Power Spring Slinky

The Power Spring is a classic toy and seemingly simple, but listen to this… The Power Spring was invented by the naval engineer Richard James in the 1940s. It’s been used in NASA physics experiments! The Power Spring is a helical spring that stretches and compresses with the aid of gravity and its own momentum. It travels particularly well down stairs, moving end over end like a strange little creature! The Power Spring has even been used as a radio aerial in times of war and as a teaching aid in the classroom. What will you do with yours? Whether it’s simply your favorite toy, a gift for a loved-one or something even more educational, you can be sure that you’ll enjoy your Power Spring to the nth degree. The simple things are always the best! This item has been in the warehouse for some time and the box is quite tatty. Product unused.

Moore's Law

Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. It is often incorrectly quoted as a doubling of transistors every 18 months, as David House, an Intel Executive, gave that period to chip performance increase. The actual period was about 20 months.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy. Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later

The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. The paper noted that number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years". His prediction has proved to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. This fact would support an alternative view that the "law" unfolds as a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the goal set by the prediction charts the course for realized capability.

The Soemtron Calculator from East Germany lives

We like to hear about retro-East German electronics on Gadget Freak - see Hans' Nixie clock takes a step back in time - and here is another, the Soemtron Calculator.
Thanks to reader Bernard Green for sharing this story about an electronic calculator without a single integrated circuit that was designed and built in East Germany in the 1960's.
Not only this, he emphasises, the designers achieved all the functions with few components - there are only 31 flip-flops in the machine and some very intricate logic in order to keep component count as low as possible. Compare this to modern designers for whom minimisation of design has become a lost art, he says.
Bernard's employer in 1967 imported this machine, he tells us, and he was a senior service engineer for it, which included being sent to the factory for a 10 week training course, where he greatly admired the design.

Swiss Army Knife

Motorola RAZR

Style over substance? Maybe. Motorola's RAZR was never the most high-spec of handsets, even on its release in 2005. But the super-thin clamshell design ensured it was an instant hit - and it remains an iconic mobile of the pre-iPhone age.

Game And Watch

Nintendo's Game & Watch series of handheld gaming devices were massively popular throughout the 1980s. But they were not only a sales success story - the design of the units laid down a template that is still followed by today's high-tech handheld consoles.

Leica M7 Edition "Hermes"

Though this special edition Leica M7 is only for the extravagantly wealthy (the flourishes added by Parisian design company Hermes help lend it an £8,500 price tag), it is also a fantastic example of the timeless styling used by Leica on its cameras since 1913.

Ferguson Hill Horn Speakers

These speakers may not be a commonplace sight in our living rooms (their size and similarly hefty price tag make sure of that), but they offer a stunning example of the kind of imaginative design often in evidence in the hi-fi industry. To own them is to live in the future.

Polaroid SX-70

Though you'd never get us to give up our digital camera, we still reckon it's hard to beat the immediacy of a Polaroid print. The company launched the SX-70, its debut instant-print camera, in 1972 and it nailed an iconic look first time.

Sony Walkman TPS-L2

We now take it for granted that we can walk around with hundreds of hours of music in our pockets, but it was the Sony Walkman, with its one-tape capacity, that was the birth of music on the move. The TPS-L2, launched in 1980 and the very first Walkman, established the definitive style of this gadget.