At one point, all IBM PC Compatibles looked like this.... well, more or less.
Of course they changed a bit through the years, and there were even variations on the theme,
usually for practical reasons.
Sometimes the boxes were even turned on their side, allowing for easier upgrades, and more
components, but these were usually restricted to servers and extreme power users.
But this style.
This is what I love.
It's what I grew up with and it's the setup that stirs the most nostalgia in me.
But at some point, this style was completely eradicated, and we ended up with towers, like
this, like that, and that style seems to have persisted to today.
But the change wasn't an instant one, it was an interesting one, and to understand it,
we must first go back to this.
Beautiful isn't it?
It's simplicity.
It's angular lines.
It's industrial office appearance.
Plonk a monitor on top, and you not only save yourself desk space, but you have an elegant
solution, which raises the monitor up to your eye level, and creates a feeling of completeness.
The box is really one of necessity.
When IBM designed the Personal Computer in 1981, they used mostly off the shelf components,
which, when combined & assembled, required quite a lot of space.
Housing them all in a rectangular box seemed practical, cost effective, and, well, it looked
nice enough.
It might not have been as elegant as some of their previous machines, such as the System/23
DataMaster, but it worked, and crucially, it's design allowed you to move the monitor,
lift off the lid, and expand your machine with an array of components, and soon to be
called ISA cards.
When IBM PC clones hit the market, they all pretty much followed suit, and apart from
the odd stand out design, all began to get a little bit beiger, and actually a little
bit more uniform.
By the 90s we had many different brands.
Compaq, Tiny, Dan, Dell, Evesham, Packard Bell, the list is endless, all looking pretty
much the same.
Some cases were thicker, some thinner, some wider, some had more expansion bays, some
had buttons, panels, even side styling, but they were all cast from the same mould.
But why beige, or that lacklustre off white, or pearl-grey as IBM called it?
Why these rather mundane colour choices?
Well back then, the PC market was a completely different beast.
Most systems were aimed at businesses, to the point where you'd often see VAT exclusive
prices only, and businesses, well, they just seemed to like beige.
It's the same reason the interiors of new houses are painted beige.
It's inoffensive.
It appeals to the greater audience.
It doesn't favouritise or dismiss
But go back to the 70s, and we can put this choice into a bit more perspective.
A bit more context.
1977; the Apple II is launched.
It's beige.
It sported a shiny new coloured Apple logo, but it will still very much beige.
It's also the year the silver TRS-80 was launched and the off-white Commodore PET.
These were also personal computers, intended for business, but also home use.
Before this point, most home computers were made by hobbyists, built into custom wood
or metal cases.
So these 3... well they looked positively futuristic in comparison.
Before this point, mainframes were teal blue, orange, black, all kinds of colours.
In fact, according to Walter Isaacson; a biographer of Steve Jobs.
The Apple II beige was chosen to actually set it apart from all the grey metal cases
of other machines.
Jobs apparently trolled stores looking for something lighter and friendlier, and apparently
his inspiration was a Cuisinart food processor.
Based on that, you could easily label the Apple II as starting this beige trend, but
here's a DEC VT50; a computer terminal from 1975, and it, indeed is also beige.
So maybe there are some other forces at play here.
But, I think it's clear that beige, was actually a pretty futuristic colour at the time...
and guess what, it went with the variety of other avocado and desert tans houses were
filled with at the time.
Stick an Apple II in amongst this, and not only does it look sleek and clean but, it
also fits in an absolute treat.
So beige blended pretty well with your house.
It didn't intrude, and that's essentially what designers wanted from computers in these
early days.
Many people felt that computers were intruding on their lives, that it was some unnecessary
fangled technology.
So having it blending it, off to the side, yet ready for use, was a win.
So, how about offices?
Because if you didn't have a computer at home, you were likely to at least have one knocking
about in the office.
Well in the 1960's the office workplace took a huge step towards a more open, landscaped
area.
This was a style popularised in Germany known as Burolandschaft; literally translating to
"office landscape".
This approach put a lot of emphasis on the importance of workforce.
Where as before it had been more of a hierarchical approach.
Now, people were grouped together, in a space that needed to light, airy and agoraphobic,
and neatural.
After all, this wasn't an emotion zone.
This was a workplace.
It needed to be distraction free and inviting.
By the late 70s and early 80s, computers were starting to encroach into these places, and
again, the computer was something of an outsider.
It needed to slink in, and most of all, fit in.
