Personally, I’m starting to get concerned that when a proper hoverboard becomes available I will be too old for a hoverboard. (I’m probably already too old for a hoverboard…)
@ItalianScallion I didn’t know the ref in the title post but the display on the device looks like Korean. I’m not good enough to be able to translate it.
@ItalianScallion@pmarin@werehatrack maybe that also, but not the source of this particular company (who made an inferior knockoff Video iPod for people who didn’t get one at the office Christmas party…)
@ItalianScallion@toycardriverbabelfish.com was an early translation website that I used to write my French language final. i got a 9 percent. it turns out that 1998 was too soon for that particular technology. too bad I didn’t even know enough French to realize how bad a job it did
@Cerridwyn Well, there was the occasional transporter malfunction, but it was usually a red uniform guy that were well-known to often fail to make it back from “away teams”
@Cerridwyn@jouest@pmarin Yes, there were plenty of transporter malfunctions: Kirk being split in two, Tuvok and Neelix being combined into one, Scotty being stuck in a transporter for decades, but I don’t remember many deaths. Yes, there was the one where the Enterprise crew thought they were beaming some red shirts to a planet, but due to an illusion, sent them into space, but that wasn’t a malfunction. It seemed like nearly always, the malfunction was observed and no transports were done until it was fixed. Please correct me if I’m wrong. My Star Trek watching started in the early 70s and is limited to TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and some of the movies. (I’m watching “The Conscience of the King” right now on H&I. )
I remember some time ago reading an article about Star Trek technology and how much of it might be possible in our future. Warp drive: yes, medical instruments: some, transporter: no.
@ItalianScallion@jouest@pmarin Star Trek fairly well directly ended up leaving to the development of the early Intensive Care Unit monitoring systems. The person who designed them was influenced by the Sick Bay in Star Trek
@Cerridwyn@jouest@pmarin There’s also the urban legend that the Star Trek communicator in the original series was the inspiration for the cell phone, but the person at Motorola to whom that is attributed said he went along with the legend all the while knowing it was false.
@Cerridwyn@ItalianScallion@jouest that intensive care monitor story is so hard to believe that I do believe it. Given where things were in the 1960s it’s a rapid jump. Same with the imaging where they waved a tricorder over the patient. To bring into the animal domain I was surprised when I needed a cat cardiologist a few years back, and he did an ultrasound using a small wand and a laptop. No more big expensive machines. Well, the cardiologist was expensive, as they tend to be, for pets or humans)
@ItalianScallion Warp drive, no. That tympani-shaped thing which was widely ballyhooed as “Lookie! Lookie! It are a Warp Drive!” was nothing of the kind. It was an extremely inefficient way to generate a tiny amount of thrust by converting some kinetic energy into heat and allowing it to radiate away. We have zero clues about how to build an actual warp drive, and zero clues about creating any form of “reactionless” thruster with an efficiency that approaches even a tiny percentage of the effectiveness of a simple chemical combustion nozzle. Until a currently-unimagined breakthrough in basic physics is made, this planet is all we’ve got.
@ItalianScallion@jouest@pmarin all great leaps have come from somebody somewhere seeing or hearing something that gets them thinking. Sometimes that thought only needs to work affection sometimes it leads to a work fact or a new device
Duff beer should have remained fictional, as far as I’m concerned.
There are any number of named fictional restaurant menu items from anime and gaijin cartoons (Krabby Patty, for one) and a few that have been turned “real” at theme parks (Krusty Burger at Universal comes to mind).
SpeedRacer’s car was from Musha Motors, hence the big red M on the hood.
In the mid-70s, Bruce McCall invented the wholly fictional car make “Denbeigh” and slipped “Denbeigh Phaeton” into that year’s polling for best luxury car, and it damned near won. The success of the prank spurred McCall to write two “articles” about the history and majesty of Denbeigh, the second of which was an absolutely atrocious shaggy-dog tale.
I know that I’ve encountered loads of fictional brands over the years, but most of them have slipped through the memory cracks long since.
@werehatrack I’d get the Heinleineken shirt; I have a friend who lived in Colorado Springs as a kid - he was an avid sci-fi fan & had a sci-fi fanzine and visited Heinlein there. It was a simpler time and Mr. Heinlein invited him in and chatted with him.
