Retro Thing

Join The "Synth Module Of The Month Club"

Modular analog music synthesizers are magnificent beasts. They usually look like a cross between a 1920s telephone exchange and a mad scientist's lab. The sound? Pure old-school analog, with dozens of instantly tweakable knobs and patch cables. In other words, these things are an electronic musician's delight. The big problem with modular synths is the price. Because they're handcrafted in small numbers and use expensive analog designs, the price is usually out of reach for all but the most dedicated pop stars or dotcom millionaires.

Synthesizers.com has the perfect solution: a $120 per month purchase plan. You get a new module each month, and by the end of the year you'll find yourself with a full-fledged (and easily expandable) modular synthesizer. This "Entry Level" system includes a MIDI interface, two audio oscillators, 2 envelope generators, an amplifier and state-variable filter. You also get a case with power supply and some orange, brown and red patch cables to ensure that your home studio always has that unmistakable Mad Scientist aura.

The system shown above takes things a step further and includes a 5 octave keyboard controller and a total of 21 modules in a beautiful walnut case. It retails for $2,658.50 plus an extra $450 for the keyboard.

Get Your Hands On A Modular Synth For $120 Month

Your Very Own $500 Electric Wind Turbine

Wind power is very much in vogue these days. The Southwest Windpower Air-X Land is a 400W wind generator that retails for less than $500. It features a 46" carbon fibre rotor that is microprocessor controlled to ensure that it slows automatically in high winds or when your battery system is fully charged (batteries and a power inverter aren't included).

I know that 400W isn't much power, but it's definitely enough to power a few lights in a remote cabin, especially if you install high capacity batteries and only visit on weekends. Besides, the price tag is low enough that it might encourage a few backyard experimenters to take the plunge and find out why so many people are excited about wind turbines. Oh, and don't forget to budget an extra few hundred dollars for a tower to mount your snazzy new turbine.

The Air-X Land Wind Turbine (via Treehugger)

The Sinclair C5: A £7 Million Toy Car

The C5 was Clive Sinclair's bizarre followup to his brilliant ZX series of computers. This little trike has no RAM, no video display, and no keyboard -- it was envisioned as a tiny hybrid electric runabout that could replace the car for short jaunts at a mere 15 kmh. The product was an absolute disaster, and Sinclair was eventually forced to sell their computer assets to Amstrad after losing as much as £7 million on the C5.

Planet Sinclair has an excellent writeup on the £399 electric trike/car, along with some terrifying pictures of this tiny and slow vehicle in traffic. It's easy to see why the public didn't embrace these things in droves: even a bicycle would be safer in traffic than riding around on an overgrown child's toy.

"The C5 was promoted by Sinclair as a revolutionary advance in personal transport with the potential to replace the car. The original intention was that it would be only the first in a whole series of electric vehicles - it would have been followed the never-released C10 and C15, each successively bigger and looking more like conventional vehicles. At only £399, the C5 was a fraction of the price of a conventional car. In fact, it was not a car at all but was instead a glorified electric tricycle, powered by an electric battery with a supplementary pedal drive. It did not inspire confidence that the C5 was assembled and serviced by Hoover, better known for its washing machines, which led to unkind comparisons being made between the two product lines."

The Sinclair C5 hybrid electric trike (via Finkbuilt)

Manufactum: Old-Fashioned Design and Mechanics

Tom Whitwell recently sent me a link to the Manufactum site. They also produce a fantastic color catalog which he sums up as "a beautiful printed catalogue on thick matt paper, full of ludicrously expensive but nice things from Germany - lots of steel, aluminium, wood, leather."

Since I'm a huge fan of ludicrously expensive German things, I (foolishly) took a look. And now I'm hooked. My favorite items are the fantastic mechanical toys, including the coil-spring powered Schuco Mercedes Silver Arrow kit  (shown above) and the demented Katita wind-up walking bug.

