Shades of Data Processing

One of the things for which Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs is given credit is the idea of designing the outside of the computer as much as the inside. During an era of endless beige boxes, he came up with the idea of translucent colored plastic and launched a thousand and one hipsters. The original iMac led to an entire new concept of computer design that influenced not only desktop machines but laptops and other equipment as well.

I once heard someone say they understood him to have been influenced by the contrast between the design of the Borg spaceships on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the starships piloted by humans and other races. The utilitarian Borg drones flew in gigantic cubes -- after all, there is no air resistance in space so who cares what shape a ship has? But the Federation and even most of its enemies flew in ships that featured sleek design elements and evidence of an obvious aesthetic dimension.

I've never seen anything in print that backs up the idea Jobs really was influenced by the Trek designs, but even if not it's a great illustration of the mindset of people who bought Apple products: How their computer looked mattered as much to them as did how well it worked.

However, as this group of images of computers from the late 1970s and early 1980s shows, the idea of colorful design didn't necessarily originate in Cupertino. Sure, the cabinets are uniformly rectangular (and huge!), but several of them have colored panels or accents. And according to the blog entry, this kind of design was pretty common up through the end of the decade, which means that at one point in time, the endless cloned beige boxes were themselves an innovation. So maybe it will all come around again, as it often does in clothing fashion as well.

But not the three-piece corduroy suit. That's got to stay buried.