Amiga as an important new creative tool. (Before that, he was more excited about Xerox machines.)

In 1986, he showed up on the cover of Amiga World magazine, in an interview where he expressed excitement for the machine. He even produced a short movie with the device—something that didn’t get revealed until decades after his 1987 passing.

He may have been pulled into the Amiga event in the name of upstaging Apple, but Andy Warhol’s interest in the Amiga was genuine.

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

from How the Commodore Amiga Turned Andy Warhol into a Computer Artist

The Story of the Bose Wave, the Stereo System Built for the Infomercial Era

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Odds are that sometime in the last couple of decades or so, someone in your group of friends or family has received a snazzy countertop radio from a loved one.But it wasn’t their first experience with this device. Its echoes reverberated in living rooms around the country, promising to envelop even tiny rooms in the sounds of larger ones.

As likely as it is that you're seen a Bose Wave radio or music system in someone's house, the odds are much better that you’ve seen the commercials or magazine ads sometime over the past 25 years or so, rolled your eyes at how over-the-top the language was, and continued living your tinny-speaker life. But what if we were missing out on something good?

Today, we ponder the Bose Wave, the infomercial’s favorite speaker—a speaker, that, as it turns out, was a Christmas gift of sorts.

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“At this moment, I must say that I have never heard a speaker system in my own home which could surpass, or even equal, the Bose 901 for overall 'realism’ of sound.”

— Julian Hirsch, a reviewer for the audiophile magazine Stereo Review, offering a notably breathtaking September 1968 review of the Bose 901 speakers, the company’s first popular product. The Hirsch quote (along with “you’ll be reluctant to turn it off and go to bed,” a quip from High Fidelity magazine’s Norman Eisenberg) helped solidify both Bose as a company—this quote was frequently used in the company’s ads even decades after the 901 speakers were released—and Hirsch himself (he was to stereos what Lester Bangs was to the music that played on them). The quote is a good reminder that breathless language is not unheard of in the audiophile space—nor in the history of Bose.

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Bose was built on engineering, not aggressive advertising

OK, so we’ve set the stage a little bit: Bose is a giant company that has gained a lot of mileage from oohs and ahhs.

But as a company, Bose gained a heck of a lot more from its purely academic approach. Whether or not you feel the company’s Wave speakers are any good, there’s one thing that can’t be debated: The man whose company still sells those speakers was a brilliant guy whose innovative spirit can’t be defined by a single product, nor his marketing team.

Dr. Amar Bose, a Bengali-American whose father was an Indian freedom fighter, came to his success though his curious mind. As a 2005 Popular Science profile notes, he was ably taking apart all sorts of devices as a young teenager. He even built his own television. And his smarts proved an effective ticket to a career in academia.

But there was a problem he felt needed to be solved. As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student in the late 1950s, he grew frustrated with the poor audio quality of the high-end stereo system he bought himself as a reward.

"I studied the literature and bought the best system based on the specifications. But when I brought it home and plugged it in, it sounded terrible,” he explained to the magazine. “I was disappointed and confused. Why did so much of what I had been taught say it should be good, when my ears said it wasn’t?”

Cutaway illustration of the Bose Air Wave system. Image: William R. Short, Bose (1991)

That led Bose, who became an MIT professor of engineering, to dive into audio research on how to maximize the sound that could come out of a pair of speakers. Eventually, his research led him to make speakers that worked much the same way as actual music being played in a concert hall did—with the sound waves reverberating off the walls.

This thought process, as immortalized in this 1967 patent, led to the 901 speakers, the devices that helped drive the company’s long-term success and which are still sold today. That success allowed Dr. Bose, who remained an MIT professor in the midst of his company’s success, to further experiment on all sorts of different projects at Bose, including (most famously) noise-cancelling headphones and (most ambitiously) a car suspension system built for smooth rides.

The company is privately held, giving it the ability to spend much of its time and profits working on major research projects. One of those projects became the basis for the Wave line of speakers, designed by Dr. Bose with the help of Dr. William Short, a fellow former MIT student. The eureka moment, according to a 1985 Popular Science piece, was when Short had built a primitive form of the company’s “waveguide” technology—an enclosed, serpentine-like plastic chamber that’s designed to help amplify a sound wave and bring out some of its best qualities.