Manufactum: The good things in life still exist. (suggested by Tom at MusicThing)

Modern Gadgets Reimagined With Some Serious Retro Style

Worth1000 is a creative photoshop competition site. Aspiring Photoshoppers are given 48 hours to create a photoshopped masterpiece for each contest. These images were taken from their Vintage Products 6 contest, which encouraged entrants to recast today's products in a vintage light. My fave from the 53 entrants is the iPod Delux. I think it would be the perfect commemorative release for Apple's 30th Birthday (celebrating Steve Job's birth in 1955, perhaps?)

I'm seriously hoping that a few industrial designers like what they see and take a few styling cues from these outlandish designs. Not too many, mind you, but just enough to make today's boring silver Chiclets a tad more fun.

Vintage Look for Your Gadgets & Gizmos (via Born Rich)

A Magnificent New Moog Synthesizer

Allow me to introduce you to the brand new Moog Little Phatty, priced at an almost reasonable $1475. Once you get past the name, you'll discover a very cool little analog monosynth designed by the master himself. Bob Moog's analog audio synthesis circuits have been melded with a decidedly modern digital front panel that features four rotary encoders, 100 programmable memories and a plethora of nice-looking blue backlit buttons. My verdict: fantastic design with a cheeky name (which fits well with their Moogerfooger effects line). The first 1,200 units are individually numbered Bob Moog Tribute Editions, in honor of Bob who passed away before this little gem made it to market.

Here's how Moog President Mike Adams describes the birth of this beautiful product:

"I am not exactly sure when the concept first entered Bob’s mind but I do have notes on it from early 2004 when we had a product planning meeting and Turnkey [a shop in London] requested us to give this some consideration but I am sure he had thought about of it long before that. Then during the Summer of 2004 Steve and Bob really began the serious work of technical conception which resulted in Steve writing the initial technical spec in August, 2004. From there my memory gets a little fuzzy because 2005 was such a difficult year. What I do remember is that we sent off our first ideas to Axel Hartmann around October of 2004 and we met with him at the NAMM Show in 2005. (Axel Hartmann and his Design Box industrial design associates have been a long time collaborators of the company.) At NAMM and then subsequently at last year’s [Frankfurt Musik]Messe, the first concepts of this keyboard began to take shape."

The Moog Little Phatty Analog Synthesizer

Happy Birthday, Apple!

April 1, 2006 marks the 30th birthday of Apple Computer, Inc. I know I'm a few days early, but I wanted to beat the rush before everyone checks their calendars. The company was founded in Mountain View, California by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

In a way, it's nothing short of a miracle that Apple has survived three decades. It's almost impossible for a company to consistently innovate, yet Apple managed to repeatedly break new ground and take unimaginable risks for three decades. They were among the first to market a single-board microcomputer (the Apple I) and their followup Apple II was a smash success because of its brilliant technical design (a single board machine with an innovative and affordable floppy drive system that did much of its low-level work in software). Had the company faded from glory after producing the Apple II series, they would still have earned an important spot in history.

Of course, the story didn't end there. Apple went on to develop the Lisa and Macintosh, with their revolutionary graphic user interface and newfangled mouses. The company also dabbled in handhelds (the Newton MessagePad, among others), and migrated successfully from Motorola chips onto IBM's Power PC architecture in the mid-1990s. After that, they floundered for a while until Steve Jobs returned in 1997 and helped to revive the company with a new operating system based upon technology from his not-so-successful Next computer startup. That was followed in short order by the decidedly different hard drive-based iPod music player. The iPod has now sold over 43,000,000 units and shows no sign of losing its dominance in the industry.