@ItalianScallion@werehatrack
Fantastic!!! My brother once worked for a fancy kitchen supply store - they do have fancy items but also a lot of pretty basic items too. And they told him that people WANT to pay more because if they give a gift in that distinctive bag, their recipient knows they’ve been generous to them.
@ItalianScallion@Kyeh@werehatrack there is certainly some truth to that, but crappy stuff in a nice bag is still… crappy. It’s getting harder to find high-quality made stuff whether made in U.S., Japan, Germany, or anywhere really.
But the point about wrapping is true. I haven’t been to Korea or Japan recently but the almost-ceremonial wrapping of an item seemed essential, like they would be offended if you told them not to do it.
@ItalianScallion@pmarin@werehatrack Oh, nothing in that store is crappy, but some of it you could find for less elsewhere. It’s a high-end place, but definitely thriving on snob appeal.
@xobzoo I have one of those! The one where you had to put in an Android phone. It was not very comfortable. Came in the military-looking case. Among the weirdest game collectibles I have, this is up there. And the full-size Fallout-76 helmet but gave up on the game; maybe in another decade.
Just bring out a new-gen Elder Scrolls with no multiplayer bullshit and no microtransactions. Ahh well we knew this is how it would go when the Ferengi took over.
Going back to the flip-phone/communicator myth (is it really a myth?) there was some excellent “industrial engineering” going on about makings things practical and usable.
Thus hit a higher level in TNG with essentials graphic User Interface design (GUI). The switches and lights of the original were replaced by elegant large touchscreens. (Tip: they weren’t really flat touchscreens back then, just backlit glass graphics. We were still in CRT-time, remember) the story is that the designer Okuda created the “vision” of a whole theme for control in the TNG generation that lasted for many years and I think still inspires some totally non-Star-Trek product designs today 30 years after TNG. https://treknews.net/2015/07/23/ode-to-okudagram/
@ItalianScallion I will have to read that; sorry didn’t yet. Like when I had to go to a work meeting and didn’t read the product proposal. (Ahh fond memories)
But from guessing I think there are 2 things important here.
-Wireless communication using small portable devices (not big field radios from military times)
Ergonomic (possibly) design for ease of use and “pocketability”.
The wireless communication was already happening in TOS era as it came from military and police radio, though early ones were unwieldy and either used huge batteries or were built into police cars. So the communication thing was happening no matter what. But at the time nobody believed a flip-like device that could communicate to space. Which now exists.
The design: the flip thing came, and went, and then came back for a while, and then went to big semi-tablets, and now maybe back again. The idea makes sense. No doubt some people who design them watched Star Trek. But they are probably retired now so maybe we will never know.
/image Motorola Star-Tac
/image Motorola RAZR
Had both of those but I don’t think the top one Star Tac had a color display.
@ItalianScallion@pmarin Star Trek may have influenced how some cellular devices were designed but the actual technology came out of AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1947.
The book The Idea Factory has a drawing/map of how a cellular network would work.
@Kyeh yup, time from my childhood; I thought ‘that’ll never happen.’ Now my watch will play videos to me but I wanted to sleep. I’m supposed to wear it to track sleep and oxygen but still not used to something on my arm all night.
Also unrelated but in this century (2000) I was working with a customer that was going to make these new things MMC and SD cards. At the time MP3 music was a new thing and but with only 16-32 MB (not GB) you could barely put a few songs on there without heavy compression.
He told me someday we would have full-length movies on cards like these.
@Kyeh@pmarin The displays on the flight deck of the Pan Am orbiter as it docked with the space station in 2001 looked clunky and of questionable utility to me when the movie first came out. Now, they’re nearly comical for being obviously CRT.
@pmarin in middle school (ca. 1990) we had to present a project about the future. I mocked up a machine that demonstrated how in the future we would get our music on chips, using old ICs with legs and a socket with a cleverly concealed cassette player and some Christmas lights for pizzazz to show off how we could just pop in some new music and play it. In college I sure wish I could have gotten in on some of those MP3 player royalties.
Okay Trekkies out there. Back in the mid 70s I help build a TOS (all there was) bridge replica in LA where people had actually seen the real one. Resin and Christmas Tree lights.