He showed Dr. Bose what he had on Christmas Eve, and Dr. Bose immediately realized he had a very memorable gift sitting in his office.

“After Bill demonstrated the first crude model to me on Christmas Eve in 1981, I ran around the plant grabbing anyone who hadn’t left for the holidays,” Dr. Bose told the magazine at the time. “I wanted everyone to hear the incredible sound coming from this new kind of enclosure.”

That waveguide technology became the basis of the Acoustic Wave Music System, released in 1985; the smaller Wave AM/FM radio, released in 1993; and dozens of other varieties since. In one of its user manuals, Bose claimed it took 14 years to research and develop the Wave audio system, and the work on the waveguide technology earned Dr. Bose and Dr. Short numerous awards.

(And, fun fact: The company also produced a massive subwoofer, designed for large group events like movies, that relies on the same technology as the Wave. This article, written by Short, explains how that worked.)

The company priced high out of the gate, predicting a market existed for extremely expensive alarm clock radios—something even its competitors, like Boston Acoustics President Andy Petite, admitted was there.

“There’s been a vacancy in the market for a really high-performance stereo/radio,” Petite told the Christian Science Monitor in 1993.

There was. But Bose had to sell a bit of its marketing soul to find it.

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When did the Bose Wave go from engineering miracle to Sharper Image fodder?

Bose’s early success with the 901 speakers and their later variations won them interest from audiophiles, but the company’s decision to later simultaneously target the consumer market and keep their prices high led to continual skepticism from enthusiasts. (If you’ve followed Apple with derision over the last 30 years or so, it’s kind of like that.)

Part of that, admittedly, may be partly due to the way the company sold its innovations. For decades, Bose has willingly put its product in the same category of commercial-based sales as stuff on QVC, as the Slap Chop, as Columbia House, and as the Video Professor. The quality of what Bose was selling was arguably of higher quality than most of what was selling on Comedy Central at 10 AM while Mystery Science Theater 3000 was on the air, but even if it was slumming a little, the strategy was necessary.

The problem is, fancy speakers don’t just market themselves. The public has to be sold on why they're even worth it.

The Bose Wave, the successor to the Audio Wave, has been heavily optimized to sell in its current channels—with psychology a heavy factor. For example, when the company struggled to sell Wave systems through magazine ads, the company changed its marketing strategy in multiple ways: It changed the headline on the ad to “hear what you’ve been missing,” then doubled down on the testimonials that worked so well for the 901s.

The example is frequently brought up by Arizona State University marketing professor Robert Cialdini, an expert on persuasion, who says that the approach helped downplay the newness of the device on the market.

“With something new, people are uncertain, and when they are uncertain, they want to avoid losses,” he said in a recent interview with PBS Newshour. “So what the Bose marketers did, they put it at the top of the ad: ‘Something you will lose, something you will miss.’ They put them in the mindset of loss, and people decided to buy this equipment, so they wouldn’t lose the benefits.”

It’s clear by the channels being used that Bose has always wanted the Wave to be a device for the people, rather than the audiophiles. That’s OK. Plebs are allowed to be impressed by a sound system, too, even if they know nothing about proper placement or anything like that.

If there’s a quibble to the strategy, however, it’s that the price and positioning might have caught Bose a bit flat-footed as it became more important for music to be portable.

Fortunately, they had those noise-cancelling headphones.

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“Do I consider Bose a rival to even a modest, entry-level high end streaming system? Hardly. But what they lack in sonic excellence they more than make up for in knowing how to sell it. And that’s a lesson many high-end companies could learn.”

— Paul Wilson, a columnist for Audiophile Review, offering a critique of the way Bose sells its Wave systems through infomercials. Wilson notes that while the infomercial he watched spent much of its time making the case that the people in the commercial were blown away by the quality of the speakers in the Wave system, some of the time was actually spent on explaining how the speakers worked, including a part where it was explained how sound vibrations going through the Wave system’s waveguide speaker technology by using a candle—an experiment replicated in this YouTube clip.

