Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
The illustration above was taken from a 1969 National Geographic story (“The Moon, Man’s First Goal in Space”) and used in a NASA report on space resources developed in 1984 and published in 1992. Below is a 1985 depiction of the advanced lunar base we’re supposed to have by 2015. Dennis Davidson is the artist.
September 15, 1975. (Tony Lopez/St. Petersburg Times)
I can identify The Taffy Machine, the Toy Mixer, and G.I. Joe’s Coils of Doom, seen below via My Toy Museum’s Flickr.
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(First image source: Vintage Image Photos)
Unfortunately, the world’s only space-movie magazine only ran for nine issues in 1961. The pages below are via Include Me Out. The early interview with Bradbury is fascinating, if poorly edited.
August 19, 1982. (Bruce McKim/Seattle Times)
The horses, the horses, the horses are on the track…
(Source: The Seattle Times Archive)
Maybe I read this as a kid and maybe I didn’t. All I know is that I want to read it right now.
Greensville Public School, Ontario, Canada. From the history section of the school’s website:
In 1982, the Wentworth County Board of Education decided to purchase three Commodore 64’s for each school. Greensville’s P.T.O. matched this with three more machines. The three board machines worked with five and a quarter inch disks and the other three with data sets which were basically tape recorders. The tape drives were always losing material and it was very frustrating. Fortunately, they were replaced by more disk drives the following year.
In June 1982, the first computer lab was set up in the old principal’s office. This entailed putting in a wall and extra electric wiring. During September and October, the computer room was out of bounds until everything was checked. This meant the computers had to be disassembled each night and stored in the computer room and then reassembled the next morning in the classroom next to the computer room.
What are they playing?
September 20, 1985. (Jack Lenahan/Chicago Sun-Times)
The Chicago Theater’s last night as a movie house. It underwent extensive renovations and reopened in September, 1986, with a performance by Frank Sinatra.
I love Teen Wolf, but you already knew that. American Ninja is on my list.
This is an illustration from a book I’d really like to get my hands on, Yesterday’s Tommorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. Written by Smithsonian curators Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan as an accompaniment to a 1984 exhibit of the same name, Paleofuture’s Matt Novak calls it “the retro-futurism bible.”
What’s hilarious about so many of these conceptions is, of course, the idea that we would have—that we should have—great technological advancements while maintaining a social backwater in which white men make all the decisions and women are domestic slaves. I guess it’s not really hilarious, considering there are millions of people who still believe white men should make all the decisions and women should be domestic slaves.
Click the image to read caption. Via No Such Thing As Was.
Brilliant. There’s a comics rack behind them. I can make out Ms. Marvel, The Defenders, and Star Wars.
(Photo via Lexibell Vintage Photos)
2 Warps to Neptune 