How hard was it to sell television-optimized internet to the public?

Despite being heavily hyped, WebTV struggled to gain traction during its early years.

The technology itself, first conceptualized by a startup of the same name and distributed by tech giants Sony and Philips, was impressive and forward-thinking at the time, taking advantage of a budding mainstream interest in the web as well as the fact that large swaths of the public (read: baby boomers and older) were not as adept with computers as their kids.

But the web was simply not designed for reading 10 feet away from the screen, despite changes made by Perlman and other developers that specifically focused on television readability. They made the text bigger, worked hard on the typography, and made it easy to scroll through links with a remote control. But it was still a slog.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, while impressed at the level of readability WebTV's developers got out of the device ("you have to see it to believe," Nielsen said of how clear the text showed up on a high-quality TV of the era), ultimately found the experience too limited for everyday use.

"WebTV achieves a very high level of usability given its design constraints," Nielsen wrote in 1997. "Unfortunately, the constraints are so severe that even this great design ultimately fails to provide an optimal Web user experience."

Perhaps one telling sign of the challenges of selling the public on WebTV comes from the roadshow clip. Cofounder Bruce Leak, as he showed off the capabilities of the system while searching for the television show Friends, had to stall a bit when the 1996-era website for NBC's Friends, a fairly primitive site by today's standards, struggled to load. The issue was two-fold: Modems are slow, but the page, additionally, was not optimized to work effectively on WebTV. There were a lot of pages like that at the time.

(Because I was curious, I tried out the WebTV developer tools to see how this horribly primitive system could handle Tedium's front page. As you can see above, the results are sexy.)

The solution to this issue, of course, is not unlike what we see happening today on mobile platforms: responsive websites, dedicated apps, and progressive approaches designed to take advantage of the small screen so that content is readable anywhere. But unlike mobile phones, where the user bases simply couldn't be ignored, WebTV for much of its history was the only company doing any of this stuff, and they didn't have enough subscribers to be taken seriously, so the idea of selling developers on creating a television-formatted version of their website was a nonstarter.

"It was a walled-garden dream of developing a WebTV version of the internet, just as AOL was doing at around the same time, and as Netscape attempted with its proprietary browser extensions," recalled Brad Hill, a marketer of the service at the time of its launch. "There was some uptake on the part of publishers, but most sites in the exponentially expanding web simply allowed WebTV to reformat their pages for better or worse. Sites were often ugly through the WebTV lens, and sometimes unusable."

But those obvious weaknesses didn't stop Microsoft from spending $425 million to purchase WebTV, less than eight months after its public launch. Maybe they saw something the public didn't.

Why Microsoft mostly left WebTV (also known as MSN TV) alone for 16 years

There was a period of time when WebTV could be considered something of a hit, if a modest one, and it was within the first year or two after Microsoft made its eye-popping purchase of the firm, which in comparison to Yahoo's $3.57 billion purchase of Geocities in 1999, wasn't too bad, considering.

But the thing is, the internet was moving too fast for a set-top device of this nature. While WebTV got an upgrade soon after its purchase from Microsoft that added some fairly interactive video features that predicted the launch of TiVo a few years later—as highlighted by this William Shatner-starring WebTV commercial from 1998—its web engine quickly found itself out of date, unable to keep up with the speedy changes of browsers like Netscape, Internet Explorer, and later, Firefox.

WebTV's proprietary setup was part of the problem, as it was designed from the ground up to offer a television-optimized experience. This meant that it couldn't easily take advantage of the open-source offerings of the era, and that porting Microsoft's comparably-better Internet Explorer would be a challenge. (It also didn't help that screen resolutions were quickly improving on computers, making the low resolution of TV sets even more of an issue.)

The Windows giant ultimately shifted the device's gears. They changed the name of the platform to MSN TV in 2001 and started giving away the devices to MSN members, convincing them to stay with the service (hey, they were desperate). Then, when it came time for an upgrade in 2004, the company released the MSN TV 2 with innards that were closer to the original Xbox than to the original WebTV. It had more robust media player features, along with an Intel Celeron processor. Moreso than the WebTV was, it was essentially a computer that worked on your TV.

Ron Goldin, a designer for Microsoft during the era, considered the interface. design a major upgrade from the WebTV.

"The complete overhaul of the design for a then 4:3 resolution TV was ground-breaking in terms of its simplicity in navigating non-linear grids with no pointing device, as well as a custom keyboard for more involved tasks like composing emails," Goldin wrote on his website.

The new device utilized Internet Explorer, much closer to what people were actually using on their desktops, but the device still wasn't ideal for surfing the web—in part because TV screens by this point still hadn't caught up with their desktop competitors.

"The web browsing experience will depend on the sites that you visit," an UberGizmo review from 2006 stated. "Because MSN TV is using a somewhat low resolution, some websites won’t look the way they were intended to. Problems can go from scaled-down images to missing navigation."

In a lot of ways, the MSN TV 2, which was distributed by RCA, set the stage for all the devices we use on our TVs now. But it didn't get much in the way of upgrades after 2004—it was left to die on the vine.

But in 2013, more than 15 years after originally purchasing WebTV in 1997, and nine years after the release of the MSN TV 2, Microsoft said enough. That's when they finally killed the a set-top device intended to take over the world. It only took over a small part of it.

(Clint Budd/Flickr)

The U.S. debated screw threads for more than 30 years

The history of the screw is surprisingly diverse and unexpected.

It dates back thousands of years, to ancient Greece, when it's claimed Archytas of Tarentum invented an early version of the device. It has the fingerprints of Leonardo da Vinci, and was a key part of the Industrial Revolution.

But in the midst of the peak of innovative efforts around the screw, one that saw the creation of both the Robertson and Phillips screws, the U.S. government … well, they spent a lot of time researching screw threads.

(For people who don't regularly screw stuff in, the thread is the pointed metal line that twists around the bolt. It's what makes a screw a screw and not a peg.)

In 1918 Congress passed a law establishing an organization called the National Screw Thread Commission, with the goal of ascertaining consistent standards for screws. The goal of this effort, which you might guess given the timing of the law's passage, is military-related: As you might guess, the military uses a lot of screws, and inconsistencies were apparently bad enough after World War I that Congress had to do something about it.

John Q. Tilson, a Connecticut congressman, argued that the measure was necessary due to the problems a lack of consistent screw thread were creating. He also made the case for businesses—who he argues also will benefit from screw compatibility.

"Private manufacturers, however, desire this done just as much as everybody else," he said, according to The Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers. "They would like to have the standard of tolerance for screw threads all over the United States.

The law, of course, passed, and we had the National Screw Thread Commission, perhaps the most obscure bureaucratic organization to ever exist.

But it had a perfectly good reason to exist. A 1926 New York Times article about the commission highlighted the 1904 Baltimore fire, in which fire departments from other major cities came in to help. Unfortunately, the other cities had hoses that were incompatible with the screws used by Baltimore, making their help useless.

The article noted that the government was working close with the U.K. on the issue, and differences between those two countries did a lot to underline the problem:

There is, however, a fundamental difference in the angle of the thread of the two systems. This is 60 degrees for the American and 55 degrees for the British thread. Still another difference is that the American thread has flattened crests and roots, whereas those of the British thread are rounded.

(via Pixabay)

This difference surfaced essentially because the U.K. had created its own standard, the Whitworth Thread, but an American thought he could do things better. In 1864, William Sellers introduced the screw design for the American market that borrowed inspiration from Sir Joseph Whitworth's design, but pitched a new path forward.

Now, the U.S. was trying to convince the rest of the world that Sellers' design was the way to go. And it took a long time to sell them on the idea. The National Screw Thread Commission was active for three decades, partly because of all the details to go over, and partly because another war threw a wrench in the mix. (We haven't even talked about wrenches!)

What eventually ended the commission's long reign of terror was a deal with Canada and the U.K. to embrace the 60-degree screw thread, something that's called the Unified Thread Standard. (The Second World War, of course, highlighted just how big a problem the different screw standards were.)

At the same time the U.S. was working out its thread standard, the rest of the world was doing their weird Metric System thing, and around the same time as the launch of the Unified Thread Standard, the International Organization for Standardization was getting off the ground, and of the first tasks they took on was standardizing the screw. The good news is that the screw design they chose screws in at the same angle as an American screw. The bad news? They set the design on the metric system, when the U.S system was based on inches.

So much for a unified system, though Americans don't seem to mind it. (It would be hilarious, though, to see shoppers at Lowe's confused if one day they picked up metric-standard screws rather than the American ones they're used to.)

In 1960, when the U.K. moved over to the metric system, the Americans lost an ally on the screw thread front.

So it's basically us and the Canadians, and the Canadians are using those weird square screwdrivers anyway.

How AllMusic highlights the value of the "long tail"

Perhaps it wasn't actually built for that purpose, but Wikipedia is often seen as a key source for all things pop culture. But AllMusic, which was actually built to classify popular culture, beat Wikipedia to the punch.

The site, which actually started in dead-tree form as a series of books, was active online in the '90s as a Gopher site, and then as a website, all years before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger had a somewhat similar idea.

But being a for-profit business, unlike the Wikimedia Foundation, adds some wrinkles to the mix. The All Music Guide, as it was originally called, has gone through a variety of iterations over the years, along with a number of owners.

One of the earliest online iterations of All Music Guide. (via AllMusic's Facebook page)

Initially started in the early '90s by Michael Erlewine, an entrepreneur whose prior claims to fame include giving Iggy Pop his famous name (as he told Wired in 1994) and a computerized astrology business that dates back to 1978, the business has passed through a variety of hands over the years—enough that tracking the full history of AllMusic would probably be complicated without a chart.

To keep things simple, I'll explain the current setup of AllMusic, which has a fairly interesting split:

The actual database platform, including the album reviews that are distributed to a variety of services, is owned by a firm long known as Rovi, though it recently changed its name to TiVo based on a recent purchase you may have heard about. That database, due to the caliber of clients that license it, is immensely valuable and can be delivered to licensees in a variety of ways.

The AllMusic website, the site that the public is likely most familiar with, was spun off by Rovi a few years ago as part of the All Media Network, and now licenses the database content from its former corporate parent. The All Media Network also includes a number of other verticals, including the TV-watching-tool SideReel, AllMovie, and the video platform Celebified. (SideReel wasn't formed by AllMusic original parent firm, but otherwise complements it well.)

