Early Apple Designs Revealed, Courtesy of Hartmut Esslinger 115
A reader writes with an excerpt as carried by CNET of former Apple design chief Hartmut Esslinger's upcoming book, titled Design Forward: Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change. Writing of Steve Job's integration of design as an essential element across the company as a whole, Esslinger says:
"The company's [then] CEO, Michael Scott, had created different business divisions for each product line, including accessories such as monitors and memory drives. Each division had its own head of design and developed its products the way it wanted to. As a result, Apple's products shared little in the way of a common design language or overall synthesis
In essence, bad design was both the symptom and a contributing cause of Apple's corporate disease. Steve's desire to end the disjoined approach gave birth to a strategic design project that would revolutionize Apple's brand and product lines, change the trajectory of the company's future, and eventually redefine the way the world thinks about and uses consumer electronics and communication technologies." CNET shows off a few of those old designs (many of them appearing unsurprisingly fresh), but for much more of them see these images at designboom.
Re:Foxconn (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-taking-hold-in-electronics-factories-in-china.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
If you really want to be honest with that attitude take a good long look at the labour practices of every manufacturer you buy products from. I think you'll find your list of acceptable brands will have to be drastically reduced. Every major manufacturer takes advantage of mistreated labor forces somewhere in the world and that includes most of the food stuffs you buy.
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Re:Foxconn (Score:5, Insightful)
Good intentions (Score:5, Interesting)
I will never buy such product from slave labors.
Before you go all holier-than-thou on us you might want to consider the full implications of what you are saying. First off, "slave labor"? I think you do not know what real slavery is so your hyperbole is really a bit out of line. Foxconn might not treat their employees well but its hardly slavery. They do not own their employees even in a figurative sense. Slavery is something far, far worse. I've actually been in a sweatshop in Chengdu where they were making parts for Dell monitors. I've seen dozens of manufacturing plants in China with my own eyes. I've seen all of this stuff first hand. There is NO electronics manufacturer that is innocent here. You will find that there is no alternative that is any better if you really look into this situation. Anything you can say about Apple/Foxconn you HAVE to say about pretty much any other electronics manufacturer as well as those for countless other products. You are actually saying that you will not buy a wide variety of products.
If you want to not buy products made in substandard working conditions, I respect that stance. But you are going to find it is not as simple as you think. There aren't any innocent parties and in many cases what we consider horrible working conditions are actually a step up from the alternatives. The important thing is that conditions continue to improve. There is considerable evidence that conditions are improving even if progress is sometimes painfully slow. There are more effective ways to improve working conditions than a silent boycott by yourself. Get involved with organizations trying to make a difference. They're out there if you really actually give a damn and want to make a difference.
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Slavery is something far, far worse
Depends on the culture. In some cultures slaves received some level of respect. In many of them the duty of the master was to protect the slave.
Consider the current situation of 'citizens' in the US. They have the ability to organize their affairs and living location to some degree (though with heavy restrictions) but their entire economic output is subject to confiscation, at the whim of the virtualized masters. The duty of protection has been summarily dismissed and
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I was working for Samsung as an English teacher for some middle managers, 2 or 3 days a week back in 2010/11. They ran a great operation, the line managers were Chinese and were most interested in quality assurance than anything else. Their big stress was that the top managers wanted new ideas for improving quality on the line on a weekly basis. And if they didn't have any ideas for a few months they were eased out of management and were quickly looking for a job with someone else (LG also ran monitor fabs
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Every major manufacturer takes advantage of mistreated labor forces somewhere in the world and that includes most of the food stuffs you buy.
Red light in the cockpit, mods. When someone uses the words "everyone, always, never, all," or other universally true (or false) statements, you really need to engage your bullshit detectors. By this poster's logic, anyone who works in manufacturing is being exploited. That is the position of an anti-industrialist, and it's not a tenable one. Yes, labor is exploited, but it's not as pervasive as the poster is claiming. Cars are a major manufacturing industry in this country, and they're union shops with hea
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We're talking consumer electronics here. Computers and phones primarily.
