Designers placed a grab handle on the dash, within easy reach of your passenger.
It's not a very sturdy handle and wasn't meant to lend much physical support.
It is, however, one of the most brilliant communication devices of the last century.
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It's common knowledge that the most amazing device of the 20th century is the Thermos bottle.
Really?
I would kinda think it was the Television.
Or at least the pop-top beer can......
I love this, having that grab handle in my Spyder is a funny thing as you can't REALLY grab it or you'll crack the dash! I do have large fender washers backing mine up.
The best communication device is my wife's fingernails on my right leg.
But as to the Thermos or the TV, I'd say the radio(both broadcast and 2-way) was the game-changer. The TV just turned everybody's minds into Jello.
iPhone changed my life more than anything. It serves so many functions. GPS, phone, computer, calculator, television, alarm, stop watch, flashlight…the list goes on and on.
When you consider that the early space flights had about as much combined on-board "computer" power as a 4-function calculator and the first 8-bit computer I programmed stuff on had about as much memory as the key fob to my car, I guess we've had any number of amazing things that happened in the 20'th century.
Another big deal was something invented at the nearby "Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology" where the husband of one of my 8th grade teachers helped invent the birth control pill. Seems a little more exciting than a Thermos™ bottle.
@Gordon Nichols posted:Another big deal was something invented at the nearby "Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology" where the husband of one of my 8th grade teachers helped invent the birth control pill. Seems a little more exciting than a Thermos™ bottle.
I guess it all depends on if you're trying not to get pregnant or if you're trying to get a hot cup of coffee while working surveillance at 2:00am while it's freezing outside and you can't run the car's engine to stay warm.
Some people...
Sex Organs are the oldest and most fun devices ever invented. They never wear out and just fade away with the rest................
No question it was the internet. Watch this video we produced when I was at Apple. Steve’s vision of the future bearing in mind none of this existed in 86’. https://youtu.be/p1goCh3Qd7M
@majorkahuna posted:No question it was the internet. Watch this video we produced when I was at Apple. Steve’s vision of the future bearing in mind none of this existed in 86’. https://youtu.be/p1goCh3Qd7M
Interesting, I once wrote Steve asking him to hold off on killing the Classic enviorenment as our RDB(relational database) was struggling to finish the OSX conversion and he so eloquently wrote back with a one line answer:" Classic is dead"
Infinity one company store is pretty cool too, we got there on our maiden voyage to Cali with the IM.
Apple and Helix for me were the fundamental tool that helped me automate everything I did during my career.
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All of the other tech notwithstanding, I agree the grab handle is the most brilliant communication device of its time.
- It works for both left- and right-handed passengers.
- It's compatible with both Android and Apple OS.
- It requires no proprietary cables.
- It works better as background noise gets louder.
- There's no separate data plan.
- It's impervious to heat, cold, water, magnetic fields, or even hail (actually, it works best when it's hailing).
- It has never been rendered obsolete by end-of-life software.
- It doesn't need Javascript.
- Finally, it NEVER asks you to enter your Apple ID.
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@Sacto Mitch posted:.
All of the other tech notwithstanding, I agree the grab handle is the most brilliant communication device of its time.
- It works for both left- and right-handed passengers.
- It's compatible with both Android and Apple OS.
- It requires no proprietary cables.
- It works better as background noise gets louder.
- There's no separate data plan.
- It's impervious to heat, cold, water, magnetic fields, or even hail (actually, it works best when it's hailing).
- It has never been rendered obsolete by end-of-life software.
- It doesn't need Javascript.
- Finally, it NEVER asks you to enter your Apple ID.
.
...and ,
- NO subscription or extended contracts required.
@majorkahuna I see it only took us 35 years to not quite get to Steve's vision (but we're pretty close).
Back in 1997 I took over the Executive Briefing System at my old haunt, after a spell of "We don't need to see any high technology in the briefings", meaning overhead slides only, no fancy presentation methods, etc. That philosophy had a lot of merit (focus the customer on the topics, not which laptop we might be using) but required a lot of air travel, etc. I managed to get a couple of video conference screens installed in each center, but they mostly sat there, unused, because on each end you either needed Cisco equipment or home-grown stuff with high bandwidth Telco pipes to handle the video (we installed T1 pipes at remote sites and a T10 at headquarters, back in 1997 just for video conferencing).
The internet has grown a LOT in the past 30+ years and now "zooming" is pretty common (thanks to some classy video compression). My son is involved with virtualization and data manipulation in servers, storage and databases and spends 80% of his time on Zoom calls all over the world - Something we couldn't do back then.
I'm forever marveling at what's happening in real time in technology and wondering what's coming next as the pace of development keeps accelerating. What a great time to be around!
