IndieGO have rights for walker case

[olsen]

This... just this! It's freaking hideous, probably one of the ugliest cases ever made.

I agree with you, but this was a product of its time.

Without giving anything away, I was present when the case was first unveiled at Amiga Technologies GmbH by Stefan Domeyer. The reasons given for going with this case design was to (1) make it stand out next to other computer models, and (2) increase focus on a different kind of market, in which design aspects drove sales. Turn the clock forward a couple of years and you'd see how this could have played out: set top boxes!

One aspect of the case design is not exactly obvious: it was intended to be used not just as a housing for an A1200 type of computer, but also for A4000T type of machines. The casing would not enclose the entire machine (A1200 type), but the upper and lower parts of the casing would sandwich the "middle part" in which plugin-cards and drive slots would sit. At least, that was how the design was presented. My best guess is that to work as a tower casing design, more work would have been needed.

As things turned out to be, the only case design which housed working hardware was shown at the same CeBIT fair during which Amiga Technologies GmbH parent ESCOM AG was announced to be in financial difficulties.

So we're sort of stuck with an historic artefact which leans towards "styling" rather than functionality. Personally, I would have much preferred Hans Ruedi Giger's take on the Amiga case design, but he probably did not get the job because he would have been too expensive

[olsen]

Sony? They were already producing components for the living room, of course, but the Playstation (and the Xbox) has become nearly what everyone imagined STBs to be in the 90's.

If I remember correctly what a set-top box was supposed to deliver, its functionality was restricted to small, limited tasks: give you access to satellite/cable TV programming. It would sit next to your TV set, plugged into the AV port.

Limited functionality, because back then more sophisticated features would have cost more money.

The typical customer for set-top boxes was not necessarily the end-user. For example, hotels would buy them (the customer), and the guest (the end-user) would use them. As a developer you could do well selling your set-top boxes to those customers, if the price was right, and even if to the end-user the product really sucked.

The PS3, XBOX360, AppleTV etc. don't really fall into the set-top box category of old because the customer is the end-user, and the devices are much more powerful. Also, the medium which the set-top box allows you to access is no longer necessarily analogue, but digital. Things have changed so much, probably for the better.