Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s
by Animats on Thursday January 14, 2016 @03:59PM
(#10904443)
Interesting idea. The data plate on the order station says it was made by "Vitarama". Vitarama was the company behind Cinerama. Owned by the Rockefellers, it developed a range of unusual projection devices - projectors for spherical screens and elliptical screens, gunnery training simulators, and a range of slide changers. Fred Waller, who invented Cinerama and worked for Vitarama, was probably involved. He had a patent for an addressable slide projector.[1] The shopping system used a linear tray rather than the circular tray shown in the Life article, but the selection by number is similar.
The idea wasn't silly. At the time, Sears and some other companies had catalog order centers, where customers could go and shop from catalogs. This was an improvement on that concept.
The problem may have been the user interface. It looks like you'd ask the attendant to load up a slide tray for the product area of interest, and then you could use a knob to select slides. Each slide contained only one image. This makes for a small catalog.
They could have used a microfiche system and had a much larger catalog. But how to address it in a user-friendly way? That's a hard problem. If you've ever used microfilm data, you're aware of how hard it is to find anything. Their UI had two buttons and a knob, probably the upper limit for shopping UI complexity in the 1950s.
Some later microfilm systems had bar codes and some the ability to search, but that was a late 1960s development and required electronics.
The idea wasn't silly. At the time, Sears and some other companies had catalog order centers, where customers could go and shop from catalogs. This was an improvement on that concept.
The problem may have been the user interface. It looks like you'd ask the attendant to load up a slide tray for the product area of interest, and then you could use a knob to select slides. Each slide contained only one image. This makes for a small catalog.
They could have used a microfiche system and had a much larger catalog. But how to address it in a user-friendly way? That's a hard problem. If you've ever used microfilm data, you're aware of how hard it is to find anything. Their UI had two buttons and a knob, probably the upper limit for shopping UI complexity in the 1950s. Some later microfilm systems had bar codes and some the ability to search, but that was a late 1960s development and required electronics.
[1] https://www.google.com.ar/patents/US2732758