What became of the founders? Well, Steve Wozniak originally dreamed of being a lifelong Hewlett-Packard engineer. It's a lucky thing for us that his talents went unrecognized at HP and he agreed to become "one of the engineers" at Apple. He quit Apple in the mid-1980s and recently helped to fund a company that acquires promising technology startups. You'll still see him from time to time as a VIP guest at Apple product rollouts, because he loves new gear as much as any of us.Steve Jobs had a tumultuous time in the 1980s. He was ousted from Apple and went on to bankroll computer maker Next and computer graphics company Pixar. Again, it's lucky for us that he returned to Apple a few years ago and continued to spin his "reality distortion field" while championing a roomful of innovative new technologies. And Ronald Wayne? Sadly, Wayne sold his 10% share of the company a short while after the company was founded for a few hundred dollars.

Happy birthday, Apple. We look forward to seeing what the next 30 years bring.

Here are a few recent Apple-themed posts from Retro Thing:

Apple II - Setting the Benchmark For Home Computing in the Late 1970s: The splash made by the Apple 1 computer would have been a mere footnote in computing history if it had not been followed by the incredibly successful Apple II.

The Macintosh Portable: How Far We've Come: The Mac Portable was introduced in 1989. It was a stunning (and stunningly hefty) piece of engineering that featured massive lead-acid batteries capable of keeping it running for over eight hours.

Newton MessagePad: On The Bleeding Edge: For a while it seemed that touch-screen tablets were poised to take over the computing world.

Briel Computers Apple 1 Clone: The Replica 1 is a modernized version of the original Apple I computer.

Another DAB Kitchen Radio For Your Viewing Pleasure

I have been totally obsessed with DAB digital radios lately, probably because DAB service isn't available in my rustic mountain hideaway. Dualit has announced a rather interesting chromed kitchen radio -- I suspect it's available with a silver finish in addition to the Gothic black shown here. Apart from that, the specs are pretty basic - a horrific blue LED backlit display, a single 8W speaker, DAB/FM reception, and 4 hours of rechargeable battery life, just in case you want to take your "kitchen" radio on your next cow-tipping expedition. Available sometime soon at a price approaching £200.

The Dualit DAB Kitchen Radio (featured on David Ponce's great OhGizmo! site)

Our First Ever Jewelry Story!

We've posted stories about watches in the past, but (I think) this is the first honest-to-goodness story I've ever written about useless shiny things. Live Wire Jewelry offers stylish Sterling silver homages to everyday objects. My faves are the 45 RPM record inserts and the precious metal versions of Pez candy. I'm not sure about the silver Froot Loops -- they look a bit too much like fossilized miniature donuts.

Live Wire Jewelry - Common Objects (via Boing Boing)

The Runt Of The Commodore Litter

[Here's a guest piece from Ireland. Tom Cremins drops by with his first computer, the quirky Commodore 16. He lost touch with his roots for a few years before hooking up with another C-16 on eBay. -Ed.]

The Commodore 16 really was the runt of the Commodore litter. Released in 1984 alongside the Plus/4 as part of the 264 series, it was heralded as The World's Learning Machine. It taught Commodore Business Machines a very expensive lesson in marketing. 

The C16 was perhaps the last thing the market needed at the time. It had a number of crucial design flaws that crippled it. The restricted amount of RAM (a pitiful 12k) really hobbled its potential. There were no hardware sprites like those on the C64's VIC II chip, so animation and collision detection were hard to do. It had no backwards compatability with either the Vic-20 or C64. The new machine couldnt even use the same peripherals such as cassette deck, disk drive or joysticks, alienating it further.

Given the power of its contemporaries, it couldn't compete as a games machine, nor did it live up to its hype as an educational tool. Its drawbacks made it too hard to sell, even with a price tag of $99 in the US. The record-breaking C64 was already well established and there was no compelling reason to buy the cheaper computer, or for publishers to develop software for it. By 1985 it was clear that the era of the 8-bit was coming to an end as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST awaited release. The black Vic-20 and C64 look-alike never threatened to repeat CBMs earlier successes.

Sony PS-FL1 Drawer Turntable

This turntable seems terribly futuristic to me, but at the same time is a curious throwback to drawer turntables built into console radios of the 40's and 50's.  Of course those lacked the gunmetal finish, weren't cool and motorized, nor did they spin records perched under an Atari Video Music...