Zac Johnson, All Media Network's senior product manager, has been on both sides of the table: For years, he was an editor with AllMusic, and since the spinoff happened, he has played a key role in maintaining the AllMusic.com website.

(Fun fact: That album review that convinced me to get into Whiskeytown? Written by Zac. Weird coincidence, huh?)

Johnson says that, even as the data-licensing business picked up—with clients from throughout the past quarter-century of the music industry, including defunct platforms like CDNow and Borders—the website remained online as a free resource. AllMusic.com, as he puts it, became something of "the world's most elaborate business card," because it highlighted just how elaborate its database was.

"If an online store or streaming service wanted to know how much info they could license from All Media Guide," Johnson explained, "the folks there could say, 'Look at AllMusic.com and you'll see all of the reviews, ratings, biographies, catalog info and anything else you might want to help your customers decide which Miles Davis album to buy or what our editors think about the latest Strokes album.'"

Not that everything can get in—there's just too much stuff, and the editors have to pick and choose their battles as a result.

"The tough answer is that we only have so many folks able to cover so many albums and artists and they have to prioritize accordingly," Johnson adds.

Cub Koda, as presented in AllMusic's database. (Guenther Studios)

Five interesting facts about AllMusic and its massive database

1. The database features content written by a number of professional musicians, most notably Cub Koda, whose claim to fame was fronting the band Brownsville Station and writing their biggest hit, "Smokin' in the Boys Room." (Koda died back in 2000; like his most popular song, the legacy of his words lives on.) Some of these musicians are native to the music scenes in AllMusic's home base of Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as nearby Detroit.
2. Yes, AllMusic occasionally changes its reviews, and sometimes its ratings. But its reason for doing so has less to do with a change of heart and more to do with a change in culture. Sometimes, Johnson says, albums may at first receive reviews that poorly capture the album's role in the zeitgeist, requiring a rewrite. Coldplay's Parachutes is a key example of this. (The original review, 1 1/2 stars, was brutal.) Additionally, albums rarely get a five-star rating initially, but only tend to earn it over time when cultural significance has coalesced around an album.
3. If you're willing to dig enough, you'll find a few Easter eggs in the AllMusic database, some of which help surface the personalities of the authors. Perhaps one of the greatest Easter eggs is this biography of Brian Austin Green, the Beverly Hills, 90210 star and onetime rapper who is still married to Megan Fox. "Beverly Hills 90210 ended production in 2000, and Green has no doubt been totally busy and stuff since," the biography ends. (All the good stuff comes before that ending.)
4. The corporate-parent split I mentioned above does sometimes create confusing situations for artists and labels that are trying to get albums added to the database, or for folks trying to get something corrected. (To help suss out the confusion, an important bit of advice: Check the FAQ, which goes over these issues in depth.)
5. The company's offices were home to a very early Taylor Swift performance. She performed in the firm's lunchroom back in 2006, when she was 16. ("I had two strong feelings of the performance at the time," Johnson recalls. "One was that she was so tiny and skinny I feared for her health, and the other was that she seemed so sweet and naive I thought, 'You'll never make it in this industry, kid. They'll eat you alive!' So, clearly I am a terrific judge of someone's talent and ability.")

(SSG Robert Stewart/U.S. Army/Flickr)

Your umbrella innovation probably isn't as clever as you think it is

Since 1790, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has had a mandate to help register the ownership of products to specific people and companies.

For nearly as long, people have been registering patents for umbrellas and all sorts of other things of varying complexity.

And it has its own designation from USPTO. According to the government office, an umbrella is generally considered "subject matter comprising an easily-portable canopy type having a cover, a stick, and a framework comprising stick-supported ribs and stretchers for supporting or shaping the cover."

That fairly broad canvas of a design (along with the "subcombinations and appurtenances peculiar to umbrellas" covered by patent law) has been used and abused in thousands of ways over the years, especially in the name of pet owners.

In 2008, New Yorker scribe Susan Orlean highlighted the fact that the patent office received enough umbrella patent filings at the time that four people were on the umbrella patent beat in the federal government. A search of Google patents shows that, since Orlean's article was published in February 2008, 1,617 new umbrella-related filings have gone up in the USPTO database in the "Walking Sticks; Umbrellas; Ladies' or Like Fans" section, which is where umbrellas, fans, or other items on sticks appear.

And all those patent filings don't seem to actually impress the manufacturers of those umbrellas. Orlean explained why:

Totes Isotoner, which is the largest umbrella company in the country, stopped accepting unsolicited proposals several years ago. One of the problems, according to Ann Headley, the director of rain-product development for Totes, is that umbrellas are so ordinary that everyone thinks about them, and, because they’re relatively simple, you don’t need an advanced degree to imagine a way to redesign them, but it’s difficult to come up with an umbrella idea that hasn’t already been done. The three-section folding umbrella, for instance, which seemed so novel when it was first manufactured, in the nineteen eighties, was actually patented almost a hundred years ago.

But those long odds and cynical comments still haven't stopped folks from trying. In 2012, for example, a pair of Taiwanese designers took on the rain using a bold concept design it called the Rain Shield, which takes on sideways rain and avoids getting blown out of the way by wind.

(Despite the buzz it received, however, it has yet to hit the market in a meaningful way. Bummer.)

That's a good idea. A lot of other ideas are terrible, of course.

(Jon Jordan/Flickr)

Diagnosing the problems that keep poor-quality umbrellas with us

You have to wonder why, in an era when we can shove a computer into a watch, we've struggled to improve on this basic design in a way that's truly gone mainstream.

Sure, the basic design of the umbrella is pretty simple, and it's somewhat built to last. And the Totes exec quoted in the Orlean piece has a point about it simply being too common for a new design to break through.

On the other hand, while everything else on our person tends to get an upgrade, whether it's our phone, our shoes, or our personal style, umbrellas persist despite having a design that struggles at the one job it's been tasked to do. Why is that?

If I had to pin it on a single item, it'd be the fact that people don't want to actually pay for umbrellas. According to a 2010 report done by Accessories Magazine in accordance with NPD Group, the average price of an umbrella was just $6, a price point that suggests "disposable commodity" rather than "thing I actually care about. (That said, the report notes that 80 percent of the industry's profits come from umbrellas sold above a $5 price point. So maybe people who really like their umbrellas are willing to spend more?)

That issue is not limited to the present day, either. Umbrellas and Their History, an 1855 book by William Sangster, noted that a lot of innovation was happening in umbrellas at the time, but consumer interest was nonexistent in most of these innovations, as Sangster explains:

Simple as the construction of an Umbrella may appear, the number of patents that have been granted within the last thirty years might have been enormous, and a small book might be written on them, so it is of no use to attempt, in our small space, to more than mention a very few of the various improvements in their manufacture. With very few exceptions the inventors have not been repaid the cost of their patents. This has arisen, partly from the delicacy of their mechanical construction, unfitted for the rough usage to which Umbrellas are exposed; but chiefly in consequence of the increased cost of manufacture not being compensated by the improvements effected.

There are probably a variety of reasons for this incredibly frugal state of affairs—for one thing, wetness is a temporary condition—but I would say a big one is that umbrellas are really easy to lose. In fact, thousands of umbrellas get lost each year in London's public transportation system—10,907 in 2014 alone, according to the BBC.

Sure, people should be better about keeping their stuff, but in a world where we use many of the things in our bags for multiple reasons, a bulky single-use device is going to be the first to lose out.

Charles Lim, the author of the site Crooked Pixels, suggests that it's this disposability that makes it unnecessary to redesign umbrellas at all. In fact, he suggests (while responding to yet another umbrella redesign) that a better strategy would be to buy the cheapest, tiniest umbrellas you could find—say, from a dollar store—and carry one on you at all times.

"So what do you do with an imperfect dollar store umbrella? You throw it out," he wrote on his blog. "It’s disposable, like a condom. Most umbrellas sell for 10-20 dollars. A small Dollarama umbrella is two dollars. At that price, you can buy more than one because hey, you never know."

Maybe all those weekend designers out there are solving the wrong problem. Maybe umbrellas need to be made of the cheapest, smallest, most recyclable materials one can find. And maybe we should just admit to ourselves that we're going to ditch them after a short period of use.

Maybe our inventors haven't caught up with where the market actually is.

(Toshiyuki IMAI/Flickr)

Why "wall warts" put their pockmarks on good outlets everywhere

What's the difference between a cheap product and one that's been heavily designed?

In some cases, it may be the wall wart, or the power adapter that transforms energy while directly attached to an outlet.

Here's why they exist: Most modern electricity systems rely on alternating current, or the type of energy Nikola Tesla made his name on in the late 19th century, besting Thomas Edison in a well-remembered feud over how Americans should power their lightbulbs.

However, most of our electronic devices internally use direct current, which is more efficient for low-power devices and offers a constant voltage level. If the current alternated on a circuit board, it would be far less effective at delivering messages from the CPU to your screen, just as an example.

The AC adapter is effectively the bridge between how your devices actually use energy and how the power system delivers that power. The transformer baked inside turns the high voltage in the grid's power stream into something manageable for your Casiotone.

Now, you might be wondering to yourself, why isn't this functionality included directly in our devices? Why can I plug in a TV without an extra adapter, but my router needs a wall wart? Simply, it comes down to a few things, including the cost of the device, the efficiency of the design, and what's most likely to break. An AC adapter removes a point of failure from the product itself.

But these devices come with a lot of complications. The biggest, perhaps, is the fact that the bricks aren't horribly efficient at their jobs, which is why they tend to overheat. But the other problem is their size—the earliest designers of AC adapters were attempting to solve an engineering problem, essentially, without much thought to how the design of the brick would interact with every other device that needs to be plugged in.

Another problem is that various devices each tend to have different voltage needs, which means that many of these adaptors aren't compatible with one another.

Some of this is understandable—different products require different types of voltages, and that might make a closed loop desirable for some designers—but it creates a lot of waste.

As a result of these problems, AC adapters generate a lot of hate in some circles.

"AC-plug power supplies are a cheap workaround to various engineering, economic, and regulatory problems that manufacturers face, and they solve those problems by pushing them off onto end users," wrote OS News contributor David Adams.

It's a bad design that sets a bad precedent, but it likely stuck around because, when it comes down to it, it's cheap and solves a problem.

And that solution lets electronics manufacturers focus on the parts of the products they can do justice.

How Sega created an outlet conundrum for its biggest fans

If you owned a Sega Genesis back in the mid-'90s, you were most likely aware of the fact that, unlike for your friends that owned Super NESes, you had an upgrade path.

