I've justy found a picture that shows women embracing new technology. Not exactly the Apple Ipad but never mind. This is the heart and soul of RetroTech (ie women and old technology). Anyway, moving on swiftly, its great to have a break from work at Easter.
Yes it may sound fantastic but its true!
Cheerleaders are a potent weapon that will crush the credit crunch and rout the recession.
They've been with us for 100 years and each time the crunch comes and the bankers fail, it is cheerleaders who lift our spirits and raise economic growth.
Girls of the 1970's ready to raise morale on Wall Street and herald in a new era of prosperity!
Today's NFL version. Streamlined and honed to raise economic activity and kickstart dead markets back to life.
Note minimal costumes to reduce the initial investment costs and raw materials and guarentee value for money and maximum return.
I'm feeling better already!
This should kick start the economy!
For more on the History of the Cheerleader and Her impact on Economic Growth, click the following link:
An English perspective on the weird glamor of Cheerleading and Cheerleaders. The Cheerleader is an exotic bird with flashy plumage but is she also an endangered species?
Save Money, fight the Credit Crunch and the Energy Crisis by turning back the clock and burning wood. Here are 10 reasons why a modern wood burning stove is the answer.
The horrors of knitwear. Crochet calamities, Bad fashion, weird glamour and when Granny's knitting turns sexy.
I don't normally suffer from writer's block but today I want to write but I just can't get any ideas. It doesn't help to know that there are people here at Hubpages who happily turn out 400 Hubs in the...
Save Money, fight the Credit Crunch and the Energy Crisis by turning back the clock and burning wood. Here are 10 reasons why a modern wood burning stove is the answer.
One of a series of articles on job hunting. Make the shortlist. Stand out from the crowd. The second step is to get that interview!
The truth about Kylie Minogue gossip and a plumber from Birmingham. Celebrity gossip even Heat magazine found too hot to handle. Read about a heating engineer with a string of Hollywood conquests who invented Kylie's golden Hot pants and installed Brad Pitt's Hot Tub.
As far as I'm concerned, you can keep your exotic snakes and your fancy dog breeds. Open up a whole new world of possibilities with the amazing, environmentally-friendly guinea pig! Guinea pigs, or...
The British Royal Navy has a language all of its own. Jackspeak (navy slang) reflects both its proud history and also the culture (good and bad) of the sailor. Everyday expressions originating from life at sea.
If you like your glamour weird then this is for you. Bad TV, B Movies, SciFi style, Abba, Blakes 7, Barbarella, Bay watch, dodgy fashion, models gone bad. Weird Glamor.
Jaguar - something streamlined, fast-moving and dangerous. Think creature, think car, think James Bond and the new Jaguar XF. Endangered species?
A Saint Valentine's feast of naughtiness, Seduction! contains everything you need to know about sexual temptation and enticement. From Eve and the Apple, Sirens, Casanova to James Bond. Plus Nigella's seductive cuisine and tips for an evening you won't forget!
Once flying was glamorous and being a pilot or an air hostess was the coolest of professions. A humourous review of the history of air travel and the rise of no frills airlines. How flight lost its glamor and flight attendants their reputation.
A FREE Guide to Helium as a writing platform and as a potential source of income. Write for Helium and get rich? Read on to find out more.
Welcome to my First Anniversary HubPage. This is a guide which contains reflections and tips based on my first 12 months at HubPages. Find out how to write Hubs and make some modest money via AdSense.
The Eye is iconic. Our primary means of perception and a magnificent optical instrument. How it works, meanings, beautiful eyes and the London Eye.
Do you remember the days when computers were as big as London buses? When the Rolling stones were still under 25? Programs were written on punched cards and fed into huge card readers. If you accessed one it was typically through a 'teletype' using what was known as timesharing. Core memory was typically ferrite core for each bit so memory was very limited. Hard disks and magnetic tape drives were the size of industrial washing machines.
By the early 80s the desktop computer arrived, with machines such as the Commodore Pet. You couldn't afford one at home but everyone was amazed a computer could be so small.
Even more amazing was the advent of the first home computers. My first was the Sinclair ZX81.
In the UK you could either buy it in kit form and build it yourself for £49.95 or £69.95 ready to go. You either typed the BASIC program in by hand or loaded it from an ordinary audio cassette player. I understand they were also marketed in the USA by Timex.
Your screen was provided by an ordinary TV set. The machine had a staggering 1k byte of memory! Contrast this with around 2Gbyte in todays PCs (around one million times as much). For a further £50 you could buy a plug in 16k storage expansion module. Amazingly this cost far more than an extra 2G of PC memory today.
