Retro gadgets

Fantastic Google Doodle today: an interactive Moog synth on which you can play not only notes, but control the tone, the VCOs, VCFs, and envelope. They even show you how to play  Kraftwerk's Autobahn riff. Whatever will they think of next? 

And let's hear it for another retro gadget, the Flash-matic - the first TV remote, whose inventor Eugene Polley died on Sunday. He worked at Chicago's Zenith Electronics for 47 years and came up with the Flash-matic in 1955.  Looking like a cross-between a sci-fi gun and a hair-dryer, it 'fired' a visible beam of light at the TV set, initially just controlling on/off and changing channels. Couch-potatoes of the world, you owe him a pint in the afterworld.