And it wasn't just limited to a Game Genie, either. Sega was more willing than its competitors to release add-ons for its system that expanded what could be done with it. Most notably, there was the Sega CD, but additionally, the company also released the 32X, a stopgap solution that made the Genesis into a 32-bit machine, at the end of 1994.

But these three devices together created a conundrum for gamers. See, each one of these products had its own AC adapter, and you couldn't use the three devices together unless they were all plugged in. They didn't share a power supply.

This was a problem for the average power strip. Power strips at the time were designed to be very narrow and with their adapters each aligned vertically. If you have a single device with an AC adapter on a power strip, this isn't a problem, because it can be attached to the end of the strip. But if you have three, you suddenly have a traffic problem. Simply put, you can't plug in a TV and three AC adapters on a single power strip. You'll be lucky to even fit the three power adapters.

(via Sega Retro)

Sega immediately realized the problem it created for gamers who really wanted to play Fahrenheit. Its response? With the release of the 32X, it also started selling an officially-branded power strip, one that flipped the outlets so the AC adapters could be plugged in side-by-side.

The 32X was a historic flop for Sega, one that was pushed off the market within about a year and a half of release (the timing of the add-on was particularly bad, because the firm had already announced its forthcoming Saturn console), but since then, Sega enthusiasts have figured out a few interesting tricks to solve this unusual state of affairs. In 2013, one enterprising gamer discovered that, if he used an aftermarket video cable with an additional pin attached, he could effectively run a 32X and Genesis on a single AC adapter. (You have to wonder what sort of technical reason/fire hazard was at play that led Sega to not do that in the first place.)

And some folks, such as this British user, have taken to retrofitting laptop chargers to replace the AC adapters.

Perhaps the most interesting, however, is a homebrew product specifically targeted at Genesis die-hards. For the past few years, a firm called Retro Game Cave has been selling a device called the Sega Trio—an AC adapter with three plugs, allowing you to plug in all three devices at once. The adapter, by the way, is far smaller than Sega's own power adapter, and reportedly generates less heat. But since it's just one tiny firm producing them, the adapters frequently sell out, likely thanks to fawning YouTube reviews like this one.

(The firm also sells an adapter that can power an NES and Super NES on a single device.)

(jeffreyww/Flickr)

The story of flat iron steak, which was discovered by a couple of scientists

The beef checkoff program, which you're probably most familiar with through the "Beef: It's What's for Dinner" commercials that have run periodically since the '90s, doesn't just exist to tell you how awesome beef is.

It also has an important role in improving the value of beef as an investment. Let me explain: Basically, a cow has a set price, a specific value, and that value is set by the market. (Don't believe me? Check the market data.)

If too many cows are on the market, the value of a cow drops. if too few, there's a shortage and the price of a steak at the supermarket might be higher than normal. And some types of cows are more expensive than others. You know, basic economics.

At the same time, some parts of the cow are more valuable than others. Tenderloin, for example, tends to be more expensive than chuck. Certain sections of the cow get a prime spot in the meat section; other parts get ground up and spread about every other part of the grocery store.

But there's always room to make a cow more valuable, and that's where the work of Chris Calkins and Dwain Johnson comes into play. Calkins is a meat scientist at the University of Nebraska, while Johnson plays a similar role at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Together, these men had a great idea: Let's research the muscle structure of your average cow, focusing on the cheaper cuts, and seeing if there might be some hidden value in there.

The duo, with the help of the National Cattleman's Beef Association, researched new cuts of meat from parts of the animal that would have otherwise been turned into hamburger. In the largest study of its kind in 2000, the scientists tested 5,600 muscles for flavor and tenderness. They found 39 worth their time.

Sounds like a weirdly specific line of work. Guessed who helped fund that research? That's right, the beef checkoff program, which quickly saw dividends from this work.

See, in 2002, these guys hit the jackpot: They uncovered an impressive new cut of meat called a flat iron steak, an inch-high cut of meat from the shoulder area of the cow, a place more traditionally associated with cheaper chuck beef that's ground into burger.

Essentially, the researchers discovered that if the connective tissue of the cow was trimmed off in a certain way (as shown in this clip), the cut of meat left behind was flavorful and punched above its weight class compared to more costly types of steak.

“Supposedly named because it looks like an old-fashioned metal flat iron, the flat iron steak is uniform in thickness and rectangular in shape,” Johnson said in a 2007 press release about the research. “The only variation is the cut into the middle where the connective tissue has been removed.”

That cut quickly became hugely popular with the public, thanks to the fact that it was cheap, but still very high in quality. High-end restaurants that would have skipped chuck in building their steaks put the flat iron steak on their menus.

A report from Beef U, an education offering provided to the food service industry via the beef checkoff program, highlights the benefits of this kind of research throughout the system:

Turning the underutilized chuck and round into these new cuts means more profitability and higher margins for foodservice operators. In addition, while these cuts have a significant impact year-round, foodservice operators can leverage key benefits during certain times of year. For instance, when both demand and price for steaks increase during summer months, operators can feature more steak options, increasing traffic and margins.

By 2012, according to the Meat Institute, the flat iron steak was responsible for around $80 million in sales.

Clearly, there's something to be said for meat science—or at least for clever naming strategies.

Amilton de Mello, the inventor of the bonanza cut. (University of Nevada-Reno)

The latest cut of beef? Well, it's a bonanza

Since the flat iron steak took hold, the meat industry has been on the lookout for new cuts of meat that could prove just as buzzy for the public.

in recent years, more cuts of meat have tried to follow the flat iron's carefully-cut path from the butcher to the grocery aisle.

Among the more notable ones:

Denver Cut Steak: This variety, found in the same bout of research as the flat iron steak, was first introduced to the public in 2009, and also comes from the chuck area. The steak, despite being seen as intensely flavorful, has struggled to have the impact of its more famous cousin, according to Denver's alt-weekly, Westword, which wrote a lengthy feature last year about the steak cut named after its city.

Vegas Strip Steak: Business consultant Tony Mata (who worked closely with researchers on the flat iron steak project) worked with researchers at Oklahoma State University to come up with yet another kind of meat from the chuck area—one that requires a non-standard butchering strategy. But what's most surprising about the cut is how it's being sold: Mata and the researchers patented the cut and are trying to license it out.

And these new kinds of cuts, controversial as they may or may not be, are still being invented to this day. Last month, in fact, the University of Nevada, Reno revealed that one of its on-campus meat scientists, Amilton de Mello, found yet another new cut near the chuck area—one he's calling the "Bonanza Cut."

De Mello, who came to the university last December, says that the cut is actually near where the flat iron steak is.

"When you separate the chuck and the ribs, the Flat Iron steak goes one way—with the Chuck—and the relatively small end stays with the rib side; this is the Bonanza Cut," de Mello told Nevada Today, a publication of the university.

A big part of the reason de Mello spotted it was some good perception. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he spotted the piece of meat while working at a beef-processing plant, thought it to be well-marbled, and decided to test it out.

The high-quality cut of beef is tiny—the two four-ounce pieces in each cow may struggle to fill you up on their own—but the high fat content (estimated to be 13 percent) gives the cut a richness that, if sold properly, could prove extremely valuable for the beef industry.

And the cut has a fan who knows a thing or two about discovering new cuts of meat: Chris Calkins, the University of Nebraska professor who helped discover the flat iron steak. He made it to the introduction party in Reno.

"Upgrading this meat from a ground beef/trim price to steak-quality price should return more dollars to the industry," Calkins said, according to Nevada Today. "I anticipate a positive reception for the Bonanza Cut, especially from countries that recognize U.S. beef for its quality and flavor."

Spoken like a guy who knows his steaks.

(James F. Clay/Flickr)

Embracing text for the sake of text

The thoughts that our brain generates come out best when they work together consistently, in a single waveform.

The problem is, when you write stuff in a word processor, you're constantly pulled away from your ideas—you keep having to refer to your research, to keep looking stuff up, and on a computer, you're constantly switching between windows.

This creates a lot of friction and, mentally, you're stuck trying to sort between four or five different layers of messy thoughts. Things get chopped into pieces and connections fail to get made.

I do my best to avoid that kind of friction, but it's tough. So it was nice to find a kindred spirit on this issue in the form of Hegland, who has long spent time obsessed with this idea of "liquid information," or how words and ideas can flow together in one fluid swoop.

The British developer and academic, who has been focused on big-picture issues regarding information for decades, has developed an app specifically designed to solve this problem, a macOS add-on called Liquid | Flow that allows users to use key commands to select a piece of text and quickly perform an action on it without even thinking. (I've tried it; It's smooth like butter.)

Hegland's annual The Future of Text Symposium—which this year covered both interesting approaches to word processing like Jesse Grosjean's ultra-minimalist WriteRoom and outré concepts like Robert Scoble pondering text in the era of the Magic Leap—has a nice throw-out-all-the-cards kind of feel.

There were a couple of living legends in the room that day, including Vint Cerf, a co-inventor of the internet, and Ted Nelson, who came up with the word "hypertext." But in many ways, the direction of Hegland's career and his focus on the written word has been defined by a mentor who wasn't even at the August event: Douglas Engelbart, the early tech innovator whose "Mother of all Demos" helped shape the functionality of the desktop computer. (Engelbart died in 2013.)

Hegland said that his focus on the written word has in part been defined by his personal relationship with Engelbart, and he's trying to bring some of Engelbart's thinking to his word processor project Liquid | Author. The app, designed for both macOS and iOS and publicly released for the latter, has an interestingly narrow focus—rather than trying to revamp word processing all at once, it attempts to tackle how teachers and students interact with documents, an interaction that many people are familiar with.

"It should be instant for students to create a citation—web, book, article, whatever—and it should be equally instant for the teacher to check that citation," Hegland explained of the app's strategy.

Another goal with Liquid | Author, he says, is to use his Future of Text gatherings almost as a skunkworks project for new ideas that can be implemented in the project, which he'll likely focus on as he works on his Ph.D.

It certainly won't be a hugely commercial project—something Hegland is quick to admit—but it will be a fascinating one to watch.

A modern take on the word processor that isn't really a word processor at all

Maybe the issue with our word processors isn't that there's too much crap. It's just that neither you nor your company cares about anyone else's.

The ambitious, Github-famous text editing tool Quill is designed to consider the process of text editing from this perspective. Rather than treating word processing as a single monolithic beast, it's an open-source project—hack it however you need it, thanks. Author and lead maintainer Jason Chen, who helped start the project while at SalesForce, suggests the strategy is intended to allow companies and end users that rely on the platform to create something that more specifically suits their needs.

