
Online Shopping in the 1950s - apo
http://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/14/online-shopping-in-the-1950s/
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Animats
Interesting idea. The data plate on the order station says it was made by
"Vitarama". Vitarama was the company behind Cinerama. Owned by the
Rockefellers, it developed a range of unusual projection devices - projectors
for spherical screens and elliptical screens, gunnery training simulators, and
a range of slide changers. Fred Waller, who invented Cinerama and worked for
Vitarama, was probably involved. He had a patent for an addressable slide
projector.[1] The shopping system used a linear tray rather than the circular
tray shown in the Life article, but the selection by number is similar.

The idea wasn't silly. At the time, Sears and some other companies had catalog
order centers, where customers could go and shop from catalogs. This was an
improvement on that concept.

The problem may have been the user interface. It looks like you'd ask the
attendant to load up a slide tray for the product area of interest, and then
you could use a knob to select slides. Each slide contained only one image.
This makes for a small catalog.

They could have used a microfiche system and had a much larger catalog. But
how to address it in a user-friendly way? That's a hard problem. If you've
ever used microfilm data, you're aware of how hard it is to find anything.
Their UI had two buttons and a knob, probably the upper limit for shopping UI
complexity in the 1950s. Some later microfilm systems had bar codes and some
the ability to search, but that was a late 1960s development and required
electronics.

[1]
[https://www.google.com.ar/patents/US2732758](https://www.google.com.ar/patents/US2732758)

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tomcam
Killer analysis. Love the research and context.

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salmonet
>There’s little to no information on the internet about it or its inventor,
except for these photographs for a LIFE magazine article which may never have
been published.

It's crazy to me that there is no record of this beyond these photographs
considering how many people must have known the inventor, used this, or had
friends that did, but then again I haven't spent much time in the pre-internet
world. People looking back on today's daily life 65 years from now will have a
lot of information.

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5ilv3r
"will have a lot of information."

I don't think they will. Too much data about our lives is locked up and lost
by online communities falling apart. Anyone who invested a significant amount
of time in myspace probably has nothing to show for that period of their
lives, and I worry that the new trend of lifelong facebook use will make that
even worse.

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eropple
`salmonet said nothing about individual lives in his post. Facebook
disappearing tomorrow wouldn't mean that historians a hundred years from now
couldn't get an extremely clear view of what life today is like in aggregate.

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bkeroack
Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? How accessible are the
contents to you today?

Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.

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steven777400
Even having the drives may not mitigate issues of that kind. A variety of
articles [0] describe unexpectedly (well, to consumers at least) short
lifespans on CD-Rs. Lots of CD drives are still around, but you might be
unpleasently surprised if you put in a 15 year old CD-R that's been sitting on
the shelf.

[0] Google search: burned cd lifespan

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Aardwolf
What I thought were joysticks in the pictures, were actually ash trays

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frik
Me too. I looked for cables around the floor, then read the text below the
picture.

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DrScump
They had mice... but they were _actual mice_.

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WalterBright
Not surprised it didn't catch on. I'd rather thumb through a paper catalog at
home.

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rawTruthHurts
[http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/...](http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/visomatic6-930x601.jpeg)