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The weird thing about Bose is that, despite the company’s pedigree, despite these longstanding ties to academia and engineering, the company still has all sorts of haters. One clip that stood out to me when I was digging around featured a middle-aged guy who clearly was not impressed by the engineering that was Amar Bose’s life’s work.

“They want a thousand dollars for a clock radio with a bunch of plastic tubes in it to make the sound deeper,” the guy says at the start of the four-minute clip in which he savages the company’s speakers for their reliance on those plastic tubes.

There are reasons to be critical of Bose as a company, not least of which are the firm’s high prices, but describing 14 years of scientific research as a “scam,” as that guy does, is perhaps a little too far.

But one random YouTuber’s video isn’t going to ruin Dr. Bose’s legacy. That legacy, it should be emphasized again, isn’t with infomercials or breathless quotes repeated to death in magazine ads for the speakers he invented.

It’s with MIT, the university whose rigorous graduate program inspired Dr. Bose to reward himself with a stereo, setting the stage for his career in electronics. The school where he taught for 45 years, most of that time while running a name-brand company. And the school that, thanks to an unprecedented gift from Dr. Bose in 2011, is the majority shareholder in the company that bears his name (though has no say in how the company is run).

And it’s with the company he built. Dr. Bose died in 2013. But its devices are still everywhere, no matter how many pairs of Beats Apple tries to sell.

The long, winding trail to the sound that goes through his most famous set of speakers lives on. It gets louder as it goes.

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from The Story of the Bose Wave, the Stereo System Built for the Infomercial Era

AOL’s 1995 Chat Rooms Were the Original 'Ask Me Anything'

Image: NBC/Getty

It was once a big deal for Jay Leno to hang out with a virtual audience of plebs, but these days, we call that a Tuesday afternoon.

Folks in the mid-1990s were just as obsessed with celebrity then as we are now, but the internet was still a modestly unknown entity back then.

So it was incredibly novel when a major star like Jay Leno, as shown in this 1995 shot at NBC’s Burbank headquarters, would show up on America Online and talk to his throngs of fans. He wasn’t alone—much like the popular IAmA chats Reddit holds now, AOL had convinced dozens of A-List celebrities to hold court on the network. (Well, mostly on AOL. Michael Jackson, for one, couldn’t be limited to a single dial-up network: In September of 1995, he simultaneously chatted with 25,000 people on three different networks, a record for the time.)

The heavily-promoted events were novel, a clear presaging of the saturated online celebrity minefield we have now, but the approach had its skeptics.

Spy magazine was clearly not impressed with the trend, which it put in its “Spy 100” retrospective of 1995.

“In a craven effort to appear hip, celebs—including such cyber gurus as Garth Brooks, Alan Derschowitz, and Michael Jackson—have been fumbling with their PCs in wildly hyped online chat sessions, regardless of the fact that they end up ‘talking’ to only a handful of pasty geeks,” the magazine wrote, while pointing out that Leno’s thousand-strong chat was a microscopic share of his real-life audience.

(Somewhat ironically, the magazine’s snark-filled list was topped by Donald Trump, whose heavily followed Twitter feed, which occasionally shares missives from 16-year-old admirers, is a reminder that AOL was merely ahead of its time.)

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

from AOL’s 1995 Chat Rooms Were the Original 'Ask Me Anything'

The Year That the Entire Computer Industry Ran Out of Memory

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Computers often seem like they’re above the supply chain.

Putting aside hot devices like the latest iPhone and the different variants of the Microsoft Surface, it’s generally easy to get a computer of some kind that will allow you to do all sorts of interesting things.

They’re mostly built for the long haul, too—designed to last for a few years and ultimately responsible for nearly infinite amounts of production when it comes to digital content, code, and imagery.

We don’t think about the ways in which resourcing impacts the way these machines are sold, how much they cost, and how it impacts production. But they are very much affected by these factors—and in at least one case, the shortage was the digital equivalent of long lines at gas stations.

The worst part? The RAM chip drought of 1988 was totally preventable.