"It was a common saying that 95 percent of features in Word are never used, but the problem is that different groups of people use a different 5 percent," Chen explained in an interview. "I think these big companies are looking for a tool that just does the 5 percent that they care about and skip the rest."

So far, the approach—which he says is inspired by both Medium's graceful, opinionated design and Etherpad's strong, hackable foundation—has won some prominent fans, such as Vox Media, Gannett, and Hubspot. And the hits keep coming. Last month, LinkedIn revamped its Medium-competing publishing platform to use Quill, with the engineering manager of the publishing platform praising the tool's technical power and flexibility.

"As LinkedIn publishing evolves, Quill’s underlying technology opens the door for rich features, such as collaborative editing and custom rich media types," the company's Jake Dejno wrote.

The strategy, Chen says, reflects a reframing of the place of word processing in the modern day. He argues that word processors generally haven't kept up with the interactivity of the internet (stuff like embeds, you know the deal); simultaneously, though, we have what Chen characterized as a "diminishing need for their strengths."

"The reasons we have traditionally used word processors has slowly been eroded away," he explained. "LinkedIn is replacing the resume, Github is replacing documentation, and blogging (and respective tools) have chipped into journalism. Even documents that are meant to be printed are largely being standardized and automated. Most letters in your physical mailbox today are probably from some bank that generated and printed it without touching Word."

By putting the rendering of words into the hands of the end user—and doing so, it should be said, with state-of-the-art technical standards—projects like Quill could redefine our relationship with the word processor … by, in some ways, removing it from the equation entirely.

(Anathea Utley/Flickr)

There's a chemical that's being used to discourage kids from eating their toys

In 2007, a toy manufacturer had a bit of a disaster on its hands when it was discovered that at least some of the beaded toys it produced were coated with a chemical so dangerous that, when it metabolized, it turned into the "date-rape" drug GHB.

Beads are small, and they're edible. So you can imagine what happened.

The manufacturer of Aqua Dots had a huge problem on its hands after learning this fact, and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission quickly recalled more than 4.2 million toys in an effort to control the problem.

But eventually, these toys came back on the market in a different form, under a different name. And when they did, they were covered with another kind of chemical—this one designed to prevent kids from eating the beads.

That chemical, denatonium benzoate, goes by the brand name Bitrex, and it's been around since the 1950s. It's currently used in substances as diverse as antifreeze, perfumes, household cleaners, and pesticides. Only recently has the chemical come to the world of toys. But it packs a hell of a punch—a single molecule of Bitrex can make a million molecules of water taste horrible.

If that level of bitterness sounds like fodder for a series of YouTube-style challenges, YouTube is already way ahead of you. Here's a G-rated taste-test from a radio-station morning show crew that was put up to it by a nonprofit organization; here's an R-rated test from a guy who runs a YouTube channel dedicated to eating weird things.

But as we learned in the case of Aqua Dots, this material has some important uses.

(Mike Mozart/Flickr)

The woman who convinced household cleaner manufacturers to make poison taste bad

This incredibly potent flavoring of Bitrex proved handy for a problem that arose in the early '80s, when reports of children being hospitalized for accidentally ingesting household chemicals became commonplace.

The logic is simple. If you make dangerous chemicals taste bad, kids won't eat or drink them.

As New Scientist explained in a 1985 article:

The sensible answer, then, is to make these household chemicals taste so repellant to a child that its immediate reaction if it puts some in its mouth is to spit it out. What is required is a compound so vile in taste that it cannot be tolerated. There are, in fact, several such substances, both natural and man-made, but one that stands out above all others is denatonium benzoate, or Bitrex, as it is commonly known. This white, non-toxic powder, which is soluble in both aqueous and organic solvents, is listed in the Guinnes Book of Records as the bitterest substance known. Adding just one teaspoon of powder to a tankerful of water would make the water undrinkable.

Problem was, it wasn't a given that household cleaner manufacturers would use this substance, particularly in the U.S.

That's where the hard work of an Albany, Oregon, woman named Lynn Tylczak came into play. Tylczak heard about Bitrex getting used in cleaners made in Europe, but found out that the issue was getting ignored in the U.S.

In the 1980s, well before the days of email, she started a letter-writing campaign—first with chemical manufacturers, then with politicians, neither of which she had much luck with. She had a much better track record, however, when she and 20 of her neighbors started reaching out to the media and various consumer groups about the problem.

"I wrote to about 20 of the big newspapers, then I wrote to consumer groups, magazines, health magazines, insurance magazines, the people I thought would pick it up," Tylczak told the Los Angeles Times in 1989.

The media notice worked; soon, the politicians (including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, then a member of the House) were knocking on her door pledging support. Noted consumer advocates, like Ralph Nader, were singing Tylczak's praises, and the National Safety Council quickly called on manufacturers to add Bitrex to their products.

As it turned out, at least one company, Procter & Gamble, already had. After doing market research in the early '80s, the company added the chemical to two varieties of laundry detergent after it was found that children were more susceptible to drinking those kinds of detergents over others. But its comments highlighted the fact that resistance lingered.

''We don't advertise the use of Bitrex because we don't want to communicate the notion that our products are not safe if they don't have Bitrex,'' company spokeswoman Jennifer G. Bailey told The New York Times. ''All of our products contain an emetic that would induce vomiting.''

Procter & Gamble was nothing compared to the antifreeze industry, which apparently got a PR firm to spy on her operation, according to a Covert Action Quarterly report.

She recalled in comments to The Giraffe Project: “One major anti-freeze manufacturer saw the Poison-Proof Project on CNN and decided to use bittering agents. His comment was, ‘It would cost us more to fight this than to do it.’ Doesn’t anybody just plain want to make a safe product?”

Within a year and a half, the success of Tylczak's grassroots efforts were bearing fruit—she quickly became a fixture on television talk shows, her efforts had gotten notice in Congress, and the industry started changing its ways. And in 1995, a law requiring antifreeze to contain the chemical was passed in Oregon.

These days, Bitrex is commonly used in all sorts of products you shouldn't drink. So if you accidentally have a toxic chemical in front of you and you feel like taking a swig, you can thank Lynn Tylczak for ensuring that you spit it out almost immediately. (Not that you should even try to drink a toxic chemical. That's stupid.)

(Kalebdf/Flickr)

How CompUSA's treatment of Apple fans shows just how poorly suited the big box is for technology

In 1997, Apple was on the ropes, and needed a new distribution deal to get its products to the public. It went to the arms of a partner that it was familiar with.

But ultimately, the lessons it learned from the experience led the computer maker to forge its own path.

In 1997, the tech superstore CompUSA agreed to create a store-within-a-store concept for Apple, allowing the company to put a sales rep on the floor who could properly help Apple's own customers make decisions.

(via YouTube)

"We believe in the future of Apple, and we are making a large investment to show our recommitment to Apple," CompUSA President and CEO Jim Halpin said in a press release at the time. "These specialized departments within our Superstores will offer a superior buying experience for the Apple customer."

Problem is, Halpin's concern apparently wasn't communicated down to individual employees. The Apple enthusiast site MacsOnly ran a page charting various consumer experiences at CompUSAs around the country, and there were a lot of situations where the staff didn't really understand the platform. Understandable, to a degree, because it was during a period when the Mac had slim uptake. But not for a company that was supposed to be actively promoting Apple.

Even famed technology columnist David Pogue, then a writer for MacWorld, had trouble. He went to half a dozen locations around the country, dealing with CompUSA employees at each location who seemed to have little to no interest in selling Mac-based hardware or software.

"Whatever the excuse, CompUSA simply isn't holding up its end of the sweet Apple deal," Pogue noted. "In steering potential buyers away from Macs, store clerks make a mockery of CompUSA president Jim Halpin's 1997 promise to make his stores 'the Apple headquarters for America.'"

So no, Apple couldn't even get a decent presentation from a big-box store, so it eventually started looking into its own retail outlets. Those outlets, smaller and more specialized, did the job much better than a big box ever could.

The ceilings are nowhere near as high, either.

(Kimco Realty/Flickr)

How a dress-seller noticed a trend and created an entire industry around Halloween

"I didn't invent temporary sales. But I feel like I invented temporary Halloween."

In the early 1980s, Joseph Marver had a problem. The San Francisco-based dress retailer couldn't for the life of him convince anyone to buy his dresses. But he did see that many of his potential customers were passing up his store to go to a nearby costume shop.

That shop eventually gave Marver an idea that would change the way we celebrate a major holiday for good. According to a Newhouse News Service piece from 2000, Marver put his dresses away for a month, and started selling costumes of his own. Sales went through the roof, of course.

The next year, he ditched his dress store and put up a display in a mall, and had even more sales success. Soon enough, he was running with the Halloween store concept all along the West Coast.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, another store, New Jersey's Party City, was quickly figuring out the same thing: that Halloween was a huge draw for customers, and that they should program their entire retail cycle around Halloween, not Christmas.

Party City eventually grew into the world's largest chain of party-supply sellers (with an unusual lean on Halloween, which made up a quarter of the company's sales in 2014), but it was Marver's concept, known as Spirit Halloween, that proved the most unusual and influential.

Marver's chain, which carries on average more than three times the number of Halloween items a traditional store might, grew quickly in the West and Midwest, eventually drawing the notice of another prominent novelty retailer, Spencer Gifts, which grabbed it in 1999.

From there, the chain—and the basic concept—exploded.

(cjbird88/Flickr)

How the recession created the perfect opportunity for the Halloween store

When regular retail is doing poorly, the Halloween store is in a position to do really well.

Case in point: The increased presence of the Halloween store in the years after the 2008 of the economy, when regular retailers were leaving homesteads at larger locations. It's bad enough when a boutique store leaves the mall, but when the Sears leaves, it becomes a huge problem.

In the years after the recession, two trends happened: One, Halloween stores became a lot more common around the country, and the stores started taking up larger and larger spaces. During its 30th anniversary in 2013, Spirit Halloween had 1,050 locations—a huge surge from the five dozen or so it was running when Spencer bought it in the '90s. (For comparison's sake, J.C. Penney currently has 1,063 locations and Toys "R" Us has 1,132 locations.)

