IFA, the annual gadget gala going on this week in Berlin, is the place for the world's consumer electronics companies to showcase their latest gizmos.
These historic photos, however, are a nostalgic reminder of how quickly future tech becomes obsolete--if not retro. Even the so-called booth babes have evolved (and yet also stayed the same, thanks in part to the return of 1980s fashions.)
IFA-Berlin dates back to 1926, originally organized as a radio exposition and then becoming a tool of the extreme right during World War II.
But this retrospective begins in the 1970s, when the show returned to Berlin and became an international affair, rather than a strictly German one. That was also around the time color TVs started to become more prevalent.
Here's a photo welcoming attendees to IFA-Berlin in 1973. Note the show logo (left), which is still used today.
On this very IFA show floor in 1973, some of the technologies introduced, according to IFA, were quadrophony, infrared headphones, and the first dummy-head stereophonic broadcast.
IFA 1983 saw the introduction of the first consumer VHS video camera, presented here by Telefunken CEO Josef A. Stoffels (and a woman sporting a tied blouse and beads circa sometime in the early 1980s).
Other innovations that year, according to IFA, were TV sets with digital signal processing and videoconferencing.
History does, in fact, repeat itself. Here's a 3D TV experiment set up at the Philips Pavilion at IFA 1983.
Flash forward to IFA 2009, and Philips is still talking 3D prototypes, albeit with a note of caution, as manufacturers insist 3D is (still) the next big thing.
In 1993, as the show's focus turned more to cell phones and digital media, Nokia presented one of its first GSM mobile phones, the Nokia 1011.
And if you're wondering what Robert Redford did that year to
make the cover of that German magazine,
IMDB tells us he starred in "Indecent Proposal," which won a Goldene Leinwand (Golden Screen)
award in Germany.
And digital music technologies just kept getting more sophisticated. Here, at IFA 2001, a red head (an IFA favorite, as you can see here with Miss IFA) displays headphones with a built-in MP3 player.