Nokia used to manufacture in Finland amongst other places, so one may assume the conditions there were reasonable. But I suspect they don't manufacture there any more.
Apple does some of it's manufacturing in the USA, and has announced they are going to be doing more. Again we can assume no sweatshop conditions there.
So who else?
I'd suggest at this stage Apple is probably amongst the best of the consumer electronics brands as regards wor
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I'd suggest at this stage Apple is probably amongst the best of the consumer electronics brands as regards worker conditions. Because they're pretty much all manufacturing in the far east, and Apple, given all the bad press they got on the issue, is the one who's doing the most to counter bad practices. And they are also not trying to compete in the bottom end - where there is no margin for improving worker conditions.
Bad suggestion. Come over in Zhengzhou, Henan, and see the weekly queue of 300 workers in the iPhone factory, that are replacing those who left because 2k RMB isn't enough to accept such working conditions (and we're talking about very poor people here for who 2k RMB is quite decent). It seems Apple is really successful with it's PR about all this, but reality is really different.
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And you still haven't answered anyone as to where the computing device you're using right now was made. You're a coward and a hypocrite.
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Re:Foxconn (Score:5, Funny)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DX1iplQQJTo [youtube.com]
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I'm glad you have taken a stand, but I'm sorry to hear you have eschewed all consumer electronics. How did you post the above comment?
There are plenty of Made-In-The-USA computers that are available on the second-hand market. Slashdot's CSS will probably work OK on some of them; perhaps a custom build of Firefox will work on a large class of these.
The real trick is trying to get your packets routed anywhere without using Chinese parts.
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I'm glad you have taken a stand, but I'm sorry to hear you have eschewed all consumer electronics. How did you post the above comment?
There are plenty of Made-In-The-USA computers that are available on the second-hand market.
And a few of them may even have been made without Foxconn connectors (guess what the "conn" in Foxconn stands for).
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Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.
So you won't own a smartphone? Or even a "feature phone"? No cell phone at all? No tablet of any kind? No portable music player?
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WTF does this have to do with the article? Or do you just go around randomly posting this on most Tech articles? Or are you just an anti-apple troll?
Re:Foxconn (Score:4, Insightful)
"Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors."
So you will never buy any hardware from....
Acer ......
Amazon
Apple
Cisco
Dell
HP
Microsoft
Motorola
Nintendo
Nokia
Samsung
Sony
Toshiba
Vizio
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Amazon...
And speaking of Amazon, a recent story in the Seattle Times:
"Amazon's overseas labor policy: Trust us"
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020017651_amazonsuppliers30m.html
And of course just about all of our fashionable apparel are made in Bangladesh...
As long as us "consumers" demand the absolute lowest price-point, this is simply the way it is. Of course this bothers me, but most of the highest pitched whiners are doing so from their "bleeding edge" super thin whatever made by Foxxcon or a Foxxcon clo
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What computer did you use to write that comment?
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Where are your computer and your phone made?
Re:Foxconn (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.
GPLHost-Thomas is a hypocrite. He's avoiding answering who made the computing device he used to post that message. But looking back through a few of his posts, we see that he bought an ACER laptop for his wife.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3274815&cid=42117409 [slashdot.org]
ACER is a Taiwanese company who outsources it's manufacturing to Foxconn amongst others.
Caught red handed.
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Then how are you posting this?
How do you find any modern electronics that doesn't have any Chinese parts in it?
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Cool, make sure you boycott products from these FOXCONN customers too then:
Acer Inc. (Taiwan)
Amazon.com (United States)
In 2011, Amazon and Foxconn formed a joint-design manufacturing company. The move was meant to produce an Amazon branded smartphone sometime in 2012.
Apple Inc. (United States)
ASRock (Taiwan)
Asus (Taiwan)
Barnes & Noble (United States)
Cisco (United States)
Dell (United States)
EVGA Corporation (United States)
Hewlett-Packard (United States)
Intel (United States)
IBM (United States)
Lenovo (Chin
Snow White Design Language (Score:2)
I don't understand this - how are ventilation stripes a design language?
Can someone explain what the hell is snow white design language created by this guy.