The reasons that these Halloween chains grew so quickly around the recession is best explained by the death of chains like Circuit City and CompUSA. Both died around roughly the same time—just before or during the recession. Both companies left behind massive real estate spaces, taking up tens of thousands of square feet each. And, because it was the recession, odds were low that new tenants were going to take their place anytime soon.

Vacant big-box retail spaces are simply harder to rent out than smaller ones.

(Daniel Oines/Flickr)

As a result, Spirit Halloween took over 83 former Circuit City locations in 2009, the year that the famous electronics chain closed.

Temporary Halloween stores were once seen as bad business, somewhat of a blight on the retail landscape, but the recession basically forced commercial real estate owners to stop being so picky.

And there's even a chance that the success of a Halloween store might set the stage for a full-time tenant. Party City is a prominent part of the temporary-store trend through its Halloween City subsidiary. According to National Real Estate Investor, the publicly traded company uses the Halloween stores as a testing ground: If a temporary Halloween City store does particularly well at a location, Party City may decide to open up a permanent location at that spot.

By re-animating mummified retail spaces, Halloween City, Halloween Express, Spirit Halloween, and others are doing the economy a bit of a service. They're offering the public something it knows they'll like, while giving real estate companies an opportunity to get a modest return on their investment.

Ross Perot (Wikimedia Commons)

How Ross Perot's 1992 campaign helped pave the way for the Internet Archive

Last year, the Internet Archive's Jason Scott uncovered a piece of archival material so obscure that even the organization's founder, Brewster Kahle, didn't remember creating it. The two-hour-long video, previously unmarked and with fewer than ten views at the time Scott discovered it, features an interview with Kahle that dates back to his days as head of WAIS, Inc., an early attempt to create a broad online database.

WAIS, which stands for "wide area information server," was effectively an internet-enabled database technology that allowed for long-distance access of digitally organized content. Initially borne in 1989 from a research project, it became something of a footnote in the history of the internet as a combination of the World Wide Web and search engines like Google took its place. But the thinking in its design was, in some ways, fundamental to the way we use the internet now.

The technology, at the time, was seen as particularly valuable—especially in the days when it wasn't clear how we would eventually access data online. Spun off from the supercomputer firm Thinking Machines in 1992, WAIS, Inc. represented one of the first attempts to make the internet user-friendly.

And, as a company, it got its start thanks to a presidential campaign—Ross Perot's, to be specific. As Kahle states nearly an hour into the video, the campaign basically was the reason why the company was created when it was. In fact, Kahle described it as a "fortuitous event": He knew Perot Systems head Mort Meyerson, who had a sudden need for an information-organization platform for the campaign of the company's namesake.

Brewster Kahle, circa 1992. (via the Internet Archive)

"Basically they've got this organization of people that are in 50 states, that is ad-hoc, that has three months to live, that has to keep in touch with each other," Kahle explained in the clip. "So they have lots of information coming from the field, and they have, they need to collect up in a central place, figure out what it is they're trying to do, what the statements, positions of Ross Perot are, and to disseminate that information out again. Paper, or having people fly back and forth, just wasn't fast enough. Electronics made a whole lot of sense within a campaign structure."

The high-tech approach considered by the Perot campaign makes a lot of sense. As is well-known, Perot had a significant background in technology, as the founder of Electronic Data Systems, a information technology management firm that dates to the 1960s. (He also famously invested in Steve Jobs' NeXT.)

Kahle's system, put together in a couple of days, impressed political strategist and campaign manager Ed Rollins, who quickly put the system to work for the campaign. Soon after, Rollins quit the campaign, and Perot famously suspended his effort before eventually hopping back in. This created a problem for Perot Systems, which had this impressive tool at its disposal that it no longer could use for its intended purpose—organizing news clippings and press contacts.

(If you know where to look on the Internet Archive, you can actually find the proposed statement of work describing this effort to create "an Intelligence System for the Perot Campaign.")

Eventually, with WAIS Inc.'s help, Perot Systems decided to eat its own dog food.

"Basically Perot Systems' point was, 'What could Perot Systems use this for?' in terms of selling it to their customers," Kahle explained. "So we installed it within Perot Systems to help them run their own corporation. And that, now it's November of '92, we've basically installed it and got it running for six months. The pilot groups are using the system for all sorts of information."

Soon enough, WAIS, Inc., off the back of client work like the Perot campaign and other projects, became a successful, profitable business, one that was only slightly ahead of its time—and close enough in conceit to the web that it basically predicted the internet's future.

As the internet started to take a more formalized shape, Kahle and other stakeholders sold WAIS, Inc. to AOL, and with the money earned from the buyout, he and fellow WAIS co-founder Bruce Gilliat started two projects that are still active to this day: Alexa, an online search and analytics tool that crawls the internet's many websites, and the Internet Archive, which keeps the internet's memory safe for generations to come. (They eventually sold Alexa to Amazon for $250 million in stock. It's unrelated, except perhaps in spirit, to Amazon's Echo-driving AI project of the same name.)

Editor’s note: Today’s issue is created in partnership with the folks at Make Room, a nonpartisan organization sponsored by the housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners.

(Unsplash/Pixabay)

If you compare historic rents to the rate of inflation, something startling emerges

Shelter is an essential thing—up there with food and water. But while those other essentials remain relatively inexpensive, the cost of a proper housing has surged over the years.

But to really get a grasp of how dramatic this surge has been, it helps to look in a historic context: How far would a 1940s-level rent get you nowadays?

In 2013, the real estate blog Curbed pondered this question, by doing an analysis of rent based on historic Village Voice classified ads. In the 1940s, a New York City apartment in a decent neighborhood could be had for about $50. What would that $50 get you now?

In the 1940s, you could get a place on the Lower East Side for less than $50, according to the analysis. These days, with inflation considered, that $50 equals out to between $780 and $830. The average rent in NYC is $3,800—and that $800 or so will barely even get you a shared apartment.

"To find a private apartment for the same $800 price range, one must go to the far reaches of the city," the website’s Jessica Dailey wrote.

But even outside of New York, rental rates have traditionally outpaced the rate of inflation. Between 2010 and 2014, U.S. Census Bureau reported the median gross rent nationwide to be $920. In comparison, the pre-inflation rate of rent in 1940 was $27—an amount that would have been the equivalent of $456 in 2014.

Sure, plenty of things have changed since then—our definition of basic utilities has expanded to include cable television and internet, we expect air conditioning, and there are tougher regulatory and maintenance standards than there were 76 years ago. But when it comes down to it, the price of rent nationally has more than doubled.

Even in states with rents below the national average, the increase has been fairly dramatic. In 1940, for example, Mississippi was the least expensive place to rent in the country, with places going for an average of $11 per month, or $186.01 in 2014 numbers. That year, the median rent in Mississippi tallies at $714, nearly four times as much as the inflation-adjusted 1940 rent could buy. (And no, Mississippi is no longer the cheapest state to rent in; that honor goes to West Virginia, or if you want to expand to official U.S. territories, Puerto Rico.)

Certainly, cheap rents can still be found in some places—if you’re willing to live in Toledo, Ohio, you can get an apartment for $638 per month, making it the lowest rent in the country in a city with a population topping 250,000, according to American Community Survey estimates gathered by FindTheHome. Problem is, the per-capita income in that area is $19,113—meaning that the rent would account for 40 percent of the average Toledo resident’s income if they were living by themselves.

Plenty of people in Toledo probably make a lot more than $19,113. But plenty more probably make less. And looking at things in recent terms highlights just how problematic this trend really is.

(turkeychik/Flickr)

Why things are so out-of-whack for renters

"Affordable housing" is often bandied about as a buzzword in the world of real estate, despite the fact that it’s considered essential for many socioeconomic groups by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The problem is, it’s often not reflected on the ground. In some ways, it feels like a myth, like you’re given a set of options—safe, inexpensive, convenient, sizable—and told to choose just two. You’re more likely to see an ad for a fancy apartment you can’t afford on your just-scraping-by salary than one that’s suited for your needs.

Now, here’s the crazy thing about this: The federal government has a set of metrics set aside that are supposed to allow for rental assistance for people who need it—in the form of Section 8 rental assistance vouchers and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. These programs keep people in their homes, and bring a bit of stability to what can often feel like a losing situation. When income isn’t inflating as fast as rent is, this kind of help can be a lifesaver.

The problem is, just 23 percent of Americans who qualify for such programs actually receive this help, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Part of the problem is funding, part of it is legislative will.

Slightly higher up the economic food chain, the U.S. government actually assists people with housing on a fairly consistent basis. These programs have definite value—they put homeownership within reach of people who otherwise couldn’t afford it, but the problem is that the calibration is somewhat out of whack: Households that make more than $100,000 per year are much more likely to receive home mortgage interest and property tax deductions than those that make less than that. In fact, three-quarters of these subsidies go to households that make more than $100,000, and more than a third to households with incomes above $200,000.

This year, the federal government will put $140 billion into programs designed to help homeowners. It’ll put just $55 billion into programs designed to help renters. In an era when renting is becoming more common, the gap raises way too many questions.

Anyone who’s lived in a city knows that the vibe and overall culture of that city is the sum of its parts. You lose that vibrancy when everyone who wants to live there can’t. By putting most of the weight of housing policy on ownership rather than rental, it limits the community’s long-term potential.

And that’s a bummer—the person pouring your drink deserves an easy commute just as much as the person who owns the bar.

Editor’s note: Today’s issue is a piece from writer Andrew Egan, who had a great story he wanted to share about something really risky. It took him to a few interesting places. Here’s his story.

Trey German being interviewed at the finish line in Mesquite, Nevada. (all photos by Andrew Egan)

The kind of person who flies with only a lawnmower engine and a fancy bedsheet

On a beautiful Sunday morning in early October, a small collection of pilots gathered in Polson, Montana for a race. The term pilot might be a little misleading for laymen as the aircraft they fly aren't regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). A powered paraglider, also called a paramotor, is one of the cheapest and most basic ways to fly. To most seeing one for the first time, it also looks like a batshit crazy thing to do.

(The Toll Road/YouTube clip)

Put simply, a paramotor is an engine with props (spinning blades) and a fabric wing. So, basically, a lawnmower engine and a fancy bedsheet. To take off, pilots turn on their motor, catch wind in their "wing", and start running. If the conditions are right, they quickly gain speed and, hopefully, take flight. Of course, that doesn’t always happen. The altitude of many of the landing points during Icarus exceeded 4,000 feet. The air was thin and face plants were common.