It seems like beige again, or numerous shades of off-white, would again fit the bill.
And in line with their open-plan offices, it seems Germany, would again agree with this.
Now you might have watched a video by VWestlife on a similar subject a few years back.
In this video, he references the book; ThinkPad, a Different Shade of Blue, by Deborah A. Dell
and F. Gerry Purdy.
I've got the same book, here it is, and it's an incredibly insightful voyage into these
creative years at IBM.
But it seems to imply that Germany, followed by some other European countries took this
light and airy approach very seriously.
So much that it was written into European health & safety workplace laws......
Tom Hardy Corporate Manager of the IBM Design Community is quoted as saying "Despite the
fact that within IBM, long before ThinkPad, black and colours other than grey and off-white
had been used on typewriters and large computer systems, this had changed.
In the late 1970s, Germany initiated workplace standards that required 'light-value' colours
on office computing equipment....Then, during the 1980s, any offerings other than grey and
off-white were virtually eliminated across the computer industry because of the cost
and the European workplace standards"
But, this seems a strange regulation to have doesn't it?
And indeed it did to Lewis Packwood from Kotaku, who after watching VWestLife's video, decided
to do some digging.
He purports to have contacted the Computerspiele Museum in Berlin, the Software Preservation
Society in Germany and even a law firm specialising in the area of business computing.
Despite researching into it themselves, none of these were able to identify such a law
or regulation, although it was noted that German workplace standards in general are
pretty strict.
In fact there are still German office regulations to this day, which require workers to have
adequate access to natural light.
So I decided to do a bit of my own digging, and following a comment I discovered in Tumblr,
I got in touch with a gentleman named Carl Ferynman.
Now for some of you, that name might stand out, and indeed it should.
Because this Carl Feynman is none other than the son of Richard Feynman; a prominent and
highly regarded American theoretical physicist, known for his work in quantum mechanics, quantum
electrodynamics and particle physics, to name a few.
What some may not realise is that he also worked at Thinking Machines Corporation and
helped build one of the first parallel supercomputers in the mid 80s.
This computer was called the CM-1 Connection Machine, and Carl, worked alongside his father
on the project as a hardware engineer.
Don't worry I'll be covering this machine is a separate video in the near future.
But anyway, Carl explained to me, that the Connection Machine used a Symbolics lisp machine
as a front end.
All good, but Thinking Machines wanted to bring the aesthetic in line with the incredible
Connection Machine, so they decided to make a new bezel to replace the beige Symbolics
monitor bezel.
This bezel was to be black, with a red strip running around it.
But they were hampered by those pesky Germany workplace regulations, requiring a bland,
or non-colour.
The end result was, the monitor bezel was made pale grey, so it would fit with German
health & safety laws, an be allowed in the workplace.
Boy, the reasons for using these non-colours are really starting to stack up.
Especially when you take economies of scale into account.
For instance, you only have to go back to the ThinkPad book, and read a few pages on,
where it states the Yamato development team felt the black finish was quite a challenge,
as black was very difficult to do, and was almost impossible to get an exact colour match
between parts.
Probably the reason why beige was also the standard colouring for East Asian suppliers
of floppy disk drives, CD-ROM Drives and most other peripherals that would fit into PC boxes...
another factor to stick with beige.
By the mid to late 80s, anyone wanting to go against this beige grain was going to face
a huge uphill struggle, and largely increased costs.
It's for that reason, there needed to be a huge motivator behind moving away from Beige,
and that motivator could come in the form of a business case, or indeed a person....
and so, we're brought rather neatly to the beginning of the end, of the Beige Box.
You see, the lead aesthetic designer of the Connection Machine was a lady by the name
of Tamiko Thiel.
She had originally created a logo for the company; a 12 dimensional visualised hypercube,
to represent the underlying structure of the computer's hardware.
She took this original design and translated it into the casing for the machine itself.
The rersult, eight black cubes, that form a larger cube, featuring transparent panels
to reveal the blinking lights of the 4,096 chips within.
This design was so striking that it influenced Steve Jobs when he started to develop his
1998 NeXT Computer and it's successor, the NeXTCube.
These were high end workstations, which largely outstripped what most of the market was offering,
all encased in mesmerising black.... and this swap between polar colours is something we
see happening, even today.
Now, the NeXT was a radical departure from previous computers.
It made previous computers, even the Apple Mac, look like a nerdy little machine.