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Re:Snow White Design Language (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are correct, propaganda is the more accurate word, but I consider propaganda for a commercial entity to be advertising.
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I am not saying Ventilation stripes are not important or that they aren't part of design. I am asking how ventilation stripe can be a design 'language'?
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The distinguishing characteristics originated by the Snow White design language, in contrast to the original Apple industrial design style, include the following:
minimal surface texturing
colored a light off-white (Fog) or light gray (Platinum)
inlaid three-dimensional Apple logo, diamond cut to the exact shape
zero-draft enclosures, with no variances in case thickness and perpendicular walls
recessed international port identification icons
silk-screened pro
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All this is fine - but why is it called a design 'language' - rather than design.
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For the same reason as a family of related design patterns in Software Engineering is called a 'pattern language'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language [wikipedia.org]
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"For the same reason..."
Yes, true, and that reason is hubris, but why use "pattern language" as an example when the term "pattern" itself was created for that reason?
Groups create their own languages to differentiate themselves and feed their professional egos. Now, time to do some "refactoring"...
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A pattern is not a pattern language.
A pattern is one single thing. Combined they might form a language, or not.
This are btw not my definitions, or do you think i highjacked wikipedia?
Groups create their own languages to differentiate themselves and feed their professional egos.
Thats why layers and medicals have their own language?
Now, time to do some "refactoring"...
Perhaps you should refactor your Gedankenwelt a little bit first. I doubt you come far with your attitude.
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I don't understand this - how are ventilation stripes a design language?
Can someone explain what the hell is snow white design language created by this guy.
Designs by the seven dwarfs?
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I don't understand this - how are ventilation stripes a design language?
Can someone explain what the hell is snow white design language created by this guy.
Yeah, who would ever recognize, say, a car buy its kidney shaped grilles.
It's Hartmut Esslinger, not Harmut (Score:2)
My mongrel system... (Score:2)
Re:My mongrel system... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're hardly unique in having a system made up of parts bought at various times, from various manufacturers. Indeed that's more or less the idea with the Mac Mini.
But if a store set your system up in store and tried to sell it. How many people do you imagine would buy it?
It's pretty obvious that companies do better if they make their products which are intended to work together look harmonious in design. So WTF is your point?
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That form follows function and is not an end in itself.
You're just repeating the only quotable thing you ever heard about design. Jony Ive actually understands this. He's arguably the world's best current day industrial designer. And you're not.
stop the downward slide of OSX whose interface has become increasingly cluttered and whose functioning has been less reliable with each release since Tiger.
Now there you have a point. Now consider... Jony Ive has recently had his remit expanded to software as well as hardware. So the elimination of clutter in UIs may well happen.
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What we know (Score:2)
Mac Mini, NEC monitor, Logitech bluetooth mouse, Kensington USB keyboard, and Tivoli Audio sound system
How exactly were we supposed to divine you understood anything about design from that mish-mash?
It doesn't even seem like a set of components that are either the best technically (kensington keyboard, tivoli speakers) nor is it coherent in design. Someone who really embraces design would recoil from having discordant components (and note I'm including myself in that assessment as I sit here with a second
My mongrel system (Score:1)
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they are cosmetically beat up and hand me downs.
And this is supposed to take us closer to know you are an expert on design...
Ok.
No defense of the Kensington I see.
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No defense of the Kensington I see.
On the contrary, it's held up fine for well over a decade. I just cry myself to sleep every night because it's not color co-ordinated though.
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Because "form follows function" is the one thing everyone who knows nothing about design on Slashdot posts. Because it's the only thing about design they know.
And they, and you, proceed to show that they don't understand the phrase, by implying it means that it doesn't matter what things look like so long as they work.
I know nothing about you. Other than you've demonstrated you know nothing about design.
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It's actually "form ever follows function" you unlettered oaf
Taken a trip to Wikipedia I see. Yes, that'll certainly mean you suddenly know what you're talking about.
and BTW it has inspired such much heralded design fripperies as streamlined toasters.
...Or not. Streamlined toasters are certainly not form following function. Quite the opposite.