"The air changed on me," Dean Kelly explained after a failed takeoff attempt outside of St. Ignatius, Montana. An Australian that's piloted paramotors for over two years, Kelly cracked two props and damaged the outer cage surrounding his motor. Fortunately, he was not hurt.

For the uninitiated, the risk associated with paramotoring often seems too great. James Borges, a pilot from the United Kingdom, explained the appeal by making an ‘X’ with his arms, symbolizing a risk/reward graph.

"It’s not really about risk, we try to manage risk as much as possible. If we do that, we get to fly in a way few people experience."

One of the few studies on extreme sports athletes found that emotional management, especially of fear, is common. Participants are eventually rewarded for successfully managing risk and fear with a healthy dose of adrenaline and dopamine, the chemicals in the brain responsible for sensations of happiness and satisfaction.

"Dopamine plays an important role in the reward- and motivational systems in the brain, and high levels of it leads to feelings of well-being," an overview of the study reads. “...The experience of fear induced by risk may be compared to the response people have after surviving dramatic incidents such as serious illness, car accidents or traumas. People often report that these experiences change their lives. Such experiences may in the longer run lead to personal development and increased appreciation of life.”

Talking to a paramotorist after a flight involves a fair amount of high fiving and handshaking. Phrases like, "pumped", “Yeah boy!”, and “holy fucking shit man” are routinely bandied about. It takes at least fifteen minutes for the excitement to reduce to a simmer. Attempts to conduct proper interviews after flights were more or less pointless. Pilots, for whatever reason, tend to downplay the role adrenaline plays in their decision to paramotor.

"When you first start, oh yeah, there's always an adrenaline rush," said Trey German, an engineer from Texas that's been flying paramotors for nearly three years. “After a while, you really only feel it during maneuvers or extreme conditions.”

Which might explain why these pilots would choose to participate in the Icarus Trophy, claimed by its organizers to be the world’s toughest air race. The 2016 version of the race started in Polson and ran 1,100 miles through five states before ending near Las Vegas. This course was 300 miles longer than the previous year’s, which ran from Seattle to Sacramento.

"During one flight, I experienced hail, snow, rain, and turbulence," Kelly said about the experience. “I had never dealt with those conditions before and I got to deal with them all at once.”

A few places on the Icarus trail

Polson, Montana: Start line of the Icarus Trophy, elevation 3,000 feet above sea level.

Idaho Falls, Idaho: The Falls of Idaho Falls. One of the larger cities along the Icarus route, Idaho Falls is also home to Idaho National Labs, the country’s only nuclear reactor test site.

Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah: Maintained by the Bureau of Land Management as a race track, the Bonneville Salt Flats weren’t technically on the Icarus route. A few of the competitors decided to make the drive for a day of spectacular flying. We arrived a day or two after rains left an inch of water across the salt plain. Several land speed records have been set at the Flats.

Moab, Utah: A beautiful resort town near Arches National Park, Moab is surrounded by beautiful red rock mountains and unique geological formations, like the Delicate Arch.

Monument Valley, Utah: In southern Utah, near the Arizona border, much of the area belongs to the Navajo tribe. This iconic landscape has been featured in dozens of films and TVs shows, including Forrest Gump and Back to the Future Part III.

Downey, Idaho: A small town in Southern Idaho with a grass strip airfield, Downey forced competitors to race against weather and make decisions that could have fatal consequences. Miroslav Svec is pictured here attempting to beat an incoming storm to the mountain.

(Photo.Ski/Flickr)

Three guys, three apps, one great idea: The story of shareware's creation

As a concept, shareware can be credited to three separate people, all of whom offered up different elements of the software offering that eventually became shareware.

In 1982, a computer developer and magazine editor named Andrew Fluegelman came out with a piece of communications software called PC-Talk, an early app that he offered up under a model he called freeware—a term he copyrighted, but has little in common with the free-for-the-taking modern definition of freeware. The software could be shared freely, but he requested that, if you liked it, you mail him $25—something he claimed was more economics than altruism. PC-Talk earned a rave review in PC Magazine, Fluegelman's employer at the time, own its own merit.

"An ingenious communications program composed by PC Associate Editor Andrew Fluegelman that is elegantly written, executes without quirk or mishap, and is free for the asking," columnist Larry Magid wrote.

Around the same time, an IBM employee named Jim Knopf (also known as Jim Button) developed a database app, sold under a similar model, called Easy-File. Soon, Knopf and Fluegelman met one another in person, and apparently out of solidarity for their collective models, Knopf renamed his database app to PC-File, and got the ball rolling on his company Buttonware.

In an essay on the creation of shareware, Knopf noted that the innovative sales strategy led to natural attention for his firm.

"Here was a radical new marketing idea, and the computer magazines were hungry for such things to write about," he explained. "The result: much free publicity for PC-File."

The next year, a Microsoft employee named Bob Wallace left that company and created a new one, QuickSoft, for which his first app was called PC-Write. Wallace, who helped other early software-makers with marketing, was ultimately the one who came up with the memorable name for the marketing strategy: Shareware. (It was certainly better than the alternative Knopf came up with, "user-supported software.")

The strategy quickly caught on, and other indie developers followed suit. Computer clubs around the country, wanting to offer their members new software, took advantage of the perks of shareware, which drove its growth.

As a result of all this growth, shareware eventually got organized. In April 1987, the Association of Shareware Professionals formed with the goal of ensuring that the distribution of such software was safe and that the rights of software makers were protected. The organization verified sources that distributed such software and created standards that independent software sellers could follow so they wouldn't get burned. If you ever run into a file called FILE_ID.DIZ in an zip file somewhere, you can credit ASP for putting it there—it's a text file describing what the shareware does.

Shareware, clearly, was an idea with legs—and those legs, ultimately, outran the three men who invented it. Wallace died in 2002, Knopf in 2013, and Fluegelman, most tragically of all, in 1985. The legacy of their work, in many ways, lives on.

How adware bastardized shareware's good name

Shareware wasn't perfect as a business model—clearly, more people used software for free than paid the piper—but, despite Fluegelman's initial claims, it was fairly altruistic. It kept small developers in the game and let computer users try out different kinds of software without spending thousands of bucks at Best Buy.

The problem is, all the altruism that went into the model at its launch didn't follow through to a second generation of developers.

During the early Windows XP years, the model broke down. A few factors were behind this, including the tendency for shareware-distributing websites to be the exact kinds of sites that would distribute downloads with adware—a problem that lingers to this very day.

Sometimes, this adware would take the form of programs like Gator, which claimed to have legitimate uses (it would save passwords for you), but also came with a pop-up ad network. (The company behind Gator denied being adware and changed its name multiple times before its inevitable shutdown.)

But more often, the adware just tagged along like an unwelcome guest, ready to clog up your computer with crap at a moment's notice. Almost as if to reflect this shift in shareware's reputation, the Association of Shareware Professionals changed its name to the Association of Software Professionals in 2010.

"It is no longer necessary to distribute software by sharing floppy disks or to pay with a check in the mail," the association explained in a blog post. "Many consumers, fairly or not, have come to see 'shareware' as short-hand for 'amateurish.'"

Sure, shareware still had its areas of success—Mac-based software developers like Panic and Rogue Amoeba did pretty well building up audiences during this era with software releases that were effectively shareware.

But overall, downloading software became way too much of a minefield for shareware to thrive. It's unfair, but that's what happened. The decline of shareware created an opening for other types of software distribution approaches to thrive, including open-source software, freemium software, and software as a service (SaaS).

And it paved the way for App Store-like approaches, where a gatekeeper plays goalie between you and your digital device, keeping out the extra crap you don't need.

The system isn't perfect, and it's not shareware. But we most certainly wouldn't have gotten to what we have now without the cottage industry that a few creative developers built in the '80s and '90s.

Why such a dramatic increase in war toy sales? Credit G.I. Joe.

An important pop-culture trend redefined both cartoons and toys starting in the spring of 1982, and that phenomenon was G.I. Joe.

It was great for the toymaker Hasbro, but not so great for anti-war activists.

For those that haven't followed the history of G.I. Joe, here's a two-second primer: In the 1960s, G.I. Joe looked a heck of a lot different from the Real American Hero that is popular today.

The toys of the early G.I. Joe era, in the mid-1960s, were 12 inches tall, and could be realistically posed any which way. But the Vietnam War happened, and suddenly, toys inspired by soldiers seemed like not such a great idea.

A 1970s version, which de-emphasized the war and military concepts, failed to catch fire. But eventually, a new approach, tied to a storyline straight out of the comic books, did the trick.

Working with Marvel Comics, Hasbro came up with an original storyline for the toy line, complete with new characters and a common enemy—one you might know as COBRA. It played more with the military elements, but it wasn't tied to actual U.S. battles. And instead of selling giant dolls, Hasbro could now sell toys that were just 3.75 inches high, thanks to the success of Star Wars. That meant the company could save money and focus on building accessories for this massive universe Marvel helped them create.

The partnership, at first, also allowed for a clever skirting of advertising rules. See, animation couldn't be used to promote toys on television at the time—it could only be used partly, and the ads required pictures of actual kids playing with the toys. As Mental Floss notes, Hasbro and Marvel got around that rule by promoting the comic book on television, a comic book which just happened to use the toys that Marvel was selling.

It was the first ad for a comic book ever aired on television, and it set the stage for a massive cartoon success, one that came about in 1985, after the Reagan administration deregulated the kinds of cartoons that could air on television.

G.I. Joe, with its military themes and tightly integrated marketing strategy, won big. But it created a massive backlash of concerned parents and anti-war activists.

(JWPhotowerks/Flickr)

How the "Ban War Toys" movement gained momentum

By 1985, G.I. Joe and other action-heavy toys were massively popular, but that success was raising some larger concerns for parents, educators, and peaceniks.

And during that holiday season, the movement against war toys started picking up steam in the U.S., through a variety of advocacy groups and other organizations. One such group, the International War Toys Boycott, held mock funerals for military toys, complete with eulogizers such as Vietnam vet Max Inglett, who became an anti-war protester after returning home, going so far as to hitchhike across the country in a wheelchair to draw attention to his crusade.

"Since childhood, we have been conditioned by being told it is fun to play war," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I had numerous conversations in Vietnam about the fact that we are conditioned by war toys to think it's OK to kill in battle. I think we need to learn at a very early age that war is not a game."

Author and peace activist Deb Ellis, in an article for Peace magazine, suggested that the Iran hostage crisis created the environment that allowed war-friendly toys to thrive once again.