Unfortunately it had no floppy drive and the memory was volatile. meaning that when you powered off everything was lost. You therefore had to down load your program to your audio player and pray that next time you tried to load your program it would actually load again!
The kids today with their X-boxes and Wiis, they don't know they're born. When I was a lad times were hard...
I threw my ZX81 away but in the last few years the price has been going up. How long before we see early computers on the UK TV show, The Antiques Roadshow? It would be nice to know that one day the sinclair machine might be worth more than the £70 paid we for it!
All this talk about Sarah Palin and drawing comparisons with Wonder Woman got me thinking about where Wonder Woman came from. Remember the 1970's TV show The New Original Wonder Woman featuring Lynda Carter?
Wonder Woman had an alias as Diana Prince a spectacle-wearing Naval Officer (who bears a strong resemblance to Sarah Palin). Wonder Woman’s outfit is sexy and, in USA terms, patriotic. So some folk on the web hit on the idea of putting Sarah Palin, an ex beauty Queen, in a Stars and Stripes bikini (via Photoshop). This story was then picked up in the print media.
Can you see the resemblance? For more about Wonder Woman and comparisons between the real Palin and Lynda Carter as Diana Prince, check out the following article. You can also find out what Lynda Carter really thinks about being compared to the VP candidate from Alaska!
We at Retrotech like to celebrate success and also be topical. With the 2008 Bejing Olympics coming to an end, we salute the successful UK cycling team and their dash for Gold.
The bike is a true piece of RetroTechnology. The current Olympic version, pictured here, combines an old fashioned simplicity with the latest engineering and scientific research.
Victorious Victoria Pendleton (dressed for an evening ride?) is one of our UK Gold Medal winners. I think I might just take up cycling again. Who knows who you might meet in the bike sheds?
Just a reminder of the days when we expected so much less from our technology. When this set came out the only colours you could view were black and white. No flat wafer-thin screen. No HD. Just a goldfish bowl picture with rounded corners and 405 horizontal lines making up the picture which almost disappeared if a plane flew overhead!
In the UK, back in the 50s, there was only one channel, the BBC. It wasn't until 1955 we got our first commercial channel, ITV. TV wasn't 24/7 back then so we played with our wooden toys and Meccano sets until kids TV started at 5.00pm. Happy days!
Recent posts here have included London and also Dr Who. This one combines the two themes via none other than that bubbly pop princess and all round trouper, Kylie Minogue.
Kylie joined David Tennant here in the UK to star in the Dr Who 2007 Christmas Special about a futuristic version of the Titanic. Kylie is a RetroTech kind of girl; a timeless Diva.
As a result of this and her many other contributions to popular culture, she received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from none other than Prince Charles earlier this month.
If you want to hear some juicy gossip involving the Aussie songstress then check out: Kylie: Hot Gossip and a Plumber from Birmingham
"London Calling" is an old Clash Anthem. London is still cool. So is London calling you?Why not come and visit one of the world’s great cities and home of the 2012 Olympics.
So what is the Eye?
It’s a huge, futuristic ferris wheel. The height of the London Eye is 135m making it the fourth tallest structure in London.
The London Eye has won over 75 awards for national and international tourism, outstanding architectural quality and engineering achievement since opening in March 2000.
It is also the tallest observation wheel in the world located on the bank of the River Thames close to Westminster and the British Parlament.
You can see around 40KM (25 miles) from the top. That's as far as Windsor Castle on a clear day.
The London Eye welcomes an average of 3.5 million customers every year and can carry 800 passengers per revolution - equivalent to 11 London red doubled-decker buses.
Each rotation takes about 30 minutes, meaning a capsule travels at a stately 26cm per second, or 0.9km (0.6 miles) per hour - allowing passengers to step on and off without the wheel having to stop.
Enough of these statistics. Eye'll see you soon in London!
Here's a reminder of what radios used to look like around World War II.
The days when a geek's hobby was being a 'Radio Ham' and you stuffed your attic full of huge gray boxes with glowing valves and hissing everywhere. Meanwhile, your roof was adorned with massive antennae warning the neighbours you were not 'normal'.
As the picture shows, it had its compensations. Attractive young women flocked to your bedroom in the hope of catching a few well turned phrases of Norwegian or the distant chatter of Chinese whispers above the static.
Happy days!
The 4th series of Doctor Who has been a real roller-coaster, thrill ride. Very different to the old days of dodgy sets, cheap costumes and daleks who threatened world domination but couldn't climb stairs.
Finally we know that David Tennant remains the Doctor for another series.
