Despite the Canute-like efforts of the BBC and the UK establishment to promote the home computer as a useful domestic tool and edifying source of instruction for the young, it was clear as soon as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum made its appearance in August of 1982 that the future of British home computing would revolve around video games…
The cover art featured on the boxes and cartridges of Atari games from the company’s heyday—1977 through the crash of ’83—has been much admired and discussed, and rightly so: video games were an upstart medium, and Atari president Nolan Bushnell felt that the packaging “needed all the care and attention that a record album did.”
In the early years of home video gaming, Pong reigned supreme. Released in its arcade cabinet incarnation in 1972, Pong became a sensation and inspired a revolution in computer gaming, headed by Sunnyvale, California’s Atari. As Atari’s programmers created more games for the lucrative arcade market, the race was on to create versions that could be played at home on a television set…
After returning from World War II, William Levitt, the son of an upscale real estate developer, set out to build affordable homes for the millions of veterans that needed one. Using mass production methods innovated at the beginning of the century by the Ford Motor Company and taught to him during his tour as a Navy Seabee—and by cutting out union workers and middlemen—Levitt did exactly that…
Collecting costly and obsessively detailed miniatures has long been a pastime of the wealthy, but the first known model village in Britain—and, if its claims are to be believed, in the world—was located in the verdant “stockbroker belt” populated by affluent upper-middle-class London commuters…
I don’t want to get all “in a world” here, and yet, in a world where most chain store seasonal decor comes branded in corporate colors and with a strict guide specifying exactly how each individual bauble is to be displayed, there’s something very human about a herd of fiberglass cows in awkwardly drooping Santa hats…
The 1968 Futuro House—a flying-saucer-shaped prefabricated dwelling originally intended as a skiing cabin—was the brainchild of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. Made of pre-cast fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic elements that could be assembled on site, the Futuro was designed to be easy to construct and heat in rugged environments…
As Western society began to shift into its post-industrial phase, the flora and fauna that had once been at the heart of the British agrarian lifestyle, and which for the last several hundred years had been interred beneath factories, exterminated as an annoyance or simply ignored altogether, began to reassert their existence in strange new fictional forms…
As part of her anti-drug Just Say No campaign, First Lady Nancy Reagan made a guest appearance on the NBC sitcom Diff’rent Strokes (1978-1986) on March 19, 1983. In the episode, titled “The Reporter,” Arnold Drummond (Gary Coleman), a reporter for his school newspaper, breaks a story on drug pushers at his school and submits it to a major city newspaper…
Toy guns have existed in the United States for nearly 150 years, becoming a niche market in the ’30s and ’40s following the popularity of Hollywood gangster pictures and The Lone Ranger serial. After the U.S. entered World War II, the market became an industry, and sophisticated new designs proliferated until the late 1960’s…
We Are the Mutants 