"Something as ugly as war needs to be beautified before it hits the market. Memories of American boys being slaughtered on national TV fade into the background when Rambo is around," she wrote. "America is seen as taking control of violence again, rather than as being a victim of it. Being kicked in the head is not glamorous, but doing the kicking is glamorous—and even virtuous."

Even celebrities got in on the movement. Michelle Phillips, the singer for the Mamas and the Papas, was inspired to join the Ban War Toys movement after seeing that a friend's 6-year-old son had been given toy machine guns for his birthday.

Perhaps the most prominent voice throughout this whole movement might have been a psychiatrist named Thomas Radecki. Having chaired the National Coalition on Television Violence throughout the '80s, Radecki was often the key advocate against violent imagery in the media and a commonly quoted figure. His views could be a bit out there at times—specifically, when criticizing Dungeons & Dragons, a game he claimed was behind a number of deaths. (And just watch him tell Larry King, straight-faced, in this 1989 clip, that Archie Comics are just as good an option as anything in the Marvel Comics stead.)

But he nonetheless gave weight to advocates for banning war toys, at one point finding, through his own research, that playing with He-Man toys often created more antisocial behavior among preschoolers than playing with Cabbage Patch dolls. The study was criticized due to its small sample size, but Radecki's voice gave it weight.

"The evidence is quite strong that we are transmitting an unhealthy message encouraging children to have fun pretending to murder each other," Radecki said, according to the New York Times.

(These days, Radecki has fallen pretty hard from grace: He is currently serving a prison term after repeatedly over-prescribing opioids to patients, sometimes in exchange for sex.)

The toy industry, understandably, was skeptical of the criticism it was facing from some of these critics.

"Imaginary play in no way makes ax murderers," stated Donna Datre, a representative of the Toy Manufacturers of America, in comments to Mother Jones in 1986.

On that front, point to Datre. Lots of He-Man and G.I. Joe toys were sold throughout the '80s. Few of them created any ax murderers.

How CompuServe convinced the country's largest newspapers to put their stories on its service

The Columbus Dispatch's early experiments with CompuServe were no accident.

They came about in part to some savvy discussions on the part of CompuServe's cofounder and early CEO, Jeff Wilkins.

The firm, which got its start in 1969 as a computer time-sharing firm targeted at large companies, slowly evolved into a consumer-targeted service that offered different kinds of online software to end users. One of those software ideas was searchable news, something that Wilkins championed as a larger concept.

In an interview for the podcast Conquering Columbus Wilkins noted that the firm wanted to get the Associated Press, which had previously only been available to the public through dead trees, onto its service. Wilkins first approached the Dispatch, talking them into giving the online service a test feed to try things out.

Eventually, Wilkins reached out to the Associated Press directly, traveling to New York to show the concept to AP officials, who then brought the idea in front of the board of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA). The board, which got a gander of the concept at a meeting in Hawaii, proved so intrigued by what they were shown that members of the board, including Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, decided to made a special trip to Columbus to meet with CompuServe in person.

Wilkins, who had initially wanted to pay for a direct AP feed, managed to flip the script: He asked for the association to let him have access to the feeds of 10 large papers for a test, in exchange for $250,000 in free advertising from each paper. ANPA not only agreed to that deal, but said it would be willing to get each of its member papers on board as part of an ongoing test of the service—one that, in the end, would last approximately two years.

"So, we ended up with every big newspaper in the United States," he said in the podcast.

It may have been the greatest negotiation in business history. Put in a room with the most powerful publishers in the newspaper industry, CompuServe's executives managed to convince the AP's members to give away their copy for free—all by portraying it as an experiment.

"Oh, it was beyond our wildest dreams, all I could do to stop from keep from jumping up and down," he added.

Alas, the idea proved more successful in theory than in execution. According to the 2008 book, On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders, the experiment ended with something of a thud, with just 10 percent of CompuServe's users regularly using the platform and outside beta testers complaining about the lack of photos. (And those users weren't even paying $5 an hour!)

Additionally, questions quickly arose about whether services like CompuServe would endanger the golden goose:

The test brought out quite a bit of data about online demographics and reading habits. Most users were males in their thirties, with decent incomes. They logged on for email, news, shopping, gaming, banking, and so on. But newspaper publishers weren't as interested in these things as they were in assurances that online services were no threat to newspapers and their advertising base. They got that assurance from AP spokesman Larry Blasko, who told them, "There is no danger to the American newspaper industry from electronic delivery of information to the home."

Newspapers had survived radio. They had survived television. According to ANPA, they would survive computer networks.

According to the passage of time and highlighted by the recent decline in print advertising revenue at the New York Times, that may have been a bad bet.

Doug Funnie, looking relaxed, writing in his journal. This is how Tedium is produced twice a week. (Nickelodeon)

20 true facts that don’t have anything to do with each other besides the fact they’re not about American politics

1. Back in the ‘90s, one company had the bright idea of combining a Super NES with an exercise bike—a narrow platform for which just a few games were made. The resulting device is incredibly rare, as are the games made for it. When one of the bikes showed up on eBay in 2013, the bid price was $10,000.
2. It took roughly 50 years after the invention of the can for someone to come up with a can opener. Before that, the recommended opening method involved a chisel and hammer.
3. In 1984, Paul McCartney scored a sizable U.K. hit with a song he wrote for the cartoon Rupert. The cartoon aired before the movie Give My Regards to Broad Street, which was a movie he released that year that he really shouldn’t have. (Also of note: The film inspired a Commodore 64 game of the same name.)
4. In Iceland, Cool Ranch Doritos are called “Cool American” Doritos, because nobody knows what ranch dressing is outside of the United States.
5. Unlike Apple, Rolex is a 100 percent vertically integrated company, which means that every part of a Rolex watch is produced inside of a Rolex factory. No outsourcing in Switzerland.
6. For five and a half years, workers in the former Czechoslovakia spent tons of energy building a gigantic statue of Joseph Stalin out of granite in Prague, which was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union at the time. Soon after the statue was built, however, the Soviet government decided to de-emphasize Stalin’s legacy. As a result, the statue was destroyed just seven years after it was revealed.
7. The company that created the Trapper Keeper is the same one that founded LexisNexis.
8. In 1979, you could buy a backyard satellite dish from a Neiman Marcus catalog for $36,000.
9. India Pale Ale gets its name not from being based in India, but the fact that it was designed to make the long trip from England to India, a British colony in the 19th century, without going bad.
10. In 1983, the corporate rock band Journey starred in its own arcade game, which is notable because developers used an early digital camera to get the faces of the band members in the awful, awful game.
11. A law recently passed in California allows actors to remove their ages from IMDB pages, as a way to prevent discrimination by casting directors.
12. In the film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and the other characters are shown being covered in snow during one scene. That snow is made of asbestos, which is probably the most carcinogenic thing one can do.
13. The first closed-captioned message, created by Texas Instruments in the ‘70s at the behest of PBS, was “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
14. Spoiler alert: The creator of Doug failed to win over his real-life Patti Mayonnaise. No word on whether he satisfyingly decked the real-life Roger Klotz.
15. Until earlier this year, Bill Gates owned millions of classic photographs. He sold those images—including the iconic Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” image—to a Chinese company. Most of these photos, by the way, are stored in a limestone mine in Pennsylvania. Here’s a documentary about the mine.
16. It’s nearly impossible in a football game for a team to end the game with just four points. In fact, it was a big deal in November 2011 when the St. Louis Rams scored four points in a single quarter. (Nearly as unlikely is the 11-10 game, but it’s happened.) That said, despite the number of games played, there are a number of final scores that have never been reached in professional play. Pro Football Reference has the full list.
17. According to an interview with Pras of the Fugees from earlier this year, the band’s first album initially sold just 12 copies. Their second album did a little bit better.
18. Keanu Reeves had his signature forged on a contract by a friend of his—forcing him to make a terrible movie he never wanted to make, simply so he could avoid a lawsuit.
19. The woman who invented the dishwasher is the granddaughter of the man who invented the steamboat.
20. And finally … Steve Jobs introduced the world to Wi-Fi with a hula hoop.

The other claimant to the cheese curl’s invention bounced back from natural disaster

While Flakall has the more interesting tale on this front, it’s not the only one. Another early claimant to the cheese curl is a Louisiana firm called the Elmer Candy Corporation, which developed a product eventually called Chee Wees.

The Big Cheese of New Orleans, as it’s nicknamed, became a local institution. (Unlike Zapp’s, another local snack-food icon whose excellent Voodoo chips have a cult following, Chee Wees haven’t gone national. Perhaps they should.)

Elmer’s Fine Foods—no longer a candy company—is a family-owned business that’s produced cheese curls mostly continuously for roughly 80 years.

I say “mostly,” of course, because the firm had to deal with the impact of Hurricane Katrina. As the company explains on its website, Elmer’s entirely facility was flooded out by the deadly storm, and the company had to stop operation for 16 months while it recovered from the hurricane and completely replaced the machines that produced the snacks.

A challenge like that might have been enough to kill a lot of companies. But Elmer’s bounced back—and it’s still active to this day.

(Another notable cheese curl firm, Old London Foods, came out with its variation, the Cheese Doodle, in the late 1950s.)

(Mike Mozart/Flickr)

Why we never got a Chester Cheetah Saturday morning cartoon, despite multiple attempts

These days, Chester Cheetah is trying to goad Beyoncé on Twitter just like every other advertising mascot worth its weight in salt, but there was a time that the cheetah was seen as so impressive that there was chatter it could become a cartoon lynchpin.

In fact, Frito-Lay got pretty far down the road with Fox in turning the mascot, launched in 1986, into a cartoon. Yo! It's the Chester Cheetah Show, as the toon would have been called, was developed as a potential part of Fox’s Saturday morning cartoon slate. (CBS also considered making the show, but rejected it.)

Problem was, advocacy groups were not happy with the idea for the show, because of the fact that its roots were very clearly as advertising. Action for Children's Television (ACT) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) were among the groups that petitioned the FCC regarding the program.

"His only previous television appearances, indeed his entire existence, have been in traditional commercial spots designed to sell a product,” the FCC petition stated, according to the New York Times.

ACT noted that it was rare to petition the FCC about a cartoon only in the planning stages, but felt it had to speak up due to what it felt was the unprecedented nature of the idea.

It didn’t help that Kraft was trying to sell Cheesasaurus Rex, its macaroni and cheese mascot, as a TV show around the same time.