It’s amazing what the old school prop-masters could make and how it looked on screen. Yeah, sorta cheesy from the 21st Century POV but ,…
I mean, several of Bones Medical Tools were salt shakers
@Kyeh yeah it’s pretty obscure regardless. someone continues to maintain this site decades later as an elaborate reference to a knockoff ipod Pam gets at some point. I just ran across it the other day very randomly
I’ve got a list of things from Star Trek teleporters to Futurama pneumatic tubes to those conveyor belts in I-Robot and the Jetsons to the Portal gun from Portal… Man I have a lot of transportation fantasies.
Keoghtom’s ointment is probably a great start. It’s been dubbed a cleric in a can.
Personally, I’m starting to get concerned that when a proper hoverboard becomes available I will be too old for a hoverboard. (I’m probably already too old for a hoverboard…)
@jouest You are not the only one thinking about when the hoverboard gets released.
@yakkoTDI Lexus made one, but they cheated
@jouest @yakkoTDI Wow (Lexus hoverboard)
@jouest, from your reference:
“Our merciless engineering culture…”
Not sure I’d want to work in such a culture.
@ItalianScallion engineering mercy is for the weak. or something.
My thoughts immediately turned to Star Trek.
The (apparently-invisible) Universal Translator would be fantastic for traveling.
@ItalianScallion I didn’t know the ref in the title post but the display on the device looks like Korean. I’m not good enough to be able to translate it.
@ItalianScallion @pmarin It appears to be from the game Second Life. I’ve never played it.
@ItalianScallion @pmarin @werehatrack maybe that also, but not the source of this particular company (who made an inferior knockoff Video iPod for people who didn’t get one at the office Christmas party…)
That’s a hint, everyone.
@pmarin Yeah, I saw the Korean then the web page talked all about Moldova. I wasn’t sure what to make of all of it.
@ItalianScallion @pmarin
hmmmmmm
@ItalianScallion The babel fish.
@ItalianScallion @toycardriver babelfish.com was an early translation website that I used to write my French language final. i got a 9 percent. it turns out that 1998 was too soon for that particular technology. too bad I didn’t even know enough French to realize how bad a job it did
@jouest I just spotted the Super High-Intensity Toggle feature in the description of the Prism 6000. So it has a SHIT switch.
@werehatrack you have to respect it
Irks, they are fictional, no?
Even the communicator from TNG forward, or better yet, I so want a transporter
@Cerridwyn Well, there was the occasional transporter malfunction, but it was usually a red uniform guy that were well-known to often fail to make it back from “away teams”
@Cerridwyn @pmarin serves them right for agreeing to wear the red uniform.
@Cerridwyn @jouest @pmarin Yes, there were plenty of transporter malfunctions: Kirk being split in two, Tuvok and Neelix being combined into one, Scotty being stuck in a transporter for decades, but I don’t remember many deaths. Yes, there was the one where the Enterprise crew thought they were beaming some red shirts to a planet, but due to an illusion, sent them into space, but that wasn’t a malfunction. It seemed like nearly always, the malfunction was observed and no transports were done until it was fixed. Please correct me if I’m wrong. My Star Trek watching started in the early 70s and is limited to TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and some of the movies. (I’m watching “The Conscience of the King” right now on H&I.
)
I remember some time ago reading an article about Star Trek technology and how much of it might be possible in our future. Warp drive: yes, medical instruments: some, transporter: no.
@ItalianScallion
@rockblossom Oof. This was the worst transporter death I remember. That distorted scream…
@ItalianScallion Well, maybe you would prefer the
transteleporter they used in The Fly?All things considered, I think I prefer to walk.
@ItalianScallion @jouest @pmarin Star Trek fairly well directly ended up leaving to the development of the early Intensive Care Unit monitoring systems. The person who designed them was influenced by the Sick Bay in Star Trek
@Cerridwyn @jouest @pmarin There’s also the urban legend that the Star Trek communicator in the original series was the inspiration for the cell phone, but the person at Motorola to whom that is attributed said he went along with the legend all the while knowing it was false.
@ItalianScallion @jouest @pmarin it does look a lot like a flip phone (not the brick)
@Cerridwyn @ItalianScallion @jouest that intensive care monitor story is so hard to believe that I do believe it. Given where things were in the 1960s it’s a rapid jump. Same with the imaging where they waved a tricorder over the patient. To bring into the animal domain I was surprised when I needed a cat cardiologist a few years back, and he did an ultrasound using a small wand and a laptop. No more big expensive machines. Well, the cardiologist was expensive, as they tend to be, for pets or humans)
@ItalianScallion Warp drive, no. That tympani-shaped thing which was widely ballyhooed as “Lookie! Lookie! It are a Warp Drive!” was nothing of the kind. It was an extremely inefficient way to generate a tiny amount of thrust by converting some kinetic energy into heat and allowing it to radiate away. We have zero clues about how to build an actual warp drive, and zero clues about creating any form of “reactionless” thruster with an efficiency that approaches even a tiny percentage of the effectiveness of a simple chemical combustion nozzle. Until a currently-unimagined breakthrough in basic physics is made, this planet is all we’ve got.
