Fifty-two years ago this month, AT&T made the first transcontinental Picturephone call between test stations in Disneyland in Anaheim California and the New York World’s Fair, foreshadowing the modern day video chatting we now take for granted. It was an inauspicious start...
Joe Grado hand-built phono cartridges in his BrookIyn home in the early 1950s and founded Grado Labs in 1953 when production exceeded the size of his kitchen table.
Back in April of 1973 when Martin Cooper made the first public call on a handheld cellular phone while walking down a New York City street, few could have imagined that the Motorola DynaTAC “brick” phone (shown here in prototype form) would evolve into a super-slim, do-everything pocket computer—a.k.a. the smartphone we take for granted today.
Twenty years ago this month Twister took home entertainment by storm when it became the first Hollywood feature film to be released on DVD. The disc went on to become top-selling DVD in 1997.
Color TV became commercially viable in the early 1950s but didn’t really take off until the mid-1960s when the big three (and only) television networks made a concerted effort to significantly increase the amount of color programming, broadcasting classic shows like Gilligan’s Island, My Favorite Martian, and Lassie in “brilliant, true-to-life color” for the first time. An epic event if you were around to experience it and arguably more dramatic than the transition to HDTV.
DVD-Audio was the big story in our February/March 2000 issue, which devoted more than a dozen pages to the launch of a promising new multichannel music format hailed by Neil Young and other artists as audio’s second coming. Things didn’t quite turn out as planned.
The original ColecoVision console (left) and the forthcoming Coleco Chameleon.
If you lived through (and survived) the decade of hair bands (aka the Eighties), you probably remember videogame stalwarts Atari, Nintendo, and Coleco and may have spent countless hours playing now-classic games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.
Way back in 1958 when stereo was a novelty, the comedy duo Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding released Bob And Ray Throw A Stereo Spectacular, a whimsical LP showcasing the marvels of two-channel sound.
Common wisdom tells us that Hollywood is the birthplace of the motion picture industry but, no, the motion picture studio was born in New Jersey. That’s right, home of The Boss and Tony Soprano.
In December 1999 the music industry sued (and ultimately shut down) downloading service Napster. Three years later Apple opened the iTunes Music Store, pointing the way to the future of music distribution and turning the recording industry on its ear.