A perfect example is the iPhone whose sleak design includes a fragile screen that easily breaks and requires entirely disassembling the unit what with its myriad of screws, tabs, and adhesives in order to replace it.
It doesn't "easily break", it's made of Gorilla glass, and reviewers who've done comparative drop tests with other phones find the iPhone is less prone to breaking. That includes reviewers on Android Fan sites.
And your observation on replacing of the glass is not one related to form following function at all.
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Taken a trip to Wikipedia I see. Yes, that'll certainly mean you suddenly know what you're talking about.
Hardly.
A perfect example is the iPhone whose sleak design includes a fragile screen that easily breaks and requires entirely disassembling the unit what with its myriad of screws, tabs, and adhesives in order to replace it.
It doesn't "easily break", it's made of Gorilla glass
Spare me the marketing hype please. And comparing it to even crummier products is faint praise indeed.
your observation on replacing of the glass is not one related to form following function at all.
Riiiiiight... Durability and maintainability have nothing to do with industrial design. It is you who is showing his ignorance, fanboi.
"Design language or overall synthesis in essence"
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Spare me the marketing hype please.
It's not marketing hype. It's a very much stronger glass, and it's called Gorilla glass.
And comparing it to even crummier products is faint praise indeed.
Other than Androids, what would you compare it with?
Riiiiiight... Durability and maintainability have nothing to do with industrial design. It is you who is showing his ignorance, fanboi.
I didn't say that. Of course it's part of industrial design. But you were trying to use it in defence of your opinion on form over function, and it has nothing to do with that.
"Design language or overall synthesis in essence"
You take part of one sentence and run it into the beginning of another. The result is nonsense. You're really confused. And didn't RTFA.
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Some people appreciate industrial design. Some people don't. It's like how the ugly "beige box" ruled the industry for decades, and some people still have them and say "it works just fine."
This is not a put-down, just a statement of fact.
In any case, it's not putting form over function, it's a matter of form complementing function.
GUCCI DECRIES FOUL FROM THE GRAVE !! (Score:1)
This is not design, it is fashion - fad if you will !! Design has purpose !! Fashion does not !!
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If good design is functional then that eliminates recent Apple products immediately. We still have this cult of personality running amok despite the fact that the relevant tyrant is dead.
I agree with the assesment that this is yet another free advertisement for Apple Corporation masquerading as news.
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The Apple mouse is probably the most classic example. Absolutely horrible and wrong from day one. Pure arrogance there.
The one that always got me is when Apple removed the power button on iPods and produced a product that only pretended to turn off, then shipped it with totally unacceptable battery life that took generations to overcome. Works fine now after years of broken function.
There's their UI adherence to concepts justified by Fitts' Law long after Fitts' Law tells us differently (due to much larg
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:GUCCI DECRIES FOUL FROM THE GRAVE !! (Score:4, Interesting)
my mother has an ipad and the only "problem" she has with it is frequently forgetting which of about half a dozen very similar passwords she has set for her itunes account.
personally i prefer the freedom of an android tablet and the raw power of my linux laptop.
apple does not put out much that is truely unique and unheard of, but they manage to make state of the art easy to use and have a serious talent for UI. look at the ipod, and compare it to the interface of other devices of the time (and even quite a few now) which would have 5-7 buttons with unintuitive glyphs sloppily imprinted and difficult to see even in favorable conditions.
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If good design is functional then that eliminates recent Apple products immediately.
You're claiming Apple's recent products aren't functional. Without a single word of justification. Do you thing everyone is as stupid as you?
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You're claiming Apple's recent products aren't functional. Without a single word of justification. Do you thing everyone is as stupid as you?
Read my critique of the iPhone in the above thread; not to mention certain iPods whose tracks could only be accessed sequentially.
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As pointed out there, you don't know what you're talking about.
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Yes, I don't get how anyone accepts the notion that removing a power button is an example of good functional design on a portable product with inadequate battery life. Apple so full of it with that stuff. Apple is good at fashion, emphasis on function is a myth.
strategic design project = copy Braun (Score:4, Interesting)
http://visual.ly/braun-or-apple [visual.ly]
http://www.metrohippie.com/dieter-rams-top-10/ [metrohippie.com]
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If you actually bothered to RTFA, you'd see that the only ones copied, in some of the designs, is Sony.