@ItalianScallion @jouest @pmarin all great leaps have come from somebody somewhere seeing or hearing something that gets them thinking. Sometimes that thought only needs to work affection sometimes it leads to a work fact or a new device
Duff beer should have remained fictional, as far as I’m concerned.
There are any number of named fictional restaurant menu items from anime and gaijin cartoons (Krabby Patty, for one) and a few that have been turned “real” at theme parks (Krusty Burger at Universal comes to mind).
SpeedRacer’s car was from Musha Motors, hence the big red M on the hood.
In the mid-70s, Bruce McCall invented the wholly fictional car make “Denbeigh” and slipped “Denbeigh Phaeton” into that year’s polling for best luxury car, and it damned near won. The success of the prank spurred McCall to write two “articles” about the history and majesty of Denbeigh, the second of which was an absolutely atrocious shaggy-dog tale.
I know that I’ve encountered loads of fictional brands over the years, but most of them have slipped through the memory cracks long since.
There is a T-shirt for the fictional beer Heinleineken, you can google it. Ditto for CtulhuCola and Cthulhu Tequila ("The wyrm eats you ")
@werehatrack Butterbeer at that Harry Potter place was pretty legit.
@werehatrack I’d get the Heinleineken shirt; I have a friend who lived in Colorado Springs as a kid - he was an avid sci-fi fan & had a sci-fi fanzine and visited Heinlein there. It was a simpler time and Mr. Heinlein invited him in and chatted with him.
@Kyeh @werehatrack
Palessi shoes
@ItalianScallion @Kyeh @werehatrack ooh good one
@ItalianScallion @werehatrack
Fantastic!!! My brother once worked for a fancy kitchen supply store - they do have fancy items but also a lot of pretty basic items too. And they told him that people WANT to pay more because if they give a gift in that distinctive bag, their recipient knows they’ve been generous to them.
@ItalianScallion @Kyeh @werehatrack there is certainly some truth to that, but crappy stuff in a nice bag is still… crappy. It’s getting harder to find high-quality made stuff whether made in U.S., Japan, Germany, or anywhere really.
But the point about wrapping is true. I haven’t been to Korea or Japan recently but the almost-ceremonial wrapping of an item seemed essential, like they would be offended if you told them not to do it.
@ItalianScallion @pmarin @werehatrack Oh, nothing in that store is crappy, but some of it you could find for less elsewhere. It’s a high-end place, but definitely thriving on snob appeal.
Brawndo!!
@yakkoTDI no documentaries
The Fing-longer.
In all my years of shopping for dangerous power tools and barrels of TNT, I have never found the ACME brand, despite heavy marketing in the 1960s.
@pmarin I grew up in a place that had Acme grocery stores and genuinely thought that the cartoons were product placement for a solid two decades
@pmarin Wiley Coyote bought everything they had.
@ItalianScallion apparently after investing it all, the market went over a cliff.
@pmarin Yeah, but it stayed stable for just a few moments before it crashed.
What are the rules/restrictions for adding something to the list? Does Pip-Boy count?
/image pip-boy
@xobzoo I have one of those! The one where you had to put in an Android phone. It was not very comfortable. Came in the military-looking case. Among the weirdest game collectibles I have, this is up there. And the full-size Fallout-76 helmet but gave up on the game; maybe in another decade.
Just bring out a new-gen Elder Scrolls with no multiplayer bullshit and no microtransactions. Ahh well we knew this is how it would go when the Ferengi took over.
There’s also a lot of other things we could include, like
@xobzoo COUNTS
Going back to the flip-phone/communicator myth (is it really a myth?) there was some excellent “industrial engineering” going on about makings things practical and usable.
