French artist Jean-Marc Côté, along with others, were asked to draw what they envisioned the world would be like in the year 2000 at the turn of the century, for the En L’An 2000 series ahead of the Exposition Universelle (1900). They depicted scientific advances and a total of 87 were known to be produced including the Stirrup-Cup, which appears to be a flying machine used by someone to get drinks, as well as humans racing on fish-like creatures under the ocean.
Measuring in at just 245 x 20 x 120mm and weighing a mere 1.39-pounds, the Sony VAIO P ultraportable laptop could have easily fit into nearly any standard bag or even purse. There were a few drawbacks though, namely the poor battery life at just over 3-hours on a full charge and a tiny screen that just doesn’t work nicely with a Windows operating system.
Ever heard of Eclipse? If not, it is a 3D Game Boy demo that 17-year-old programmer Dylan Cuthbert of Argonaut Software sold to Nintendo back in 1992. It was eventually turned into a game called X and set the stage for Star Fox, which uses the Super FX Chip to create the first hardware-accelerated 3D gaming experience on a home console.
Many things happened during 1993 for Nintendo including the release of the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie on May 28 and the launch of a top-loading NES console five months later. As the holidays drew near, the company released a training video that gave a glimpse of their rarely seen certificate of achievement.
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Atari Pong was released on this day (November 29) in 1972 and some may not know that the game was developed by engineer Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by company co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Ted Dabney, the second Atari co-founder, was so surprised by the quality of Alcorn’s work that he decided to manufacture the game for release in arcades.
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was unveiled 40-years-ago today by Bill Gates during a special event in New York City’s Helmsley Palace Hotel. The official release didn’t come until November 20, 1985, more than 2-years later. This operating system runs on MS-DOS as a 16-bit shell program known as MS-DOS Executive, providing an environment capable of running graphical programs designed for Windows, as well as existing MS-DOS software.
Nintendo released Mario Kart Double Dash on November 7, 2003 in Japan, and this 3D polygonal masterpiece most certainly deserves a retrospective. Unlike Mario Kart 64, which only used polygons for the environments and 2D sprites for the racers, Double Dash is the first game in the Mario Kart series to use 3D polygons for the characters.
