Guess the pioneering gadget

September 25, 2020 5:05 PM

Techades quiz: guess the gadget from its illustration. Fair warning: the correct answers permit a broad category for some devices but require a precise manufacturer and model number for others. Discovered via Belong.

Solutions at this Twitter link.

posted by Monochrome (49 comments total)

It’s a difficult quiz. I think everyone should mentally add 5 to their score because it’s often too pedantic IMO.
posted by Monochrome at 5:08 PM on September 25, 2020

Geez no kidding. I managed about half...
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:15 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ha, I spent too long trying to get it to accept ENIAC for UNIVAC but still pretty okay with 31 considering the rest were basically impossible (I guess I could have gotten the Alto if it had a frickin mouse).
posted by General Malaise at 5:19 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

(Was delighted that it accepted 5150 for "IBC PC" though)
posted by General Malaise at 5:20 PM on September 25, 2020 [6 favorites]

26/45 I thought the pager was a blackberry, but no keyboard!

Sensorama?
posted by idiolect at 5:24 PM on September 25, 2020

25/45

Don't be mad, but this millennial got #23 by guessing "Gameboy cartridge".

(Also, raise your hand if you thought #34 was a Lite-Brite, #39 was some kind of sewing machine, or the last one was a cash register.)
posted by Rhaomi at 5:38 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

I thought the pager was a blackberry

Yeah that pager looked like none of the pagers we ever had. The Sensorama are actually pretty interesting - they were an early immersive multi sensory device. I've never seen one in person but I have seen film of it in action.
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:39 PM on September 25, 2020

I got 28/45, though a few of those were educated guesses.

The pager is clearly a Motorola Advisor, but the art style makes it look too blocky. It should have rounded corners like the iPhone or the Nokia.

I’m very curious to look up the answers and find out what the not-a-sewing-machine is.
posted by mbrubeck at 5:50 PM on September 25, 2020 [4 favorites]

I got 35, but I am a massive techno-nerd. I would have gotten more, but it really is ridiculously pedantic on three or four of the answers.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:09 PM on September 25, 2020

Tamagachi. Tomogachi. Tamigachi. Tamigatchi. Tamagatchi. Virtual pet. Pocket pet. Tommah Gahhhhhchy.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 6:23 PM on September 25, 2020 [13 favorites]

Millennial, 25/45 so far, but I feel like I can do better. Managed to remember the names of several pda brands but not the right one. Also missing brands on a few of the other identifiable items. Pretty sure I know the brand on one thing but it maybe they're looking for a model number? Complete bafflement with regard to one object.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 6:27 PM on September 25, 2020

I got 34, and I swear at least ...8? of them I only know because I've clicked on every quiz like this I've ever come across in my life. Do I know it's a dynatac phone? Nope not really, but sporcle knows, so I know.

It accepted mechanical turk for the credenza looking thing.
posted by phunniemee at 7:10 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

That's a mechanical television!

41/45, that seat-with-movie-projector-hood thing is cofounding me. I'm not even going to attempt the old 50s computer consoles at the bottom.
posted by mookoz at 7:16 PM on September 25, 2020

It doesn’t accept ZX81 for the Sinclair, and the Trinitron isn’t cylindrical - they could at least have shown the reflections as vertical.

And what’s going on with the Apple I?
posted by grahamparks at 7:20 PM on September 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m very curious to look up the answers and find out what the not-a-sewing-machine is.

Clue: Bardeen and Brattain
posted by mookoz at 7:21 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

This quiz feels almost QI-trap-setting in its pedantry.
posted by threecheesetrees at 7:31 PM on September 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

This quiz marked two correct answers wrong (ZX81 and tamagotchi). Hmm.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:58 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's an American re-branded variant of the ZX81 (you could just make out the difference from the position of the logo), and "Tamagotchi" worked for me, maybe double-check your spelling on that?
posted by Slogby at 8:18 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

I really thought the pager was one of the myriad now-defunct mp3 players. I put "Zune" in before I got the actual Zune right.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:21 PM on September 25, 2020

It's certainly not a perfect quiz, I noticed the Apple I was basically a depiction of one specific museum exhibit (which from Wikipedia turns out to be the Living Computers: Museum + Lab) with a transparent case and a particular CRT monitor, rather than something you could reasonably call the Apple I in general.

