The vinyl resurgence shows no sign of slowing, so here's a great budget turntable for your newly thrifted LPs.
The last days of the Commodore Amiga in the mid-90's were dark ones for Amiga zealots like me. Yet there was still hope, as the Amiga computer had been mismanaged almost since its beginning. One reseller was even heard to say that the only thing more difficult than doing business without Commodore was doing business with Commodore.
Hungry for a new machine, one of the Amiga projects floating around in 1996 was the Amiga Walker. Only two prototypes exist , and as you can see the Darth Vader helmet design was a radical departure from the beige and boxy computers of the day. This invited much industry derision, putting proof to the point that the Amiga was never going to be a serious computer - especially when it looked like a vacuum cleaner.
The specs were plenty good though, and would have been good competition against Mac & PC. If it had reached production, the radical design could have really set the Walker apart from other platforms. It was intended to be a "fun" computer, ready out of the box for internet & gaming as well all the great graphics & multimedia apps that put Amiga on the map.
An innovative feature that folks seem to have forgotten about was that the top section of the Walker was designed to lift off, so an end user could easily sandwich in hardware expansion modules for things like hard drives, advanced graphics boards, and whatever other magic the Amiga's vibrant 3rd party community could dream up. Fun computing and easy end-user experience weren't mainstream ideas in 1996.
Only a few years later these ideas wouldn't seem so ridiculous when Apple launched the first iMac. The Mac Mini also has some of the Walker spirit in that many of its hardware accessories are available in the same miniature case style and footprint, so you can stack up components on your desk in a neat and compact package. It's a shame that while Mac's design departures earn Apple magazine covers and financial rewards, it seems that the history of the Walker will forever be relegated to the trashcan that people said it resembled.
There is a way you can own your own Walker today. You can get it as a virtual computer in the game Second Life. It has one significant improvement over the original prototypes... it still works! The Walker even includes some old Amiga games. If you want to add it to your Second Life setup, the page is linked below.
More history on The Walker
Walker computer in Second Life
related:
Minimig modern Amiga 500 clone
Amiga playing cards (somehow the Walker isn't the Joker)
Amiga demo video from the 90's
Computer generated dinosaurs are amazing on the big screen, but if you're building a museum display you want something even more alive and in your face. Disney elevated entertainment automatons to a high art in his theme parks in the 60's, but his "imagineers" weren't the first to create animatronic beasties.
The new 500's resemblance to the original is only skin-deep. For one thing, it's based on the second-generation Fiat Panda platform and comes equipped with a range of 4-cylinder engines (how often does one get to tout that as a feature?) including a 75hp 1.3L turbo diesel and a pair of gasoline motors that offer either 69hp or 100hp of fun. You can select either a 5 or 6 speed manual gearbox... there is no automatic option [update: there is an optional Dualogic semi automatic clutchless transmission]. Like the original, the modern version is tiny: only about 3.5 meters long.
From 1950-68 DC Comics devoted an entire series to the
I can't figure out what audience DC was intending to reach. All I can say about the experience is that just because a celebrity has a face that's easy to caricature, that doesn't make for a good comic.
The Hope comic makes some tiny bit of sense, but the elaborate Rickles cameo with Superman is just odd. It's hard to believe that including Hollywood stars could do all that much to increase sales of comics. On top of that, the presence of real-world celebrities compromises the elaborate universe that comic books work so hard to construct. I don't think that Superman sales soared because the world was just waiting for Rickles to don cape and boots.
When I tell people that I write for a site called "Retro Thing", one of the images that they conjure up for my lifestyle is of the stereotypical 50's bachelor pad vibe. You know the look; smoking jacket, 
Following military production throughout WWII, the company produced a series of extremely popular 350cc and 500cc Bullets. The Indian government selected the Bullet 350 for military and police use in 1955, and 
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.