Thus hit a higher level in TNG with essentials graphic User Interface design (GUI). The switches and lights of the original were replaced by elegant large touchscreens. (Tip: they weren’t really flat touchscreens back then, just backlit glass graphics. We were still in CRT-time, remember) the story is that the designer Okuda created the “vision” of a whole theme for control in the TNG generation that lasted for many years and I think still inspires some totally non-Star-Trek product designs today 30 years after TNG.
https://treknews.net/2015/07/23/ode-to-okudagram/
To answer the “is it really a myth?” question, here’s an article
Did Star Trek Communicators Inspire the Invention of the Cell Phone?
@ItalianScallion I will have to read that; sorry didn’t yet. Like when I had to go to a work meeting and didn’t read the product proposal. (Ahh fond memories)
But from guessing I think there are 2 things important here.
-Wireless communication using small portable devices (not big field radios from military times)
The wireless communication was already happening in TOS era as it came from military and police radio, though early ones were unwieldy and either used huge batteries or were built into police cars. So the communication thing was happening no matter what. But at the time nobody believed a flip-like device that could communicate to space. Which now exists.
The design: the flip thing came, and went, and then came back for a while, and then went to big semi-tablets, and now maybe back again. The idea makes sense. No doubt some people who design them watched Star Trek. But they are probably retired now so maybe we will never know.
/image Motorola Star-Tac
/image Motorola RAZR
Had both of those but I don’t think the top one Star Tac had a color display.
@ItalianScallion @pmarin Star Trek may have influenced how some cellular devices were designed but the actual technology came out of AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1947.
The book The Idea Factory has a drawing/map of how a cellular network would work.
@ItalianScallion @pmarin @yakkoTDI Star-Tac!! Available with the optional sexier, slimmer battery.
The article linked by @ItalianScallion reminded me of a great fictional item that has pretty much become real:
@Kyeh yup, time from my childhood; I thought ‘that’ll never happen.’ Now my watch will play videos to me but I wanted to sleep. I’m supposed to wear it to track sleep and oxygen but still not used to something on my arm all night.
Also unrelated but in this century (2000) I was working with a customer that was going to make these new things MMC and SD cards. At the time MP3 music was a new thing and but with only 16-32 MB (not GB) you could barely put a few songs on there without heavy compression.
He told me someday we would have full-length movies on cards like these.
@pmarin Remember the earliest computer “art?” It was sooo clunky-looking.
@Kyeh @pmarin The displays on the flight deck of the Pan Am orbiter as it docked with the space station in 2001 looked clunky and of questionable utility to me when the movie first came out. Now, they’re nearly comical for being obviously CRT.
@Kyeh @pmarin
@pmarin in middle school (ca. 1990) we had to present a project about the future. I mocked up a machine that demonstrated how in the future we would get our music on chips, using old ICs with legs and a socket with a cleverly concealed cassette player and some Christmas lights for pizzazz to show off how we could just pop in some new music and play it. In college I sure wish I could have gotten in on some of those MP3 player royalties.
Okay Trekkies out there. Back in the mid 70s I help build a TOS (all there was) bridge replica in LA where people had actually seen the real one. Resin and Christmas Tree lights.
It’s amazing what the old school prop-masters could make and how it looked on screen. Yeah, sorta cheesy from the 21st Century POV but ,…
I mean, several of Bones Medical Tools were salt shakers
@Cerridwyn the guy from Star Wars with the ice cream maker would like a word.
no takers on that reference up at the top? I’m a little surprised!
@jouest I saw your hints but I didn’t watch the show! It’s an impressive site though.
@Kyeh yeah it’s pretty obscure regardless. someone continues to maintain this site decades later as an elaborate reference to a knockoff ipod Pam gets at some point. I just ran across it the other day very randomly
I’ve got a list of things from Star Trek teleporters to Futurama pneumatic tubes to those conveyor belts in I-Robot and the Jetsons to the Portal gun from Portal… Man I have a lot of transportation fantasies.
Keoghtom’s ointment is probably a great start. It’s been dubbed a cleric in a can.
Acme anything (the RoadRunner versions)
Esp anvils
/giphy roadrunner wile e coyote acme
Dammitol, the wonder drug!
https://www.coastsidenews.com/community/dammitol-the-wonder-drug/article_0899daf3-0e1e-506b-8468-6dc002a8bb46.html
@Kyeh And the competitor, Fukitol.
@Kyeh @werehatrack And the anti-Ozempic med, Eatitol.
The Babel Fish from HHGttG
@Wollyhop Welcome back.