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The course correction that made RAM really expensive in the summer of 1988

The Chicago Tribune compared “The Great DRAM Shortage of 1988” to the oil shortages of the 1970s. And honestly, the comparison was pretty close to the mark.

It was a story filled with trade conflicts and manufacturing challenges, but was ultimately defined by a complete misunderstanding of the computer market by chip producers, which ended up underestimating the demand for certain kinds of RAM.

The issue was basically this: After the computer industry slumped in 1985, prices for RAM chips fell to extreme lows. According to an analysis by retired computer science professor John C. McCallum, a 256-kilobyte RAM chip being sold in BYTE magazine could be had for just $2.95 in September of 1985—a sharp decline from the $8.95 the same-capacity chip sold for in January of that year.

Higher-capacity chips remained expensive: A two-megabyte chip, for example, was $599 in September 1985, making the cost-per-megabyte for larger-capacity RAM $300, per McCallum’s analysis. But even at the high end, the prices kept dropping: The cost-per-megabyte for a three-megabyte chip fell to as low as $133 in October of 1987.

What drove the severe drop in price? To put it simply, an industry slowdown, mixed with extreme overproduction, caught the industry off-guard.

“About 1985, the personal computer market was tremendously overextended,” Texas Instruments spokesman Stan Victor told the Tribune. “There were a lot of manufacturers, all fighting for the same 10-percent share of the market. Then, demand for computers started slowing, and the computer manufacturers found themselves with a tremendous inventory. So they stopped buying chips. For about six months there was no demand. People started selling chips for whatever price they could get.”

To offer a comparison to the modern day, you know how gas has been really cheap for the last year or so? Well, that cost decrease has been pretty rough for the oil industry, leading to massive bankruptcies and job decreases. The steep drop in chip prices had a similar effect in the US, with numerous RAM manufacturers closing their doors in response to the downturn.

Manufacturers were looking for a target of their scorn. That target, as it turned out, was Japan.

In June of 1985, the Semiconductor Industry Association filed for regulatory relief with the US Trade Representative, arguing that Japan was unfairly penalizing the US chip industry by favoring local computer chips over American ones.

The plea had its intended effect. In 1986, the US Commerce Department accused the Japanese chip industry of flooding the American market with RAM chips at a level below market rates, with the goal of pushing American companies out of the market. Not long after, the Reagan Administration put economic sanctions on the country, effectively doubling the price of electronic products manufactured in Japan and sold in the US. It was the first time the US had retaliated against Japan on trade issues since World War II, according to the New York Times. By late 1987, the sanctions ended after the administration decided that the market was no longer being flooded with costly chips.

It was a huge win for the US semiconductor industry, and one that the Harvard Business Review highlighted as a successful example of how an industry can swiftly and successfully influence the US government.

“This series of measures is unprecedented for its swiftness, severity, and agreement with industry recommendations,” David B. Yoffie wrote in May of 1988.

The impact of the flood of RAM in the US computer industry—which cost chip makers as much as $5 billion, according to the Tribune—is that it made chip manufacturers very timid about making too much RAM. Manufacturers shifted away from making 256-kilobit DRAM chips, converting their factories to 1-megabit chips.

It turned out to be a huge miscalculation, and fixing that error was not going to be easy.

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“I think when the year ends, supply will be 10 percent to 15 percent less than what real market demand is.”

— Peter T. Main, the marketing vice president of Nintendo, discussing with the Los Angeles Times how chip shortages were negatively affecting the video game market in 1988. The market was negatively affected not only by a sharp decrease in DRAM—which was affecting the industry as a whole at the time—but by a decline in SRAM (static random access memory) chips, which Nintendo used most notably for its save-state cartridges. (Japanese memory manufacturers had moved away from producing SRAM, because DRAM was more lucrative.) The company delayed the American release of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link as a direct result of the SRAM shortage, and its competitor Sega also delayed the release of some games.