Just a few weeks after the controversy blew up, Frito Lay and Fox shelved the idea, with Fox claiming that differences in creative control and long negotiations killed the show—not protests.

“I still believe he’s one of the best characters since Bugs Bunny, and the fact he is associated with a product was irrelevant to us,” Fox Kids President Margaret Loesch told the Times.

Frito Lay spokesman Tod MacKenzie, in comments to the Associated Press, was a bit more honest.

“Since Chester came out in 1986, he’s been wildly popular,” MacKenzie told the AP. “We don’t want to jeopardize the job he’s doing here.”

The book Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-chip, published in 1998 by Duke University Press, pointed out that while ACT didn’t officially win the case with the FCC—which, during the Bush era, was in no mood to censor a show that wasn’t indecent—the group acted like it did, especially after its efforts also killed off the Cheesasaurus Rex show.

"We feel we have zapped, for the time being, the problem of logos turning into half-hour programs," ACT President Peggy Charren stated at the end of the controversy.

But you still have to wonder what might have happened if the show got the green light after all this. ( This wiki page certainly does.) Would we be eating fewer cheese curls? Maybe more?

Editor's note: This piece originally published on Vice's Motherboard, a syndication partner of ours. It's a pretty rad site; they might be onto something.

John Scherer's well-known catchphrase: "Try my product." (YouTube screenshot)

The story of how Video Professor became such a big deal

“I used to tell everyone if I just had a room full of people to show how the product works everybody would buy it. The problem was I could never figure out where that room full of people was located.”

John Scherer didn’t see himself becoming a television icon. TV was simply the most effective way to sell his product—and it turned out, the giant room full of people interested in Video Professor’s lessons was actually millions of smaller rooms, each with a television set or computer sitting nearby.

The concept was born from Scherer’s first business, a Colorado PC clone-maker called Data Link Research Services. The company was successful, but it had some sluggish periods. Amidst an effort to sell machines to an investment firm, he had the idea of giving the firm video instruction kits to explain how to use the computers as well as the investment software installed on the machines. In the process, he discovered something surprising.

“I told an employee to go to a library or store and get a video on how to use the computer so we could include that as well and we discovered that there was nothing like that available,“ he said. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

In a 1987 interview with InfoWorld, Scherer noted one of the advantages of the Video Professor tapes was the ability for users to study at their own pace. Targeted at novices, the company’s products were intended as an alternative to complicated manuals or large, classroom-style training sessions.

While the Colorado-based firm's products were built with the business market in mind—during a period when computer knowledge didn’t come naturally to users—it proved just as useful for home users.

Infomercials helped to drive the product to a larger user base, and at the same time, they made Scherer—who, as Jimmy Kimmel once hilariously pointed out, looks like John McCain with a mustache—a recognizable figure to millions of people.

“It didn’t matter if I was in New York City or California—people would stop me when I was out for dinner or just walking down the street, and when Jay Leno talked about me on his show, I knew I was becoming well known,” he said.

That came with its benefits—it boosted the company’s sales, and before an interview, Fox and Friends introduced him as one of the most recognizable people in the country—but it also put extra scrutiny on the firm.

It cut both ways.

An illustration of the Video Professor, as shown in a Windows 3.1 instructional tape. Somewhat ironically, this particular video was created with an Amiga. (YouTube)

Not everyone was a fan of Video Professor’s business model

Video Professor and its many ads made Scherer well-known, but it also drew attention to the company’s business practices—and consumer advocates didn’t like what they saw.

The model, similar to the Columbia House payment structure with the additional wrinkle of automatic credit card payments, drew a number of complaints from consumers, in part because of the large amounts of money it charged for courses in its installment plan. Unlike an unwanted Columbia House CD, a single Video Professor tape or CD could cost hundreds of dollars.

In the last few years of the company’s life, for example, it became a frequent target of discussion at Consumer Affairs, which tested the company’s model after receiving consumer complaints. (The publication’s Joseph Enoch dealt with a bit of a rigmarole during the ordering process according to a 2007 feature, but found that the return process ultimately worked as advertised.)

Sometimes, the approach meant that the firm would find itself in battles with some of the biggest names in tech media. In a 2009 TechCrunch post, site founder Michael Arrington raised a number of concerns with the company’s business model, and drew attention to the fact that the firm had tried to push The Washington Post to modify another post that mentioned the company. (The Post declined.)

“Video Professor is unlike mobile scams which look to get a relatively small $10–$20/month subscription on your mobile bill and hope you never notice,” Arrington wrote. “They go for the big kill: $190-$290 charged to your credit card on time.”

Scherer was quick to defend the company’s practices, stating that the firm had an internal refund policy in which it agreed to refund a user’s money no matter what.

“Having that type of policy and then having people write a criticism that we would not refund them would upset me greatly as I knew they were being dishonest,” he explained to me. “Not only because Video Professor was my company but also because I was the face of Video Professor, so when Video Professor was attacked by critics it was an attack on me personally.“

Those attacks at times led the firm to sue some of its critics, most notably in 2007 when the firm filed lawsuits against 100 anonymous commenters who wrote negative reviews of the company. The issue drew the attention of Public Citizen, which defended some of some of the critics and the sites that hosted their complaints. Eventually, Video Professor backed down, though Scherer—who claims that less than one-half of one percent of customers ever complained—argues that some of the actual targets of the company’s legal strategy were competitors acting in bad faith.

“We had a system in place that proved they were telling untruths and often the criticism was coming from competitors bashing us for their own gain. We found some of those competitors, filed suit and won,” he said.

Scherer blamed the negative press during this era on the firm’s large size and public profile.

“I also learned that the bigger you get in business the bigger target you become,” he said.

(Daniel Oines/Flickr)

How Casio turned its calculator conquests into synthesizer success

In 1979, a calculator came out that seemed to serve multiple masters. It was highly functional, but it served as something of a bridge between Casio’s earliest success stories and the devices that would define the company in the 1980s.

This device, the Casio Melody-80, could do math, clearly, as it was a calculator, but it was also able to work as a stopwatch or an alarm clock. But the real trick, the one that makes it such an impressive artifact of 1979, is that it was able to work as a musical instrument as well—a device that had pre-programmed classical music that could be easily played, as well as the ability to work as something of a synthesizer.

“As you must have figured out by now, the Melody-80 doesn’t confine its genius to strictly serious business,” a Sharper Image ad in an October 1979 edition of Popular Science proclaims. “By flicking the upper right-hand switch, you covert its calculator buttons into music keys, a full 11 note scale from A to D.”

People didn’t need Beethoven with their math—certainly not when it sounded like this, and certainly not from The Sharper Image—but the device was a page-turner for Casio and the company’s primary designer, Toshio Kashio.

Kashio was the second-oldest of the Japanese brothers who founded Casio and the man who played a key role in inventing many of the company’s earliest products. In 1978, Toshio led the company into the electronic music market, with an array of devices that would come to set the stage for the music industry in big ways and small.

See, Toshio was an amateur musician, and in many ways, he saw the problem he was trying to solve as one that involved trying to make an entire world of instruments available to amateur musicians. So instead of building a device that played with waveforms like, say, Robert Moog did, Toshio approached electronic music as a way to create a single device that could play dozens of instruments—including a drum beat, guitars, and melodies. (This approach, as it turned out, was way more palatable to mainstream tastes.)

Toshio was an amateur musician, but could be called a professional patent-filer, with hundreds to his name. One such patent, filed in 1985 but started much earlier, describes the thought process behind the strategy Casio used for its earliest keyboards:

In order to obtain an artificial musical sound wave fairly analogous to its original natural musical sound, not only an analogous musical sound is used but also a volume envelope including factors such as wave rises and wave falls must be superposed on the analogous musical sound. However, there have been no proposals to effectively superpose the volume envelope on the sound wave by the digital technology. The conventional superposition of the volume envelope has been made by the analog technology or by using a complex control circuit. Thus, the musical sound wave formation technique by the digital technology, which is well adapted for [large scale integrated circuit] fabrication, has not yet been established in this field.

The technology that Casio came up with for some of its earliest keyboards became known as vowel-consonant synthesis, for the similarities the company’s approach had to human speech.

Beyond the Melody-80, Casio came out with a few more synthesizers that could be considered toys, like the Casio VL-Tone, famed for its central place in Trio’s “Da Da Da.” But in 1980, the company released its wood-encased Casiotone 201, the first musical instrument built around sound banks—a big step forward for the company, and for music in general.

It could play an electric guitar, a banjo, a harpsichord, a trumpet, and even a glockenspiel. Unfortunately for Casio, these melodies almost never lived up to their billing—sounding more like distant cousins of a specific sound than an actual tone.

But that proved incredibly valuable for actual professional musicians, who saw the melodies for what they were—a new palette to paint with.

A Casio Rapman. (YouTube screenshot)

As you can tell by the commercials, Casio’s keyboards aimed for Middle America

Casio’s decision to put its energy into sound-bank style keyboards proved fruitful—not only did it make the company a lot of money, but it also gave them a great sales pitch. Here was a device that could let you be your own band.

(Definitely cooler than calculators.)

Once Casio realized it had a massive hit on its hands in the form of the various keyboards it was selling, it marketed them aggressively. One clip advertising the Casiotone MT-100 sells the idea of “The Johnson Five,” a one-man band that can rock it out with a single keyboard:

(Never mind the fact that at the end of the commercial, the clip says multi-track recording was used. Wouldn’t want to ruin the illusion.)

Nearly as good is this clip featuring the Casiotone MT-205 with its optional drum kit attachment.

Clearly, the intended audience for these things was the same audience that was waiting for that awesome A-Ha video to come on again.

Eventually, Casio moved away from the Casiotone series, and tried a variety of different approaches. Casio saw the success Yamaha was having in the professional market and decided that it wanted in—initially having success with the CZ series (likely thanks in no small part to this amazing commercial), but failing to maintain that momentum. Casio eventually started making keyboards for kids that were even simpler than the Casiotones. But eventually, Casio found another hit in the form of the Rapman, which won plaudits from professional reviewers for being fun to use compared to other keyboards of the day, despite the disastrous commercials.

“Listen up: Casio's new Rapman does just about everything a bona fide rap group does,” The New York Times’ Dulcie Leimbach wrote back in 1992, clearly having never heard a bona fide rap group.

But these kinds of tools—toys, really—hold a sort of intrinsic value culturally, the kind that led Toshio Kashio to this idea in the first place.

A lot of creativity was had from that initial spark.