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The United States in Germany: Two typical products from the United States often bought here in Germany:

Qualatex Latex Balloons (Q24 in this picture, very nice, shining, robust, fun) and Ernest & Julio Gallo Wines from California.
My preferred wine from California however is the Fetzer Barrel select Cabernet Sauvignon, I have some 2002 and 2003 bottles left.

Behind there are typical products from Germany:

A W48 telephone from 1951 and a spacey lamp from the 70ies which is lighted by a stove (!) bulb.

Enjoy the picture and the scene :) Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Picture (c) 2009 Pascal Gienger, you may use it with name of author (my name) given as credit.

How old were you 1987?
I was 16 years old and I had my Commodore 64 with a 1541 floppy disk and 170 kilobytes was a big storage for me, a guy used to cassette tapes to store computer data.
In real business, hard disks already carried hundreds of megabytes and were big - yes big. One of these "disks" was brought in by my esteemed collegue who got it from a bank some years ago where these platters ran for 12 years without any problems.

Start Photo Album (20 pictures)! Starting in 1993, a "new" product soon became a synonym for a total nightmare and the equivalent of a today's childrens' toy.

Everybody which had access to "real" computers and systems began to feel embarassed, and all parts of the body began to ache suddenly when a collegue asked for help with Windows for Workgroups...

Microsoft wanted to do a facelift to Windows 3.1 and felt the pressure of OS/2 just poking around. It had networking, something Microsoft could not offer! So Windows for Workgroups was born as a fast hack. There was Windows 3.1 for Workgroups (not sold very often) and then Windows 3.11.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 ! Ready to go! (Photoalbum, 20 images).

Enjoy!

The system was installed with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.1.4, Settings:

and there are already over 700 angry comments by users discussing about the reasons for this step.
Members of Heise staff wrote that the database has grown too large and indexing kills too much performance now. And they note "editorial reasons" - leaving them nebulous:

"Wir starten morgen mit dem Löschen":

http://www.heise.de/extras/foren/S-Wir-starten-morgen-mit-dem-Loeschen/forum-7262/msg-15786090/read/

The heise newsticker is famous for the "troll postings" and conspiracy theories as well as many technical debates. It is Germany's most read IT website.

[Update:] Heise said it will not delete old posting due to users' protests. They will simply mark older threads as "read-only".

Yesterday I saved an old S-Bus (sun) ethernet scsi combi card from the trash. It's quite special because engineers seem to have forgotton a capacitor and a logic circuit on the board, so they did extra wiring and sticking to the produced card. Funny to see. I am wondering how many of these cards were corrected this way until a new revision of the board was developed.

And yes, it is "made in U.S.A." which it proudly "says" on its back.

The SCSI controller is a NCR 53CF96-1, the ethernet controller is the AMD chip under the green wirings. The big LSI chip seems to be a microcontroller, doing some bios work for the s-bus card.

Revision seems to be "210-2013-03 REV.50". And yes, these cards were expensive...

As Heise Online states, the days of Polaroid instant photography will be over soon.

It's all over now, baby blue... At least in my brain. After having read that Heise article, immediately I began thinking of my childhood, where I had such a camera and I almost never had a film pack for it, they were far too expensive.

But when you had one... Those bad pictures of parents just coming out of their bedroom (the kind of psycho terror of flashing them at 6am) and this chemical smell which was in the air when you saw the picture developping itself...

And a smile comes on my face, thinking about these "new" instant photographiers, connecting their little photo printer on their camera and working with bad software and many cables...

But wait... You still have an alternative... Fuji INSTAX! Without the polaroid feeling of course....

(Image source: Wikipedia).