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posted by
chromas
on Thursday November 25 2021, @09:12PM
from the how-many-of-these-do-you-recognize? dept.
from the how-many-of-these-do-you-recognize? dept.
Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s:
If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.
YouTube has a 17m00s video by IBM demonstrating many of these in use.
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Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From the 1940s
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The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose.
-- David Lardner
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dwilson on Friday November 26 2021, @11:02PM
You can start by changing human nature. It's been shown over and over: People buy cheap stuff over expensive stuff, even when the cheap stuff is crap and the expensive stuff isn't. Not everyone. Not you, not me. But enough of a majority to exert a real influence on markets and producers. Not everywhere and not in every field, of course. Lots of niche areas exist where quality is the word of the day and cheap crap doesn't exist. But they are fewer every year.
So your cloths dryer's compressor motor? They did the math, and a better motor added x to the end price, raising it above Y, and Y was too much higher vs comparable models from competitors. So they went with the cheaper compressor motor.
Plastic vs metal in hinges, latches, covers and panelling. Better steel and closer tolerances in bearings and electrical components. And so on and so forth, for every item in the item. It all adds up in the final price, and the market has spoken pretty damn loudly, over and over: Low-priced sells, high-priced doesn't. Designing it to be easily repairable? Now they have worry about better components that can be removed and reinstalled without breaking, better assembly methods than plastic snaps and glue, more engineer-time making sure this can come out without removing that.. all adds to the cost.
If you're offering a solidly built thing that will last generations, and two spots over is a chinese flimflam-clone of it that's five bucks cheaper, you lose in the long run. As much as everyone likes to play the they-make-shit-to-fail-so-they-can-sell-us-more card, I doubt that's really in the front of anyone's mind, anywhere along the chain. It all comes down to that end price on the walmart shelf.
- D