Tech In Plain Sight: Shopping Cart Locks

February 28, 2025 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Shopping carts are surprisingly expensive. Prices range up to about $300 for a cart, which may seem like a lot, but they have to be pretty rugged and are made to work for decades. Plastic carts are cheaper, but not by much.

And carts have a way of vanishing. We’ve seen estimates that cart theft costs hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide annually. To stem the tide, stores sometimes pay a reward to people to round up carts off the street and return them to the store — it’s cheaper than buying a new one. That led [Elmer Isaacks] to patent a solution to this problem in 1968.

The [Isaacks] system used lots of magnets. A cart leaving the store had a brake that would be armed by running over a magnet. Customers were expected to follow a path surrounded by magnets to prevent the brake from engaging. If you left the track, a rod passing through the wheel locked it.

A third magnet would disarm the brake when you entered the store again. This is clever, but it has several problems. First, you have to insert magnets all over the place. Second, if someone knows how the system works, a simple magnet will hold the brake off no matter what. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Shopping Cart Locks” →

DataSaab: Sweden’s Lesser-Known History In Computing

February 22, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 6 Comments

Did you know that the land of flat-pack furniture and Saab automobiles played a serious role in the development of minicomputers, the forerunners of our home computers? If not, read on for a bit of history. You can also go ahead and watch the video below, which tells it all with a ton of dug up visuals.

Sweden’s early computer development was marked by significant milestones, beginning with the relay-based Binär Aritmetisk Relä-Kalkylator (BARK) in 1950, followed by the vacuum tube-based Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator (BESK) in 1953. These projects were spearheaded by the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery (Matematikmaskinnämnden), established in 1948 to advance the nation’s computing capabilities.

In 1954, Saab ventured into computing by obtaining a license to replicate BESK, resulting in the creation of Saab’s räkneautomat (SARA). This initiative aimed to support complex calculations for the Saab 37 Viggen jet fighter. Building on this foundation, Saab’s computer division, later known as Datasaab, developed the D2 in 1960 – a transistorized prototype intended for aircraft navigation. The D2’s success led to the CK37 navigational computer, which was integrated into the Viggen aircraft in 1971.

Datasaab also expanded into the commercial sector with the D21 in 1962, producing approximately 30 units for various international clients. Subsequent models, including the D22, D220, D23, D5, D15, and D16, were developed to meet diverse computing needs. In 1971, Datasaab’s technologies merged with Standard Radio & Telefon AB (SRT) to form Stansaab AS, focusing on real-time data systems for commercial and aviation applications. This entity eventually evolved into Datasaab AB in 1978, which was later acquired by Ericsson in 1981, becoming part of Ericsson Information Systems.

Parallel to these developments, Åtvidabergs Industrier AB (later Facit) produced the FACIT EDB in 1957, based on BESK’s design. This marked Sweden’s first fully domestically produced computer, with improvements such as expanded magnetic-core memory and advanced magnetic tape storage. The FACIT EDB was utilized for various applications, including meteorological calculations and other scientific computations. For a short time, Saab even partnered with the American Unisys called Saab-Univac – a well-known name in computer history.

These pioneering efforts by Swedish organizations laid the groundwork for the country’s advancements in computing technology, influencing both military and commercial sectors. The video below has lots and lots more to unpack and goes into greater detail on collaborations and (missed) deals with great names in history.

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The “Unbreakable” Beer Glasses Of East Germany

February 17, 2025 by Lewin Day 80 Comments

We like drinking out of glass. In many ways, it’s an ideal material for the job. It’s hard-wearing, and inert in most respects. It doesn’t interact with the beverages you put in it, and it’s easy to clean. The only problem is that it’s rather easy to break. Despite its major weakness, glass still reigns supreme over plastic and metal alternatives.

But what if you could make glassware that didn’t break? Surely, that would be a supreme product that would quickly take over the entire market. As it turns out, an East German glassworks developed just that. Only, the product didn’t survive, and we lumber on with easily-shattered glasses to this day. This is the story of Superfest.

