Bill DeRouchey

(Following up from the previous post…) In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh to the public on a lofty principle. Anyone can use a computer. You don’t have to wear a white short-sleeved shirt and a skinny black tie to enter the computing age. You can do it too. You

LOST is a television drama, an odd mixture of The Prisoner, Twilight Zone, and a dash of Gilligan’s Island. And I’m hooked on it. It has the required drama of people loving, fighting, bonding and dying. But Season 2 did something unusual. The central plotline that underscored the

Radio was the first push-button home entertainment device. Families had record players, spinning Rudy Vallee or Ukulele Ike on their Victrolas at 78 rpm, but they had to crank them, and pick a record, one song at a time. It sounded gorgeous, absolutely, but it was a bit of work

Beginning in 1945 and well into the 1980s, The Button was a very bad thing. Science and technology had progressed to where we had mounted highly destructive bombs on highly accurate missiles. Nuclear bombs that could rip apart entire cities, killing millions in a heartbeat. All you had to do

Last night, I saw the documentary The Future of Pinball at the Clinton Street Theater here in Portland. It’s a solid overview of the pinball industry with a focus on how Williams, the last pinball maker (at the time), gave it one last go in 1999 with Pinball 2000.

Following up on the previous post on flashlights, here’s an interesting twist. According to the Electrochemistry Encyclopedia, A two pound (~one kg) Leclanche battery is a little large and heavy to carry around in one’s pocket. Recognizing this, Conrad Hubert at the American Electrical Novelty and Manufacturing Company

Up until the 1980s, all buttons were physical, actual tangible things that you push, press, hit or slap. At the same time, all computer software was text-based, codes and commands that you had to master and type in. Then someone got chocolate in their peanut butter. The twin inventions of

Tonight I went to Ground Kontrol to shoot pictures of buttons of classic arcade video games and pinball machines. Absolute heaven. I shot 99 pictures. If I had been paying attention, I would have shot one more. Like most people my age, the arcade floods the memories. Pocket full of

Interaction design is a difficult thing to define because it encompasses a lot of fields. It can be the design of a software application or the design of a website. It can be the design of a physical product, especially one with controls, an interface. The common thread is of