And personally I don't feel like I'm missing anything in not knowing about particular models of tape deck etc, but your mileage may vary.
posted by Slogby at 8:35 PM on September 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

34 out of 45. The rest I had no idea.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:39 PM on September 25, 2020

28/45. Annoyingly pedantic. Useful, though for keeping people on that website.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:50 PM on September 25, 2020

A couple more guesses, and I am up to 38. I think that is where I top out.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:53 PM on September 25, 2020

Dangit. I spelled "Bombe" as "Bomb". I couldn't figure out why I got that one wrong.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:57 PM on September 25, 2020

I own a working calculator older than me and a resistance bridge older than my great grandfather. I got a 13 before giving up, having missed most of the ones I've actually owned. (Distinguishing between a TRS-80 and a Commadore-64 in 50 pixels is pretty subtle. And the transistor is just silly.) But, it was very well framed as a post.

My childish plan to complain did lead me to this surprisingly interesting, if a bit scattered wikipedia page
posted by eotvos at 9:19 PM on September 25, 2020

17. And the sewing machine / atomic force microscope is supposed to be what now?
posted by janell at 10:01 PM on September 25, 2020

There's a thing that, to me, looks more like a LaCie rugged drive than the thing it's trying to represent. It took me a while to realize what it was getting at.

maybe double-check your spelling on that?
I approached the quiz as a closed-book exam. I wouldn't want to cheat on something this gravely important!

seat-with-movie-projector-hood thing is cofounding me
After trying a few arcade console related things I entered the words "computer toilet." That answer was not accepted, but I stand by it.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:26 PM on September 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

29. I checked my answers and might have been able to manage 30, but not one more.
posted by TheCoug at 11:02 PM on September 25, 2020

Seeing a "Sinclair ZX81" [acceptable answer] gave me a bit a Proustian madeleine-rush. When [1979] I went to grad school in Boston, I left my partner in Cambridge UK and she got a job as a secretary with a tiny tech startup in an attic on King's Parade. Despite paper quals, she couldn't type well enough so they shifted her to admin and later to deal with a tsunami of letters enclosing a cheque / money order for £99. It was the start of our boy's stamp collection. There was a photo behind Sinclair's desk of "The Boston Office" and Her Chutzpahness asked for a transfer. It didn't happen immediately but by early 1982 she was "Customer Relations North America" and we could a) live in the same Cambridge b) graduate from a basement to a semi-basement apartment. A shared love of the poems of WB Yeats was no harm.
posted by BobTheScientist at 4:03 AM on September 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

32/45, but shite quiz. It wouldn't accept some answers, so every variation of IBM or Elliott or Ferranti-Packard-something or other wasn't accepted for the grey consoles. The ZX81 detail was unfair, especially since everything else is so badly drawn. Generic cutesy low-rez drawings + bawhair-splitting pedantry is not fun.

That soroban/two-bar electric fire thingy — a Bombe, is it? Could've been a PDP-8 to these eyes. The Apple 1 could've been an Ohio Superboard, and looked a heck of a lot more like a BBC Micro. The video commode whatever, fuck that. And that wood coloured oblong/Hammond enclosure with a SPST momentary/block of spam with the button on it? "Every Other Popular Electronics Project, 1974–82" can and must be the only correct answer.

