Online Shopping in the 1950s | Hacker News Reader

Online Shopping in the 1950s

messynessychic.com

70 pointsapo21 comments

Interesting idea. The data plate on the order station says it was made by "Vitarama". Vitarama was the company behind Cinerama. Owned by the Rockefellers, it developed a range of unusual projection devices - projectors for spherical screens and elliptical screens, gunnery training simulators, and a range of slide changers. Fred Waller, who invented Cinerama and worked for Vitarama, was probably involved. He had a patent for an addressable slide projector.[1] The shopping system used a linear tray rather than the circular tray shown in the Life article, but the selection by number is similar.

The idea wasn't silly. At the time, Sears and some other companies had catalog order centers, where customers could go and shop from catalogs. This was an improvement on that concept.

The problem may have been the user interface. It looks like you'd ask the attendant to load up a slide tray for the product area of interest, and then you could use a knob to select slides. Each slide contained only one image. This makes for a small catalog.

They could have used a microfiche system and had a much larger catalog. But how to address it in a user-friendly way? That's a hard problem. If you've ever used microfilm data, you're aware of how hard it is to find anything. Their UI had two buttons and a knob, probably the upper limit for shopping UI complexity in the 1950s. Some later microfilm systems had bar codes and some the ability to search, but that was a late 1960s development and required electronics.

[1] https://www.google.com.ar/patents/US2732758

Killer analysis. Love the research and context.

>There’s little to no information on the internet about it or its inventor, except for these photographs for a LIFE magazine article which may never have been published.

It's crazy to me that there is no record of this beyond these photographs considering how many people must have known the inventor, used this, or had friends that did, but then again I haven't spent much time in the pre-internet world. People looking back on today's daily life 65 years from now will have a lot of information.

"will have a lot of information."

I don't think they will. Too much data about our lives is locked up and lost by online communities falling apart. Anyone who invested a significant amount of time in myspace probably has nothing to show for that period of their lives, and I worry that the new trend of lifelong facebook use will make that even worse.

`salmonet said nothing about individual lives in his post. Facebook disappearing tomorrow wouldn't mean that historians a hundred years from now couldn't get an extremely clear view of what life today is like in aggregate.

Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? How accessible are the contents to you today?

Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.

Even having the drives may not mitigate issues of that kind. A variety of articles [0] describe unexpectedly (well, to consumers at least) short lifespans on CD-Rs. Lots of CD drives are still around, but you might be unpleasently surprised if you put in a 15 year old CD-R that's been sitting on the shelf.

[0] Google search: burned cd lifespan

> Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)?

Nope. Too young for Zip disks. My data's on redundant hard drives in my NAS and has a cloud backup as the braces to that NAS's belt.

> Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.

I have a remarkable amount of trust and faith in the Internet Archive to continue being excellent at their jobs or others to pick up the slack. This thread reminded me about a project I wanted to bounce off of those folks, too...BRB.

The way to save bits is to copy them onto new media every few years. That's what the Internet Archive does -- we're currently phasing out 2 terabyte disks for 8's.

soon pre-internet will feel like pre-writing.

There's an online game from 2001 that I can't find any information on. I went as far as contacting the trademark owners and even they don't have anything, any source code, any images. Pre-internet and pre-google will probably mean the same soon.

I've got to ask: which game ?

It was a web-based game in Hungary called Virtual Box.

"Little to no information on the internet" I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated to do offline research, you could probably find at least some information. If this was notable enough to attract a LIFE photographer--whether or not the article was actually published--I'm pretty sure there would be newspaper articles, etc. about it.

What I thought were joysticks in the pictures, were actually ash trays

You can push down on the joystick-looking part to make the disk under it drop down a bit and spin quickly, flinging recently-deposited ashes into a container under it, if it's the kind I think it is.

Commenting to provide the info only because if my grandfather hadn't owned a similar one that I'd gotten to play with years and years ago, I'd have had no idea WTF they were.

[EDIT] "as" to "a".

Me too. I looked for cables around the floor, then read the text below the picture.

They had mice... but they were actual mice.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sage+computer+ash+tray&t=ffsb&iax=...

Not surprised it didn't catch on. I'd rather thumb through a paper catalog at home.

http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...

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