This peaceful full color Parisian street scene was shot on July 19, 1914 - only a few days before the outbreak of WWI.
The Engineering EXPO has been a prestigious annual event held at Tampa, Florida’s University of South Florida since 1974. Sponsored by USF’s College of Engineering, the event is held during February’s National Engineering Week. In 1981, my father was chosen as part of one of only three student teams to present projects at the EXPO.
Robotics was considered an exciting wave of the future in those days, so Dad’s team created a robotics project. Using an Apple IIe, the team programmed a Unimate Puma 500 robot arm. With no real model to work from, Dad’s group brainstormed and developed the project from concept through implementation.
The robot arm had two claw attachments which were programmed to rotate on their own. The robot first inserted a bolt into an electric screwdriver attached to a table. It then retrieved two blocks of wood, one at a time, each containing a pre-drilled hole. It placed the wood blocks onto the bolt, and then placed a nut onto the end. Pressure on the nut activated the screwdriver for tightening. Finally, the robot picked up the entire assembly and placed it onto a conveyor belt.
Although the project was simple, it utilized highly advanced technology for the times. As a small child, I was flabbergasted by the ease with which the robot did the things my dad programmed it to do.
A year later, EPCOT Center opened at Walt Disney World. One of the attractions, World of Motion, featured a show at the end called “The Bird and the Robot.” In the show, an animatronic bird interacted with a robot arm. I couldn’t believe the robot that Disney selected was the Unimate Puma 500, the same type that Dad had programmed just a year before. It made me feel like my family was truly on the cutting edge of technology!
Incidentally, you can still buy a descendant of the Puma 500 today. Unimation was acquired by Swiss manufacturer Stäubli in 1988 and they produce robots capable of lifting from 1 to 100 kg with a variety of special-purpose attachments.
And - if you have deep pockets - you can pick up a Puma 500 on eBay.
They could also function as mini-security systems, demanding a password from intruders and shooting foam rockets at any loud noises or lingering threats. Perhaps their most disturbing feature was the "spy" mode, which meant you could use your R.A.D. to eavesdrop on other people's conversations. I can only imagine the fascinating conversations the early '90s R.A.D.s overheard my friends and I participating in - we were probably discussing whether or not one of the New Kids on the Block was going to be marry me. 
Product Enterprises concentrates on models from the first 26 years of the show, and in this case models the Doctor's deadliest enemy as they appeared in their oft-forgotten 1960's feature film debut. Movie Daleks have a claw arm rather than the famous toilet plunger, and have a more robust build overall. This impressive 12" remote control Dalek model is no exception. The spaceship-shaped remote controls the Dalek as its head scans left & right all while barking out phrases from the movie.
I asked Ron how the site came to be. He explained, "I have been always interested in robots and had to put them away
to make a living. Now that I am retired the passion has re-emerged. The
robot 
Heathkit released four different programmable models in the 1980s, and
they proved quite popular with hobbyists and educators. Just imagine R2D2 crossed with a mid-1980s
Epson dot-matrix printer and you'll have a fairly good idea what they
looked like. HERO Jr. (right) included a 32K ROM of "behavioral utilities" to control
sensors, movement and even speech.
Dark grey Big Trak (white and called "bigtrak" in the U.K. for some reason) was a programmable toy vehicle put out by game maker Milton Bradley - apparently it was developed by everyone's rubber-keyboard superstar Clive Sinclair. Video & handheld LED games were the rage at the time, but some of the microchip revolution made it into the brains of more traditional toys like this. 
If you're tired of waiting more than 25 years for an official upgrade, some enterprising folks on the internet have reverse engineered Big Trak. There are plans online for adding new parts, replacing old ones, and interfacing your new gear with decades old plasti-tech. Take a look at the second link below just to appreciate how terribly clever the innards of Big Trak are. It takes some real engineering oomph to reduce a sophisticated technological concept into an affordable toy.