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You Know This Font, But You Don’t Really Know It

February 15, 2025 by Jenny List 18 Comments

Typography enthusiasts reach a point at which they can recognise a font after seeing only a few letters in the wild, and usually identify its close family if not the font itself. It’s unusual then for a font to leave them completely stumped, but that’s where [Marcin Wichary] found himself. He noticed a font which many of you will also have seen, on typewriter and older terminal keys. It has a few unusual features that run contrary to normal font design such as slightly odd-shaped letters and a constant width line, and once he started looking, it appeared everywhere. Finding its origin led back well over a century, and led him to places as diverse as New York street furniture and NASA elevators.

The font in question is called Gorton, and it came from the Gorton Machine Co, a Wisconsin manufacturer. It’s a font designed for a mechanical router, which is why it appears on so much custom signage and utilitarian components such as keyboard keys. Surprisingly its history leads back into the 19th century, predating many of the much more well-know sans serif fonts. So keep an eye out for it on your retro tech, and you’ll find that you’ve seen a lot more of it than you ever knew. If you are a fellow font-head, you might also know the Hershey Font, and we just ran a piece on the magnetic check fonts last week.

Thanks [Martina] for the tip!

Inside Project Delilah

February 4, 2025 by Al Williams 13 Comments

The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to be the father of computers as anyone. But [Jack Copland] points out in a recent post that the famous computer scientist was also involved in another secret project: Delilah.

While [Turing] is best known for his work breaking ciphers at Bletchley Park, he also put time in on a second project about ten miles away in a secret electronics lab at Hanslope Park. There he worked with an assistant, [Donald Bayley] on Delilah — a portable system for encrypting voice transmissions.

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How The Main Frame Became The Mainframe: An Etymological Dissertation

February 2, 2025 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

In his most recent article, [Ken Shirriff] takes a break from putting ASICs under a microscope, and instead does the same in a proverbial manner with the word ‘mainframe’. Although these days the word ‘mainframe’ brings to mind a lumbering behemoth of a system that probably handles things like finances and other business things, but originally the ‘main frame’ was just one of many ‘frames’. Which brings us to the early computer systems.

We have all seen the photos of early computer systems, which not only filled rooms, but which also tended to consist of multiple units. This was something which the designers of the IBM 701 computer seem to have come up with, to make it possible to transport and install computer systems without cranes and the breaking out of walls. Within the IBM 701 system’s internal documentation, the unit containing the core logic was referred to as the ‘main frame’, alongside the ‘power frame’, the ‘core frame’, etc.

From this [Ken] then traces how the word ‘main frame’ got reused over the years, eventually making it outside of the IBM world, with a 1978 Radio Electronics magazine defining the ‘mainframe’ as the enclosure for the computer, separating it seemingly from peripherals. This definition seems to have stuck, with BYTE and other magazines using this definition.

By the 1960s the two words ‘main frame’ had already seen itself hyphenated and smushed together into a singular word before the 1980s redefined it as ‘a large computer’. Naturally marketing at IBM and elsewhere leaned into the word ‘mainframe’ as a token of power and reliability, as well as a way to distinguish it from the dinky little computers that people had at home or on their office desk.

Truly, after three-quarters of a century, the word ‘mainframe’ has become a reflection of computing history itself.

RedBox In The 80s: Meet The VHS Vending Behemoth

February 1, 2025 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

Redbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!

Meet the Video Vendor. YouTuber [SpaceTime Junction] was able to track down one of these rare machines, which apparently formerly served an Ohio rental outlet called Kohnen’s. It’s a monstrous thing that stands taller and about three times wider than traditional vending machines, and it could hold up to 320 tapes in its robotic magazine. It’s got lashings of woodgrain, a green-on-black CRT, and the beautiful kind of clicky keys that went away after the 1980s.

[SpaceTime Junction] has a bunch of videos up on the machine, and you even get to see it powered up. It’s a little difficult to see what’s going on, because the machine is something like nine feet wide and it’s all shot in vertical video. There isn’t a whole lot of content on these obscurities out there, so this is a great place to start. Apparently, there were recently a hundred or more of these found living in a Texas warehouse according to Reddit, so we might see more of these popping up online soon. [SpaceTime Junction] has toured that facility, too.

You can read more about the fall of Redbox, or the cleanup afterwards, in our prior coverage.

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