Back to the point... the Sony PS-FL1 has the unmistakable lines of the 1980's.  There were a number of these drawer model turntables, the idea being that you no longer had to save space at the top of your stereo cabinet for the swing-up lid of a typical record player.  Most drawer turntables were linear tonearm affairs, but this is a regular old belt-drive axis tonearm table.  It's still a decent turntable today. 

The drawer is powered, and is pretty impressive to watch the smoked plastic window drop as the drawer slides out.  It's a fully automatic turntable which will make the platter purists among you poo-poo it, but it is the only turntable that my girlfriend requested that we keep in the living room so that we could use it more often - so nyahh.

Commodore 1702 Video Monitor

This monitor was made to be coupled to the venerable Commodore 64 home computer.  While you could connect your C64 to your home TV (a function coming back to mainstream computers only relatively recently), you realize a better display hooking up to the 1702. 

The monitor produces a really high quality NTSC or PAL display, and I still use them to hook up video equipment.  It only has mono audio (of course all computers were mono then), and sports front and rear video inputs; one with separate Luma and Chroma inputs for S-video (after you solder the appropriate cable of course).  I also like that the monitor's neutral-ish colors (isn't as dated as a mid 80's TV should be), and the squarish shape means that you can stack 'em (which is good since they're pretty easy to find for about $2 at the thrift... um, I have quite a few).

Not only do I admire the high quality and longevity of this display, but it's also a reminder of a time when a single company could providing everything that you needed for your computing experience... and make it affordable to boot.

Float Red Wine Glasses

It has been almost two weeks since I last knocked over a wine glass. There's something about their spindly shape that almost begs me to give the stem a little tap. The hand-blown Molodesign Float glass is a novel redesign of the classic red wine glass that places the familiar bowl shape within an attractively sturdy cylinder. The result? A cool $45 glass that I'm unlikely to spill all over you at a party.

"The suspended bowl design at the bottom of the glasses serves to elevate condensation away from the table surface, making the use of a coaster unnecessary. When used for cold drinks, beads of moisture from condensation cling to the rounded underbelly of the glass, adding delicacy to the optical effect." Brilliantly wonky ad copy. After all, when was the last time you read about the rounded underbelly of a glass?

Molodesign Float Red Wine Glass (inspired by a totally unrelated productdose post)

Daft Patent Filings Abound At Patently Silly

Patently Silly is the brainchild of comedian and reformed engineer Daniel Wright and web designer Alex Eben Meyer. The site features an impressively odd collection of off-the-wall patents including electronic devices with concealed firearms (keep the marketing department away from these), whipped cocoa baths and a combination powered parachute and motorcycle (not sure what's supposed to happen at stop lights, but it'd be worth filming).

Visit Patently Silly

Hitachi DA-P100; an excuse for musing?

According to the sticker, this CD player's birthday is April 1986.  While this Hitachi may seem chunky now, in its day it was really small.  I don't know where the DA-P100 falls on the timeline of portable & affordable CD players (I remember no-name portables that were alarmingly cheap in the late 80's), but I'm interested in making a different point.

This CD player is actually one of the most flexible and consumer-friendly devices I've ever seen.  There are three ways to power it; AC cord, wall wart/car adapter mini jack, and batteries.  It has both headphone and line out, a built in speaker, tone control, programmability, an LCD display, a power LED (why oh why did power LED's ever disappear?), even a switch marked "S&P" (salt & pepper dispenser, I expect).

When I look at any number of new gadgets, they often need custom power supplies with custom jacks, difficult-sized buttons each perform multi-stacked functions, no status display or power LED, etc. etc.  Hitachi didn't set out to reinvent the 16-bit digital wheel with this CD player, instead they created an easy to use device, with lots of simple and friendly touches.  And here's the clincher - after 20 years it still works.