This black, beast of a machine, symbolised a power shift in the world of computer.
From something that we should be ashamed of... a clerical tool, to something that should
now take centre stage.
Something that could transform our lives and our businesses.
Something that could even create new businesses.
This was the computer coming of age.
Sure, there had been computers which stepped away from the norm before.
Clive Sinclair's Sinclair QL being one that immediately springs to mind; a computer, from
1985, specifically made for the world of business, but which completely ignored any other office
conventions, or German regulations.
Just like the NeXT Cube, it was stylised and striking, but, like many of Sir Clive's products,
it was perhaps, a bit ahead of it's time, and slightly misplaced in the market.
You could argue the same about the Next, but these were seeds which started a revolution.
And surprisingly, seeking to redefine themselves after losing so much ground to clone manufactures
in the late 80s, it would be IBM who picked up the baton and ran with it.
"We knew that, in order to differentiate IBM products, we needed to break away from the
dogmatic grey and off-white syndrome.
I commissioned a well-respected Swiss ergonomist to conduct an objective study on the state
of global workplace standards, to declare which were valid and which were flawed.....
The final report concluded that the aspect of 'light-value' product houses was not valid,
except where glare was concerned"
IBM debated with the German Standards Authority who capitulated to the use of black, with
the condition that German manual covers boldly displayed the words "This Product Not For
Office Use".
This bold statement, combined with some other design quirks, ensured the ThinkPad made a
successful impression.
By 1996, had launched their first black desktop PC.
A tower case, with a black multi-media monitor.
This was definitely a departure from what had gone before.
The Aptiva Model S followed, and just look at this thing.
It doesn't know whether it wants to be a desktop case or a tower case, but it certainly looks
different.
Of course, the Aptiva range was a home PC line, and it wouldn't be until the year 2000,
and IBM's NetVista line that their business machines followed suit.
You can check my last video for more details on that.
But of course, in the middle of this was, once again Steve Jobs.
Having moves back to Apple in 1997, by 1998 he was already churning out machines like
the iMac, which completely shook up the concept of what a PC could look like.
Here, the screen and computer were one unit, and I'm sure, it certainly paved the way for
IBM's NetVista.
But the choice of colours on offer was extraordinary.... and look at this "Think different" Apple advert
from 1998, It shows Richard Feynman, wearing the Thinking Machines logo T-Shirt, and it's
being used to promote the brand new iMac.
It's weird how these things are connected.
*Sponsor*
Today's video is sponsored by Raycon.
Now, when I'm approached by companies, I first test their products before I agree to sponsorship,
and god damn, I'm glad I tested these.
What I have is their latest Everyday E25 Earbuds, and they are amazing.
I'm used to using chunky wired headphones, but there's no way I'm going back after using
these.
These tiny earbuds give better sound than what I had before, and they're tiny.
But what's best is the incredible freedom they bring.
I can walk around the office, go out jogging, cook something, and no more do I have a wire
sagging about, getting in the way.
What's more, this little box actually charges the earbuds FOUR times, without being plugged
in!
And out of the box, they have seamless Bluetooth pairing, 6 hours playtime, a lot of bass and
an excellent, noise isolating fit.
What's more, they're about half the price of other premium earbuds on the market, and
by clicking the link below and visiting buyraycon.com/nostalgianerd you can grab 15% off your first order.
Oh, they come in lots of colours too.... just not beige!
*Sponsor*
Those of us still clinging onto our beige boxes were really starting to feel left behind,
and it wouldn't be long for other PC manufacturers to bring out their own remixes of the PC concept.
Most stayed safe, but some went bold.
But for the office, black seemed to be the new choice.
It was different, but yet, it was still unoffensive and plain.
Somehow PC manufacturers had managed to mix up the business marketplace by choosing yet
another non-colour as the basis.
CRT's went, LCD panels came in, which also meant the desktop box said goodbye.
After all, a flat screen on a massive box just looks a bit silly.
You didn't need to take up all that desk space anymore.
Your flat screen could fit neatly to one corner, and the tower could be placed neatly under
the desk.
It's design also allowing for far easier expansion than the desktop cases of old.
And like that, the beige box was a thing of the past.
A relic.
A thing for collectors and purveyors of old.
But like everything.
Fashion, cars, even game consoles, colours and design choices come in circles, and I'm
fairly certain we'll see beige back again in the very near future.
After all, it looks kinda cool, don't ya think?
Thanks for watching.
Have a great evening.