But I got the Baird Televisor. Of course I did: I'm Scottish. The television is a Scottish invention. Electronic shite doesn't count, St. JLB made it fucken mechanical and real.
posted by scruss at 4:20 AM on September 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

After sleeping on it and doing 25 seconds of research I'm provisionally convinced that many of these images were sourced/modeled via Google image searches for "first X." That's how you get the transparent apple i from the museum and the benchtop transistor experiment instead of the first commercial transistor.
posted by range at 6:05 AM on September 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

It's so janky with its badly drawn icons of actual physical items they could have shown photographs of that it was harder than it needed to be, plus the whole random specificity thing, means I shan't be sharing the quiz nor crowing about how well I did.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:05 AM on September 26, 2020

I thought the one with the seat was HAL (2001). But that would screw up the timelines.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 6:26 AM on September 26, 2020

I call foul on the ThinkPad. It doesn't have a touchpad or clit mouse (xkcd comic).
posted by Hactar at 6:50 AM on September 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

I get 34 myself, then Googled my way up to 43. Can't find that last desk terminal anywhere, and I don't even know where to start on the springy-sensor thing.

Answers
posted by CaseyB at 8:12 AM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

(Didn't even see the answers link in the post! Oh well, I had more fun this way.)
posted by CaseyB at 8:26 AM on September 26, 2020

Yeah the Thinkpad cue was bullshit. I got it because black and boxy, but it should have had a red dot on the keyboard. I loved those mouse controllers. I had a 90mhz pentium "transportable" that used one and really it's just so superior to moving your hands off the keyboard I can't even.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:44 AM on September 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

32! had to google a spelling or proper name.

I also didn't get the arcade, the sewing machine thing. I know what the wood box with a button is, but it would not accept "The Internet" and I can't remember so, clearly they have no sense of MY humor, which I lifted from an old show from the UK.

It wouldn't take abacus so I'm going to go look up the answers.
posted by zenon at 8:57 AM on September 26, 2020

A mouse!?? Come on that wasn't commercially available or even a real product. boo. boo to that wankery.
posted by zenon at 8:58 AM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Some of the entries are extremely generous, and some are frustratingly precise. It was still pretty fun. I got 25 naturally, but I think if the entries had been similarly permissive it may have been closer to 30.

Still no idea what the sewing machine is, nor the last item. My second thought (after sewing machine) was some sort of early 3D printer, but nothing I tried there worked.
posted by codacorolla at 9:57 AM on September 26, 2020

I got all of the ones I at one time owned (which was an embarrassingly large number, probably around 15), and a few that I didn't. I got the Bombe by writing "Turing Machine," which is nice. I never owned a Zune, nor a Sinclair, or a Commodore, nor a Speak & Spell nor a Simon or an Atari, but that was all available in memory.
posted by chavenet at 10:04 AM on September 26, 2020

33/45. Indeed many of these are the first of a thing. But: they do warn you it is 'impossible'.

I did pick up on the mouse and the sewing machine (once i realized it was not a sewing machine).
posted by pwnguin at 10:08 AM on September 26, 2020

I have seen that particular Apple 1 in person so that helped with that one

25/45
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:46 PM on September 26, 2020

31/45 here but notably, the Zune was NOT brown. Big fail.
posted by hijinx at 3:51 PM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

I got to 35, there were some things that I knew what it was but had to go search to find exactly the right synonym of the specific thing that it wanted.

Getting the ZX Spectrum, for instance, or having to specify which early Motorola phone, or knowing it was a TRS-80, bleh.

Bleh I say.
posted by aurynn at 6:55 PM on September 26, 2020

What on earth does it want for the phone? I tried car phone and cordless.

I don't think "computer that my school had" or "other computer my cousin had" works very well.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 1:56 AM on September 27, 2020

36/45 (I partially cheated on #18 because I had to look up the spelling)

*looking at answers* Damn it, I considered and dismissed #19 because it didn't have the iconic cylindrical tube. Also, I assumed #34 was a Hollerith tabulator.
posted by ckape at 6:43 AM on September 27, 2020

"Video commode" should also be an acceptable answer for the computer toilet
posted by evidenceofabsence at 5:59 PM on September 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

The scale of the Bombe completely threw me; If I could have thought it wasn't desktop sized I might have gotten it.

Yeah the Thinkpad cue was bullshit. I got it because black and boxy, but it should have had a red dot on the keyboard.

Weirdly I got that one immediately; the bezel screamed ThinkPad to me.

The Apple I icon on the other hand was just wrong.
posted by Mitheral at 1:19 AM on October 2, 2020