Throwback Thursday

Back in April of 1973 when Martin Cooper made the first public call on a handheld cellular phone while walking down a New York City street, few could have imagined that the Motorola DynaTAC “brick” phone (shown here in prototype form) would evolve into a super-slim, do-everything pocket computer—a.k.a. the smartphone we take for granted today.

Color TV became commercially viable in the early 1950s but didn’t really take off until the mid-1960s when the big three (and only) television networks made a concerted effort to significantly increase the amount of color programming, broadcasting classic shows like Gilligan’s Island, My Favorite Martian, and Lassie in “brilliant, true-to-life color” for the first time. An epic event if you were around to experience it and arguably more dramatic than the transition to HDTV.

DVD-Audio was the big story in our February/March 2000 issue, which devoted more than a dozen pages to the launch of a promising new multichannel music format hailed by Neil Young and other artists as audio’s second coming. Things didn’t quite turn out as planned.

Way back in 1958 when stereo was a novelty, the comedy duo Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding released Bob And Ray Throw A Stereo Spectacular, a whimsical LP showcasing the marvels of two-channel sound.