Jony Ive, who DOES credit Dieter Rams, was only a teenager when these designs were made. Before he went to University, let alone joined Apple.
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Macphone pictures upside down (Score:2)
I wonder if they noticed that the pictures of the Macphone [designboom.com] they show were taken with the product upside down.
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My guess is: Yes they noticed.
"I'm Assistant Product Designer"/"Assistant to..." (Score:2)
> "The company's [then] CEO, Michael Scott"
Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change
That's what she said!
Steve's desire to end the disjoined approach
That's what she said!
bad design was both the symptom and a contributing cause of Apple's corporate disease
That's what she said!
Next project (Score:2)
Hartmut needs to design a line of products for shaving.
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It's Jony Ive that has the Dieter Rams inspiration, not Hartmut Esslinger.
Internet appliance (Score:3)
I recall these internet appliances that would allow us to cheaply access email and the WWW. Since so many were still using dial up, a land line phone was a common sense addition. Few imagined that cell phone rates would fall so quickly that phone calls would almost be given away, and what you pay for was data. This lead to the internet appliance that was not imagined, the smart phone, and the larger table on which we use Skype, which with we call anywhere for negligible costs, at least by developed world standards.
This is funny because so many said the internet appliance would never be viable. Maybe that was true in a very restricted sense, but not in a broad sense. In the same sense that there was no market for microcomputers.
Which is why I get so annoyed when people dismiss a concept because they do not like a design. Sure the Tandy 100, 200, PC-6 might not have been many peoples idea of a programmable portable device, but they had many of the ideas that people want today. A keyboard, programing on device, removable storage. It is interesting to note that many successful mobile devices do not include such features. But that is who progress works. We start by mimicking existing technology, then move to novel ideas.
Really shows how far ahead they were (Score:3)
No matter how you feel toward Apple, those designs show how forward thinking they were. Keep in mind that most of those designs are from 1982. Two years before the Mac's debut, and at a time when we were all beating on our Atari 8-bits, Apple IIs, and Commodore 64s.
I'm especially intrigued with the split screen monitor designs. Dual monitors in 1982? Dual flat screen monitors? Pretty amazing.
And the baby mac resurfaces 14 years later as the iMac.
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Long after PCs had multiple monitors.
Funny, though, how this is always brought up as Apple innovation.
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Long after PCs had multiple monitors.
Funny, though, how this is always brought up as Apple innovation.
And by that you mean hacks with one monochrome and one color card that only ever worked with programs specifically written to do so.
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The original IBM PC was designed to support multiple monitors and did so from day one. Dual head was a great way to develop software in the early days and CodeView supported it (that's the debugger in Visual Studio for those experts who weren't born yet). Apple was the slowest company to embrace color and multiple displays. Apple was technologically retarded, not forward thinking. They were concerned with fashion and marketing, not superior function. Wozniak was the master of inferior function on the c
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I've always felt that Apple's problem is they hit on a successful, good formula, and then ride it into the ground and well past its sell-by date. Original Macintosh was something new and interesting, but they were still making the Mac Classic into the early 90s which was fundamentally similar and did poorly outside education (trying to sell a non-color 8mhz computer when PCs were at 33 and 66mhz? Really?). The early color Macs were interesting, but they got bogged down in the confusing product lines and cor
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The original IBM PC was designed to support multiple monitors and did so from day one.
That both worked at the same time was never intended, merely an side product of the cheap design.
What works and what doesn't (Score:2)
Much early personal computer design was dominated by the "where do we put the back part of the CRT" problem. You see that in the article's pictures. Once screens became flat, and electronics became small, there was more design flexibility. Not much is done with it, though.
Organic designs have been tried over the years. Olivetti did some beautiful designs in the 1960s and 1970s, and most good museums of modern art will have a few Olivetti objects [moma.org] on display. Bang and Olufsen designs [bang-olufsen.com] are much admired by