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BYTE Magazine ad. Image: Internet Archive

Why was RAM so expensive in the late 80s? Blame a really terrible miscalculation that was hard to fix

By July of 1988, the increasing RAM prices, which had slowly crept up in the early parts of the year, surged. A megabyte of RAM, according to John C. McCallum’s price analysis, had surged in price from $199 to $505 in a single month, and the cost of a 256k DRAM chip had surged from $2.95 at the beginning of 1988 to $12.45—a price level maintained for nearly a year. Eventually, 1-megabyte chips took over the market, but the price issues were causing many RAM-buyers to hold out before purchasing any more chips.

The RAM prices were clearly affecting sellers—many of whom were hiding their prices in ads for the magazines of the day, such as BYTE and Computer Shopper. In a July 1988 ad, Advanced Computer Products (which hid its prices for every kind of DRAM behind a request that customers call the company) leveled with its audience.

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger … we are also suffering from loss of memory,” the company wrote in the full-page ad, which listed prices for literally every other kind of computer part besides memory. “ACP sells more Memory Upgrade IC’s than other other mail order supplier … But! … the present shortage is driving us up a wall! We can’t get them at the right price, but we are getting them. PLEASE BEAR WITH US … as the market price comes down our price will come down.”

Why did it take so long to fix this problem? To put it simply, correcting course from a miscalculation in the amount of RAM needed is a tough problem to get past. The production process for one-megabit chips, notes the Chicago Tribune, was much more difficult than that for the 256-kilobit chips. Chip-fabrication took four months, start to finish.

And complicating things even further, RAM manufacturers converted their 256K factories to 1-meg facilities, rather than producing the chips in two separate facilities. That meant when the finally problem showed itself, it was already too late to fix.

“This cannibalism of 256K capacity would not have mattered, but then they found that, in practice, the converted capacity was largely standing idle, because the new one-megabit chips were so difficult to make,” Lamont Wood wrote at the time.

It took until mid-1989 for the problem to work itself out. John C. McCallum’s month-by-month analysis showed that the $505-per-megabyte chip prices for three-megabyte chips remained stagnant until June of 1989, at which point the chips fell by nearly $500 in a single month.

Soon, higher-capacity chips came onto the market, and within two years, four-megabyte chips could be had for less than $200—a massive decrease that came just in time for the internet revolution to take hold.

With few hiccups, the cost-per-megabyte of DRAM has been falling ever since.

*

The 1988 shortage, while the most painful, isn’t history’s only RAM shortage. For example, in 1995, a fire on Penang Island in Malaysia caused a power outage so dramatic that semiconductor factories were shut down for nearly three weeks.

And even this year, computer RAM has seen some increases in prices. At HardBoiled, NewEgg’s business blog, the company notes that a power station explosion in China caused problems for a Samsung factory that produces flash memory. That fire, along with a power outage in Korea, helped to spook the DRAM market, causing prices to rise for the first time in nearly two years.

Just as DRAM shortages hurt the SRAM market back in 1988, flash memory issues caused price problems for DRAM.

That’s definitely not positive, but the memory industry of 2016 is nothing like that of 1988. A big reason? Unlike oil shortages, chip shortages are mitigated by the forward march of innovation. RAM capacity has surged like a hockey stick, meaning that you get much more for your money now than you did in 1988. The cost for a megabyte of RAM in 1988, per John C. McCallum’s analysis, was $505. These days, a single megabyte of RAM costs a third of a penny. You can buy two 8-gigabyte chips for less than $60—with free shipping—and even with the recent shortages, that $0.0035-per-megabyte price remains near the all-time low of $0.0027 per megabyte, hit back in June.

Oil is oil. As a natural resource, you can’t improve it. But computer RAM is constantly getting better. It’s still a limited resource that can be broken by manufacturing stumbles, but the problem can be mitigated through the creation of RAM that works better than the chip it’s replacing.

(But it does create problems for owners of older computers as different kinds of RAM become outmoded: As MakeUseOf notes, the shift from DDR2 to DDR3-based RAM caused a price increase for older varieties of memory.)

Megabyte for megabyte, that means it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a 1988-style shortage ever again. We can’t make better oil, but we can make better RAM.

from The Year That the Entire Computer Industry Ran Out of Memory