The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME Does a computer need to look sexy? You might say that the looks of such a pragmatic gadget don’t matter. After all, most of us have, at one time or another, had to make do with bland, beige boxes almost exactly like everyone else’s bland, beige box, and it didn't hinder us from getting the job done, or made play any the less …
Of the look of my old Apricot Qi 300 PC (my first proper PC, after coming up through the ranks of the ZX80,81, VIC 20, BBC B).. It won me a few contracts in the day because of the built in security (infrared key card and security chip on board that prevented anything working unless you authenticated using the key, as long as you had it enabled)... It looked pretty neat too!
http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?st=1&c=995
That's another Rick Dickenson special IIRC. Because of the complexity of designing the portable computer, Sugar was talked into using a top notch industrial designer.
Pity Dickenson wasn't around for the PCW. A lovely machine that was a superb Word Processor (arguably better than PC's 3 or 4 times its price for word crunching, but was pig ugly.
Definitely should be in the list. The Series 3 was beautifully constructed with a sligthly dappled & tactile textured exterior & clearly lots of thought put into the ergonomics.
The Series 5 had the more impressive slide-out keyboard but was substantially bigger, more plasticky and felt like one too many designers had had their input.
I have a number of problems with this list:
1) how can the mac book air win when it left ethernet and other connections. It doesn't look so sexy with all the necessary dongles hanging of it.
2) The PS3 only if you work work the North Korean Airforce would you be desparate enough to include this a a "computer".
3) What about the Sinclair QL (or at least the Spectrum+).
There I feel better now.
Where are all the geeks? Wasn't Eniac sexy? Look at all those tubes. "...17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8 by 3 by 100 feet (2.4 m × 0.9 m × 30 m), took up 1800 square feet (167 m2), and consumed 150 kW of power.[11][12] . Just try and spill a soda on that!
"even the most eager Xbox aficionado ...has to concede that Sony has the best looking console."
Best looking (or not) console aside, the PS3 still has the worst CONTROLLER IMHO.
It feels like its been designed for a kid. It lacks weight or sturdiness or something.
Moreover, for a long time after the launch good luck finding games that had Split-Screen...
The monitor was an RCA XL-100 television, spray-painted "Space Patrol Silver."
The name plate covered up the holes where the channel knobs would normally have gone.
The monitor cable came out of the hole where the vertical hold knob would have gone --with a "V" still prominently embossed above it.
Jony Ive and frogdesign only *wish* they could have been this sleek and innovative in their design.
As others have said, Thinking Machines CM-series (I used to work on a CM-5, we had it in our data center), Kendal Square Research KSR-1, Cray as mentioned, Oracle's nCube, , SGI - take your pick, Tandem Himalaya, MassPar, and who can forget Teradata with their early Y-net machines? They were all built in a day when these machines were HUGELY expensive, and had the looks and styling to match. Today's supers are just lines of equipment racks with blades or subchassis, and look like nothing special (that is why I omitted the IBM SP-series off this list, even though it was a contemporary). They are built to a competitive price, not to let you know that your data centre holds something special. But back in those days, machines LOOKED the part - something that could change the world and wanted you to know it visually. Compared to these, the PS3, and indeed most of this list just are not that sexy - I'll give you the Next and Apple cubes, but a lot of that list is fairly boring. For that matter, I think an IMSAI 8080 should have made the list too - who doesn't like paddles and lights?
N.B. - When Thinking Machines went bankrupt, there were CM chassis literally picked out of their Cambridge, MA dumpsters, that had a retail price of hundreds of thousands of dollars... :-( I don't know where I would have stored it...but I wanted one. Sigh.
Paris, because she knows all about the importance of "style"...
Arguably the first (certainly ONE of the first) colour desktop computers.
http://www.dvq.com/ads/isc_3600.pdf
8088 based, with 16k (32k on the posh model) PROM, 32k RAM and 4k workspace
CP/M operating system and a BASIC interpreter.
8 colour display
Graphics plotting on a 128H x128Vgrid (I laugh at your 1080p scans!)
51k + 51k capacity 5 1/4" FDD
And a nasty propensity for one of the PSU capacitors to wee electrolyte across a 100V track that was routed between its pins. Always made a very satisfying KZZZRRRTT!
Had one of the nicest keyboard actions I have ever used.
This article is proof the Reg fetishizes computers instead of understanding them. Computers aren't sexy because of what they look like; they are sexy because of what you can do with them. REG!!! Hire someone who actually knows how to program and stop wasting our time with articules ike this!
When the title mention Apple I thought for sure the 20th Anniversary Mac would have made the cut. While it wasn't the most powerful of the Mac line of the time the design was surely sexy. You could definitely see that machine sitting on any CEO's desk. It also had the Bose sound system.
Speaking as a long-time Mac user, imho the Air and the Cube may have looked cool from the outside, but the MacBook Air's inability to upgrade memory, its lack of internal Ethernet, and limited USB capacity -- and the Cube's various technical issues -- made them far less sexy. The MacBook Air would've been much sexier if it had expandable memory and more ports (I would've settled for it being a bit thicker for that) and the Cube would've been way sexier if not for the power switch issue, the defective polycarbonate issue, and its limited expandability. Too bad, really -- they looked really cool. What a lot of designers don't realize is that functionality adds to "sexiness", too.
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