Specifically, the one scene here, in one of my favorite/most unsettling shorts from when I was a tyke, back in the 80s.
A rather distinctive looking machine—a humanoid shape, with clear plastic forms covering the electronic and mechanical innards of his torso, arms, and legs; the minimalistic “head” futures a plasma globe for a cranium, two large metal “lips” (almost like a bill), and a pair of goggly, probably decorative eyes.
Although there’s no audio aside from the CTW music track, the motion of the robot and his “lips” indicates that he was “talking” when filmed.
I’d guess that he’s probably from a science museum or a trade show pavilion; I swear I recognize it, maybe from a book or magazine, but I can’t think of where. I’m sure he’s not a movie/tv prop, at least.
I have it on good authority ( being a comment on another youtube upload video of the same piece… ) that the boxy robot (box on wheels) is HERO-1 and the clear humanoid exeskeleton is “Gor-Don”, mascot/host of the AT&T InfoQuest Center.… AT&T Archives: The AT&T InfoQuest Center … at 4.06
The little boxy one is a HERO-1, the Heath Educational Robot.
I can still remember the odd cadence of its Votrax voice synthesizer. “Hello I am Hee-Roe the Heath Educational Roe-bot. I can sense light sound and movement. I can use my grih-purr.”
And to annoy people, you could program it for watchdog mode. “Some Thing Move!”
That’s the guy—thanks! An old question finally answered.
On that same note, that Infoquest Center seems like a neat place—and I’m sorry to learn that it was truncated after Sony bought it out, and that it was eventually closed for good earlier this year.
“The world’s still the same. There’s just…less in it.”
I was in college (graduate school) when it opened, and visited it a short time after it opened. It was indeed pretty cool at the time, but as the short video showed many of the exhibits at the time have been superseded by technology over the decades.
I wonder if Sony had kept it going till recently, what kind of exhibits did the center host at the end?
I remember seeing HERO-1 on an episode of Nickelodeon’s 1980s Mr. Wizard’s World. Mr Wizard himself, Don Herbert, said that the man who created and built it was a friend of his.
There used to be a similar, if not identical, robot arm that arranged blocks at the Computer Museum in Boston. When that Museum closed in 1999, many of its assets went to the Museum of Science in Boston (with which had had officially merged the previous year), but many of its pieces went to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. I haven’t seen the Aem at the MOS, so, unless it’s simply in storage, I assume it’s in California.
Sad to hear the Computer Museum is gone, glad to hear the exhibits live on. Glad some of them are still in Boston, at the equally cool Science Museum.
When I was a lad in Connecticut , we made a trip to the Science Museum at least every couple of years. It was close enough for school field trips, even.
I only went to the Computer Museum once, but it made a huge impression. Especially the stuff they would let you touch, like the Apollo Command Module Computer, and the mechanical computer that played tic-tac-toe that was made from tinkertoys and string.