The sonic screwdrive (pictured) is a key gadget used by Doctor Who - a kind of intergalactic/timetravelling Swiss Army knife.
To investigate the latest WiFi gadgets, why not check out:
WiFi Gadgets - get more value from your WiFi broadband
Back in the days before Television and the Web, technologies such as the Magic Lantern began to compete with more traditional entertainment such as Charades and piano, poetry or singing recitals.
The Magic lantern was an early version of the slide projector which bored to death millions of families from around the 1950s onwards.
Nowadays we tend to send a link to a site like Flica or Picassa and trust our friends/family to check out our latest snaps. At least they no longer have to endure dreaded phrases such as,
"Now this next carosel is from our holidays in Spain. Then we have 2 more from Clackton-on-Sea.... Then we'll break for a cup of tea ..."
Here is a typical example of the kit, complete with handy carrying case.
Today the nearest equivalent to the dreaded slide show is 'Death by PowerPoint' frequently endured at countless business meetings across the globe.
For some lighthearted hints and tips on presentations and how to avoid death by PowerPoint check out:
Deliver Successful, Effective Presentations.
Steampunk is a term used in fantasy and speculative fiction that came into fashion in the 1980s. The term relates to an alternative universe where steam power is still widely used.
In Steampunk there is typically an element of the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne and real technological developments like the computer or mobile phone occurring at an earlier date.
Here is a PC built in Steampunk style. This one was sold on Ebay. The frame is solid 1/4-inch brass. The base features a mixture of brass and black marble.
The Goldern Compass
There is an element of Steampunk in the movie The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman's book. This is particularly reflected in modes of transport such as the amazing steam carriages and the airships.
There is no doubt that there is a real hunger for these retro-looking technology items. We long for the days when technology was hand-made and individually crafted. Think of the early gramophones with their cabinet-maker cases.
With oil prices going through the roof, who knows, the steam car may be on the way back. Similarly the airship could also be the next big retro-technology thing.
Talking of Retro and the Golden Compass, it seems only right to end with Nicole Kidman; an actress of timeless beauty who compliments retro-technology so well.
In days gone by people had a more cavalier attitude to safety. This picture illustrates my point perfectly.
This is one of those weird pictures that just catches the imagination. What is going on here? It has the look of a sixth form class photo with the form teacher at the back. (click to enlarge)
Here is an early advert for an Apple IPOD. Or is it?
Kind of looks like an early transistor radio got the Photoshop treatment. But what do you think?
I spend many happy hours in the UK listening to AM pirate radio on one of these. Lots of static but very exciting. In those days the UK was surrounded by around 20 ships broadcasting pop music illegally. The government caved in in the end and allowed commercial radio on land.
This is a strange poster by today's standards.
It shows how much times have changed. This is so sexist. The implication is that only real MEN are fit for the Navy. Women can only dream.
Certainly at least 20% of the crew on a typical British Royal Navy vessel are now women. Arguably its a more grown up environment as a result.
I'm amazed how interested you guys out there are in the horned gramophone I recently posted (April 26) which plays 78 records. Due to popular demand here is another shot of the same 'model'.
Aria (the lady in old-fashioned underwear) is demonstrating the deployment of the horn. A beautiful piece of equipment. They don't just make them like that any more!
So here you have it - a complex looking machine used to collect data in order to to select the perfect car cushion. Surely not? Could this be another Photo Shopped hoax? On balance I think its genuine. But what do you think?
If you check back to my 23 April post you'll see another example a bit like this which did turn out to be a hoax. The RAND corporation home computer.
A final question. Why on earth is the driver wearing a hat? presumably she is inside a lab of some kind. Perhaps its just a fashion statement.
This woman is obviously incredibly proud of her new-fangled, portable music machine. So proud that it is a wonder she managed to prepare the substancial meal she is carrying.
I love these homely US Ads from around the 1950s. All 'God, Motherhood and Apple Pie'. I'm also fascinated by the progression of music players from the horned gramophone to the Ipod.
Talking of horned gramophones, I just happen to have a picture of one. I apologise that the lady demonstrating it is only partly clothed. Perhaps she plans to listen to some music while getting ready for bed.
Incredible that these machines are purely mechanical. The clockwork motor turns the disk and the needle in the grove vibrates reproducing the sound. The horn applifies the sound so it was clearly audible. With not an amplifer or any electricity in sight. Beautiful isn't it?
The lady in the picture? Aria Giovanni wasn't born until 1977 in Long Beach California. She obviously gets her underwear from a charity shop along with the record player and her 78 records.
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