Stunning, Classic Computer Console, from 1958?

Posted by michael on Saturday August 14, 2004 @05:02PM from the back-to-the-future dept.

Predicta Lover writes "It's widely believed that the late-50s Predicta series was the swansong for Philco. After its introduction, RCA's president David Sarnoff is quoted as having said "Philco has reinvented the industry and made TV more exciting again." Somehow, I can't imagine Bill reacting that way to an Apple product launch, at least not publicly. Years later, Philco's phenomenally-designed but questionably-engineered and over-priced TV sets are an icon of modern television design, and are even made in a stunning reproduction form. Maybe Philco would still be in business if they'd thought to shoehorn a contemporary computer into the box and put a high-resolution LCD up top (ahh, I guess that would've been tough...oh, the cruelties of history). At any rate, the researchers and designers at Onomy Labs did just that, 45 years later, and the result is an absolutely lust-worthy piece of computing hardware. Built to eventually house an experimental computer being produced by Sun Labs, the supercharged piece made its debut at their recent Open House held at the Computer History Museum.The Pedestal model that's used here was originally penned by Philco's Catherine Winkler, and is variously described as being inspired by the ideal female form and looking like a gas pump (I am not even going to touch that one). The perpetrators of this project have been mildly vilified by classic TV collectors (fearing imitators) and highly praised by most everyone else...some are calling it the 'best casemod ever'. I don't know about that, but it's definitely a beautiful object."

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Casemods aren't news. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-08-14 17:45 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Is anyone else bored with seeing casemods on slashdot? They're not relevant (or funny) news, they're almost always ugly, and they seem to largely be the province of high school or college-aged kids whose parents have too much money. (The same goes for Alienware and other vanity PC manufacturers, but that's not relevant to my immediate point.)
It just doesn't take much skill or inspiration to look at something and say "I wonder if I could put a computer in there!"