─── THE PRE-1980s WING ───
the analog ancestors. wire recordings, tape formats, the machines that died before the modem was born.
34 dead. ordered by year of death, newest first.
[pre80s] | 80s | 90s | 00s | 10s (2010-2014 · 2015-2019) | 20s
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1979-10-01
IMSAI 8080 (1975 - 1979)
a computer store chain killed the computer company that started it. william millard founded ims associates in san leandro in 1973, shipped the imsai 8080 on 16...
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1979-05-14
Processor Technology (1975 - 1979)
popular electronics wanted an intelligent terminal for its july 1976 cover and asked bob marsh and lee felsenstein to design one. they handed back a whole...
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1979-01-01
Polavision (1977 - 1979)
sixty-eight and a half million dollars was the loss on the leftover hardware when polaroid dumped it as a job lot in 1979. polavision had launched two years...
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1979-01-01
Video Cassette Recording (1972 - 1979)
in 1972 philips built a video recorder into a living room cabinet with a tuner and a clock inside it, and charged around six hundred pounds. the cassette was a...
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1979-01-01
Longitudinal Video Recording (1974 - 1979)
basf announced a video recorder with no rotating head in 1974 and did not show one in public until the 1979 funkausstellung, by which point vhs and betamax had...
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1978-12-31
Kee Games (1973 - 1978)
joe keenan was nolan bushnell's friend and neighbor, and in september 1973 he fronted a company that pretended to be atari's rival. kee games advertised itself...
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1978-12-31
Television Electronic Disc (1975 - 1978)
telefunken and teldec showed the press a working videodisc in berlin on 24 june 1970, five years before anyone else had a home video product to sell, and then...
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1977-12-01
Byte Shop (1975 - 1977)
paul terrell gave steve jobs a card at a homebrew computer club meeting in 1976, and a few months later ordered fifty assembled apple i boards at five hundred...
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1977-07-01
Nutting Associates (1967 - 1977)
in 1971 a young engineer named nolan bushnell talked a coin-op quiz machine company into manufacturing computer space, and about 1,500 cabinets went out as the...
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1977-05-01
MITS (1969 - 1977)
albuquerque, new mexico, where a company that had been selling model rocket telemetry kits and losing a calculator price war put a metal box with switches on...
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1977-01-01
V-Cord (1972 - 1977)
sanyo had a home video cassette on the market before betamax existed and could not make it matter. v-cord put half inch tape in a plastic shell in 1972, and...
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1976-04-01
Penn Central (1968 - 1976)
february 1968 put the pennsylvania railroad and the new york central under one roof, and the roof came down twenty eight months later. the halves never...
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1975-01-01
Magnavox Odyssey (1972 - 1975)
ralph baer had the idea in august 1966 while waiting for a bus, and sanders associates, a military electronics contractor, let him build seven prototypes...
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1975-01-01
Atlas/Seaboard Comics (1974 - 1975)
martin goodman started marvel in 1939, sold it in 1968 and left in 1972, and at sixty six he opened a comics line on fifth avenue to compete with the company...
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1974-02-28
Busicom (1945 - 1974)
sixty thousand dollars is what intel handed back in may 1971 to own a chip it had designed for a japanese calculator company. the chip was the 4004 and the...
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1973-07-20
Compatible Time-Sharing System (1961 - 1973)
november 1961 is when a modified ibm 709 at mit ran several terminals at once and time-sharing stopped being an argument on paper. fernando corbato's group...
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1973-07-01
Cartrivision (1972 - 1973)
cartridge television inc, a subsidiary of avco, put the first home video recorder with rentable hollywood films into sears and montgomery ward in june 1972,...
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1973-01-01
Kenbak-1 (1971 - 1973)
forty-four of these were sold, which makes the owners a smaller group than the staff of most companies that came afterward. john blankenbaker designed it in...
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1971-12-31
Electronic Video Recording (1967 - 1971)
evr was cbs putting television onto photographic film and selling you a machine to read it back. the cartridge held 750 feet of 8.75 millimeter film written by...
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1970-12-31
Stereo-Pak (1962 - 1970)
earl muntz sold used cars and televisions before he worked out, in 1962, that the thing missing from a car was a record collection. his 4-track cartridge was...
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1969-01-01
PlayTape (1966 - 1969)
frank stanton showed it to mgm records distributors in new york in 1966 and put it on sale in september 1967 in five colored cartridges, priced from a dollar...
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1969-01-01
The Pullman Company (1867 - 1969)
at its 1929 peak this company could put more than 150,000 people to bed on a moving train every night, which made it the largest bed operator on earth without...
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1969-01-01
Sony CV-2000 (1965 - 1969)
august 1965 is when sony put a videotape recorder in a living room for the first time, at 695 dollars for the deck and 40 more for an hour of tape. it was...
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1968-01-01
Sabamobil (1964 - 1968)
philips showed the compact cassette in berlin in august 1963 and licensed it to anyone who asked. saba showed the sabamobil at hannover the following spring...
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1967-01-01
DC-International (1965 - 1967)
two german electronics giants spent 1965 to 1967 selling a cassette that was bigger than the philips one and would not fit in a philips machine. then philips...
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1966-03-16
Studebaker (1852 - 1966)
south bend, indiana, where five brothers opened a blacksmith shop in february 1852 and built it into the largest maker of horse-drawn wagons in the world. the...
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1965-12-31
Tefifon (1936 - 1965)
four hours of music on a single cartridge in the 1950s, when an lp held forty minutes, and it still lost. karl daniel's tefifon pressed audio grooves across an...
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1964-01-01
RCA Tape Cartridge (1958 - 1964)
four dollars fifty a cartridge in 1960, against three fifty for a twelve hundred foot reel of plain tape. that price gap is the whole obituary. rca spent four...
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1963-01-01
de Havilland (1920 - 1963)
geoffrey de havilland incorporated the company on 26 september 1920 and buried two sons who died testing its aircraft. the comet carried fare-paying passengers...
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1957-06-01
Picture Post (1938 - 1957)
sixty political prisoners outside pusan station, photographed by bert hardy in september 1950, are the reason the best editor in british magazine publishing...
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1955
Wire Recording (1898 - 1955)
valdemar poulsen worked out in 1898 that you could magnetize a steel wire as it ran past an electromagnet and hear the sound back off it later. that idea is...
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1953-08-14
Fawcett Comics (1939 - 1953)
four hundred thousand dollars and a promise to stop publishing. that was the settlement fawcett signed on 14 august 1953 to end twelve years of litigation with...
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1929-01-01
Victor Talking Machine Company (1901 - 1929)
the dog was painted in 1898 and he has been in work ever since. the company that put him on its labels was incorporated in camden, new jersey in 1901 and sold...
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1898-01-01
Kelmscott Press (1891 - 1898)
a copy of chaucer, 425 of them on paper at twenty pounds each and thirteen on vellum at a hundred and twenty guineas, finished on 8 may 1896 after twenty one...