Clunky by today’s standards, in 1979 when it was first introduced in Japan the gadget was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Before the Walkman people simply had to hold radios up to their ears and while tape players were becoming common place in cars there was no way to listen to your favorite band’s tape outside of the home or automobile. Armed with a headset that also allowed the music to only be heard by you the Walkman became an instant hit.

Sony’s innovation, in many ways caused their device’s downfall. When Steve Jobs came out with the iPod, there was no need for carrying around something that could only play one tape at a time and needed costly battery replacement several times a month. Still, fare thee well Walkman tape player, and thanks for the memories.

Former Apple engineer and current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein will stay on-board. Rubinstein, probably the man given the most credit for webOS, will head up HP’s new Mobility unit. It’ll consist of Palm’s hardware assets and will gain HP’s iPAQ line of smartphones.

The merger between HP and Palm is supposed to be completed by the first week of July. Other notes from the meeting, although Verizon ordered 1 million Palm Pre phones for the launch, they haven’t ordered any since. AT&T is reportedly better at selling the Palm hardware and they were described by Palm as being “better trained.”

Sounds like there was a lot of excited people at the Palm shareholder meeting. webOS 2.0 was mentioned. Will we see a webOS tablet sooner? We know HP really is keen on the mobile OS, and they even want to put it on printers. Once the deal is finished, we could see them start to churn these products out.

One interesting conversation Jonathan Swartz had was with Steve Jobs after the former unveiled a Linux-based desktop called Project Looking Glass in 2003. Steve Jobs called him to tell him that the graphical effects of said project were “stepping all over Apple’s IP” and therefore Apple would have just sued Sun would they have commercialized it.

Here’s what happened next according to the former Sun CEO:

My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.

So Steve can be silenced! Unfortunately HTC will not have it that easy which is weird since HTC has been making phones long before Apple, isn’t that right?

Jonathan Swartz has also had a similar meeting with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer regarding Open Office but also Windows. Microsoft asked for royalties for every Open Office download at which point Sun asked for money for every Windows copy sold. The meeting ended up in a draw but the point is that neither Microsoft nor Sun sued each other for Intellectual Property aka patents.

We’ll be looking forward to see how the courts feel about these suits in the mobile business then and we’ll definitely be interested to see who will win.

Set to become available later this year, though no specific release date has been confirmed as yet, BigTrak Jr – which seemingly comes in at around half the size of the original BigTrak, as pictured below – will be capable of storing up to 32 programs and it’ll even see new accessories such as a rocket launcher attachment and a digital camera though, again, details concerning these attachments is pretty sparse right now (so we are unable to offer any indication as to the resolution of the camera, etc).

BigTrak Jr is expected to hit retail this Summer and will carry a price tag of some $40 (circa £30 in the UK).

[via Crunchgear | Technabob]

Having only yesterday fallen into somewhat of a digression concerning the fate of the HD-DVD format, in which we made references to the long defunct Betamax format, we couldn’t not post concerning the passing of another iconic technology whose days are well and truly over as Polaroid announce that they are ceasing production of the film utilised by their instant cameras.

If you are of a ‘certain age’ you’ll no doubt recall with especially fond memories the first ever time you first saw one of Polaroid’s bulky instamatic cameras in action as well as the somewhat ceremonious ‘holding of photo to chest to warm it up’ pose that, depending on who owned the camera, oven proved quite enlightening (we won’t give her name here, but safe to say that I’ve never seen an instamatic photo develop quite as quickly as was the case in her ample bosom – hence the delectable space between them hitherto being referred to as the ‘dark room’).

I’m holding on to that fond memory for just a minute…

Polaroid Mini Printer

The ceasing of film production by Polaroid will result in the closing of factories in the US, Netherlands and Mexico though, with Polaroid having ceased manufacture of their instamatic camera range around a year ago the writing has been on the wall for some time.

If you still own one of Polaroid’s instamatics the good news is that apparently they apparently have enough stocks of the film left to continue supply up until 2009 and are presently in talks with another company with view to films being provided by a third party beyond that date.

Big Trak was a six-wheeled tank that featured a keypad with which the vehicle could be programmed to move forwards, backwards, turn, pause and even fire a laser (in other words, flash a blue light) complete with sound effects and it was great as you could place a cup of tea or coffee on top of the keypad once it had been programmed and send the drink off down the room and invariably under the sofa.

And, for many of us who were knee high to a grass hopper when this marvel of the toy world was released, it was the first time we had ever actually programmed anything.

According the press blurb at the time you could “Let Big Trak’s electronic memory treat you to an absolutely spectacular performance. Just punch in your program of commands and watch Big Trak carry them out: moving forward, backward, left and right, up to 99 length units! Order Big Trak to picot into a sharp or wide-angled turn, full circle, or even beyond that. Big Trak can lurk silently before continuing on its course, and can fire either a single shot or a volley from its “photon” cannon. Send Big Trak out of the room, around furniture and other obstacles, and back again! Easy enough for kids to learn, but so much fun, even adults won’t be able to resist. One 9 volt transistor and four 1.5 volt “D” size batteries.”

Big Trak on the move
(i.e., just about to collide with something)

Big Trak was brain child of none other than Clive Sinclair (now rightly a Sir), a British inventor who was way ahead of his time and who later went on to design such icons as the Spectrum commuter and the much maligned C5 electric trike (both of which we are duty bound to feature in subsequent posts). Incidentally, Sir Clive’s latest product, the A-Bike, has already been featured in TFTS and can be seen via this link.

Using the keypad Big Trak could be programmed to navigate its way around the home with relative ease, however, if your calculations were even a little out or if anyone had been spiteful enough as to move something prior to completion of the programming its journey inevitably ended with some kind of collision. The problem was that the path had to be programmed by inputting how many units of distance you wanted the toy to complete (up to a total of 99 units) before turning, firing its photon laser at the cat, etc and, whilst perhaps I am at fault here, one could never quite gauge just how long one of these units actually was.

Big Trak’s Keypad – simple but
(reasonably) effective.

For example, you would programme something like forward 5, turn 90, fire laser, but somehow it never quite ended up where you expected (through no fault of its own).

Interestingly you could also purchase a separate trailer, known as the Big Trak Transport, that you could attach to Big Trak so as to enable you to send a precious load, such as an entire ham sandwich, off into the wilderness of the front room though I never got to own this accessory (thankfully – as otherwise my parents would have spent hours trying to fish curled up ham sandwiches out from behind the sofa every day).

Big Trak with trailer sans ham sandwich

Big Trak was a wonderful toy that is steeped in nostalgia and, quite rightly, takes pride of place amongst the electronic toys that served as prime examples of where the world was headed.

If you would like to get really sentimental, I have managed to gain a copy of the original Big Trak manual which you can either view or download here (PDF format). You can also watch Big Trak in action in this clip from the 80’s, and once again hear those catchy beeps that you have never truly forgotten, via the video below (click the picture to stream or the link provided to download).

[etv]

I would like to thank and acknowledge Scalleja for the above images – you can see more images of Big Trak on Scalleja’s Flickr page via this link.