History of ID Week 12, Part 1: Electronics and Product Semantics

[@BrokebackBob]

I'm not one of your students though I wish I was. I'm just a 66-year-old retired IT professional who has always admired design and technology. I am totally hooked on your lectures. I'm going to watch all of them and I've watched many of them already, they are just so interesting instructive fascinating and engaging. You're a marvelous instructor.

[@reniermassyn4402]

Second Year Industrial Design Student from Cape Town South Africa. Absolutely loved it! please upload more!

[@buhlemahlangu2136]

i wish he was our actual teacher!!!!

[@RD2564]

This guys is a star I tell ya', a STAR. I'm amazed that Matthew Bird hasn't been discovered by Hollywood yet ...

[@leeharman3762]

First of all, thank you for this lecture series. I think I've watched all 12 weeks at this point, plus all the bonus content. I am enjoying this so much! Second of all, it's such a thrill to see Commodore computers included here. My father was an engineer there until they closed and was just telling me about the development process for keyboard specs!

[@paulaeller9494]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!! You are a God-send!! You have explained everything in a way that i can understand and i am so grateful!

[@julianciccone81]

Hi I'm a second year Industrial designer students from Canada. Thanks a lot for your amazing content love your videos! :)

[@Centerstagerentals]

Thank you for your videos they're awesome, I'm a design student in San Francisco theses videos have been extremely helpful!

[@TheSeventhSphinx]

Astonishing theremin performance! Thank you!

[@delusionnnnn]

A couple of notes about the Macintosh - the ads and introduction and sketches are for the original Macintosh, which was just called "Macintosh" which debuted in 1984. The Macintosh SE was from 1987, three years later, and was significantly improved from the original since it was their fourth model. The key differences are that the original Mac had 128K of memory, the SE had 1 MB, the SE had two 800K floppy drives instead of one OR one floppy drive and a 20 MB hard drive, whereas the original Mac only had one 400K floppy. The SE is said to have sold incredibly well pretty quickly.

[@pangkyuli6626]

I truly love your work and your STYLE hhhhh.(abundant pic and gif help a lot to remember all of them ) Sincerely hope can access more class from u .

[@josieTheDuck]

As always, thanks for a great lecture! It would be interesting to see collection of items that you have behind you :)

[@HistoryofID]

Maybe with a little time off I will return to the scene of the crime and record a little tour. Thanks for the idea!

[@MexTexican]

So informative and entertaining. Thanks for posting!

[@sandrawheeler7831]

Just found our Speak and Spell. Still works!

[@fontenbleau]

Unfortunately Theremin have very dark secret, it used first as wireless alarm in USSR Gulag enslaving camps, inventor was able to sell it there first and only later made as musical instrument, maybe this becomes a curse for destiny of such device. Very good lecture, we need more. 👍

[@seamlab8870]

OMG 😳 Never heard that!

[@fontenbleau]

@@seamlab8870 it's hard to find, most Kgb archives are closed again and continued to be destroyed. You can't research personal case folder in communism archives of inventor if not family member now.

[@ShowandTellknitting]

Ah, yes. Thanks for reminding me of those late nights in college submitting my decks of punch cards at the computer center. (We never had "hanging chads", but all those punched out bits made great confetti!)

[@lupinzar]

In regards to early computer equipment: Digital Equipment Corporation put a little bit of styling into their machines. Not a lot, but I love the switches on the PDP-11 models, even though they were before my time.

[@seamlab8870]

I was a Secretary in the 80’s and used “Selectric” IBM, then “Word Perfect” which I hated because you had to memorize codes before you could type anything. Took to the Mac like a duck to water, all WISYWIG.

[@HomeBuiltByHoward]

The original iMac was said to have been translucent because it allowed us to visually grapple with a technology we couldn't understand.

[@HistoryofID]

I have a whole file full of images of transparent models created to show insides (Braun, Apple...). It's a weird fun thing.

[@TheMissingxtension]

Even worse is the apple trackpad on the laptops, they are oversized, too hard (no good for long sessions), jagged, hard edges, and gets in the way of typing. I like the nibs and two separate buttons that actually give you feedback and friction. I don't like the finish on the apple trackpad, maybe some light sanding would make it usable.

[@HomeBuiltByHoward]

If you owned one of the Walkman TPS-2's your will remember deafening yourself constantly as you inadvertently slid the volume to 11.

[@beanieweenietapioca]

When I look at consumer electronics from the late 70s on, I think there's an underappreciated modernist aesthetic to these plastic and metal boxes. I find it kind of reminiscent of International Style architecture--letting the form be dictated by a pure expression of function and materials. Stereo systems, VCRs, and desktop PCs were new objects, with no functional antecedent--so why try to make them look like something else by wrapping them in a decorative chassis? These are objects made from rectangular circuit boards and box-shaped modular components--there is a purity of purpose to put them into a metal or plastic box with the controls you need to touch up front, and the tangly bits--which you don't want someone tripping over--connected in the back. You could take the same components and put them in a sphere, or a teddy bear, or literally anything--but why? Apple is the darling of designers, because their products scream out how designed they are. I think a lot of enthusiasts reacted negatively to that, not just from platform-war fanboyism, but because viewed from this functionalist sensibility many of them come across as pretentious, bloated, and chintzy. And the non-Apple hardware that aped that aesthetic was scorned even more. Much like the International Style, of course, this "simplicity of purpose" also happens to conform with blatant, repetitive cheapness. So it's not without its own problems. 😁

[@timrasim1515]

Hi Matthew, thank you for your lecture series which I greatly enjoy watching. I noticed that you switched from memory to storage in showing the computers advancement, which seemed weird to me, especially when you referred to the Macintosh SEs hard drive with "it seemed inconceivable that something had that much memory". (For the off chance you do not already know this: www.kingston.com/germany/us/memory/difference-between-memory-storage ).

[@timrasim1515]

After re-reading this I feel a bit petty. To be clear, you did not say anything wrong and computers definitely advanced significantly in their memory.

[@HistoryofID]

Thanks! It takes a village to understand history; I love getting the details cleaned up!!!!

[@ThatsAllFolkss]

Cool one! (They’re all great though)

[@lisad1993]

*ahem* the Apple Lisa :)

[@maryk8553]

slay king

[@nordfaen]

Thank YOU very much 😁