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Last Updated: Thursday, 15 March 2007, 11:57 GMT
Lost gadget museum 'goes global'
The Pester (Pic by Museum of Lost Interactions)
The Pester may have been the first multimedia phone
A research project into what may have been history's forgotten gadgets has grown into a global phenomenon.

The Museum of Lost Interactions was launched by a group of Dundee students researching interactive technology which pre-dated the digital age.

The result was a collection of fictional gadgets dating back to 1900.

The work, displayed in Dundee in December 2006, has now been shown online and has attracted interest, particularly in America and Finland.

The technology included the "acoustograph" from 1925, said to be a music downloading device well ahead of its time, and the "case communicator", described as the laptop of the 1930s.

The museum "curator" Graham Pullin said there had been an amazing reaction to the museum, which was put together by Dundee University interactive media design students.

Mr Pullin said: "I set my students the task of researching some 'dead media' that may have existed in previous eras but have now gone out of fashion and become lost and forgotten.

"Sometimes looking back in history, we get an ironically clearer perspective of the role of technology in the context of society."

Citing the "case communicator", Mr Pullin said: "In those days it was about connecting yourself to your secretary or other people that you worked with."

He said the museum had now "gone global", with veteran US sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling describing the students as "the awesomest".

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