Wish I knew how to read assembly. My bet is on 'color = rand()%4'. Maybe plus the modifier of the skintone light reflection (so it checks how light/dark and makes the rest up) But hey, maybe this really was more than a marketing gimmick and had actual tech behind it, but it wasn't feasible (thus it never was widespread and this is the first time 99.9% of the world has seen or heard of this)!
It's hard to tell because of the glasses but he looks like he has hooded eyes, so I bet he does a badass cut crease winged eyeliner. Probably nothing too smokey or bold though cos it just wouldn't suit his attitude. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh for like the first time ever I actually know what I'm talking about in the comments of one of these videos.
I fucking love that this computer has some fake computer noises coming out of it to trick people into believing "that's the computer thinking." It's like something out of a CARTOON. God... I wish I had this.
Welcome to the 80s. Computers were *futuristic*! Only nerds and geeks used them - not middle-aged housewives that had never seen a computer before. That's what they likely thought computers were was those beeps and boops.
"It's FREE to use (when you buy a $5 make up)." "Oh, btw, we may also require 500 Watts from your home's mains supply for powering the computer and Gamma-ray gun."
"Being a T1000, it will go up to 512KB that these things came with from Toshiba." That's it, Toshiba is Cyberdyne and the T1000 only has 512KB of RAM. Mighty impressive!
While you're making these vids, do you ever get the acute feeling that you're the only human on the planet that has ever done a thing? Running Sim City on the Avon computer has got to be a wholly unique thing, haha
Tyler Kurth I recover and preserve lots of old files which are practically gone from the internet, and I get a feeling like that whenever I rediscover an old file and load it up onto my PC. It’s crazy to know you have the only surviving copy.
@@justanotheryoutubechannel kind of feel that as well. Helping out at a local recycling center, the thing that interests me the most is the media people throw out. I once found a Microsoft Windows crack disk case, only to find graduation disks inside. It had homework assignments, school outings and of course, the photos of said students graduation. Our policy is to destroy all private media that we discover however, and since people come and go plus not having any amenities for storage, that's the only option we see ethical. It's still fun looking through the memories of others one last time, just because of negligence in handling.
My aunt has sold Avon since the 70s. I remember bringing this thing over to my house to show my mom way back in 88 or 89. I was 4 or 5 and thought that it was pretty cool because all of the computers that I had seen up until that point had been larger desktop models. I thought it was so neat that there was a computer that was so portable and that it came in its own little case and had an attached printer.
Obviously, you were so young that you never saw an advert for the regular Toshiba T1000, but then again, neither did I see any technology-related advertising at that age, from what I can still remember.
Kevin Bhasi Now that you mention it, I don't recall seeing much advertising for computers and all of the things that go along with them until about the mid 90s. I'm sure that there were plenty of ads in magazines catering to tech and business people. But as far as TV and other mainstream advertising goes, I don't remember much.
Being an avid young computer enthusiast at that time: No, advertisements were rare. You had to be looking in business-oriented literature to see something like that. Even in the early 90s, PC World, PC Computing, Computer Shopper.... all catered to business.
The only computer-related TV ads you got were probably for videogames, and even then you didn't see them much (maybe a tad more in the UK in the 80's, because we had a few "indigenous" systems competing with each other, and even a few dedicated computer shows). I can remember treasuring a tape of The Crystal Maze I had, because one of the ads on it was for Mario. Well, actually it was for crisps, you could win a NES if you sent in coupons. Mario was jumping against blocks, only crisps were coming out instead of coins. He also did a Pitfall-style swing over some alligators.
Showing my age here, but i did have a consultation done using this. It picked up on my rosacea and the rep had to try different areas instead. It didn't get my palette right. I remember we were all impressed with the technology at the time. That magical chance roulette while it played a song was a real exciting ten seconds back in the day. Id love to see some people who routinely wear makeup and know their color palette give this a test drive. Perhaps it was only inaccurate on my freak skin. Btw, imari is a spicy patchouli sandlewoody scent. It's pretty nice.
"if you're an Avon adviser get in touch" I think the Venn Diagram between LGR fans and Avon reps from the 80's is pretttttty slim. Awesome video as always Clint
That "gun" looks like no joke item but an actual colorimeter/spectrometer/somethingelseofthesort, that has an real xenon flash inside it. Charging the caps for the flash maybe takes so much current that the voltage for the rest of the system goes low. That light at the back of the meter may be a neon bulb turning on when the caps are charged. The software that analyzes the output does look like a joke :)
It looked like one of those tiny neon bulbs to me. A bunch of 80's appliances had them. I even had a night light that looked like Mickey Mouse that had the bulb in series with a tiny resister.
Hardware: Legitimate scientific equipment, clean form factor, ergonomic and compartmentalized placement of accessories, nice carry case, neat manuals and color graphics for showing product selection, a laptop as a terminal for user convenience and computing power... Software: Thanks to our hardware, we can tell that: your name is "Duke" and your skin tone is "ultra-cool". Thank you. *plays a MIDI jingle*
The sound you hear when gun is loading came from a transformer which is fed with a high frequency square wave in order to produce high voltage. It is stored in a capacitor and released later in the flash lamp. This process draws a lot of current, that's why the LCD screen is dimming.
My mom was an Avon lady in the early '90s. I remember all of the scents being similar, noxious, and ephemeral; everything was some mix of sandalwood, vanilla and musk which faded to a tomato soupy aroma before dissipating altogether within a couple of hours. You can replicate the old school Avon perfume experience in the gifts section of any discount store. Also, your skin appears to have neutral undertones, so you can theoretically look good in any color. Deep greens and muted violets will look especially flattering on you.
It's funny that you could either use an expensive computer to analyze a customer's skin tone or you could learn how to tell what someone's skin tone is just by looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if a trained person could give more accurate results and give more detailed results as well.
Clint passed away after having shot his face with a random Avon scanner and briefly becoming a makeup covered hulk before melting into a puddle of goo that smelled of old lady perfume.
Wh.. What about all the Avon customers? Representatives would walk into their houses and just blast them with it... "Hi want to buy makeup? Just melt yourself with this ray gun first"
Dude... actually... yeah. Fuck this. I have bought 3 home printers on the process of a 2 year span. None lasted more than 3 months. And this thing survived +20 years.
@@icecold1805 : It's got Avon quality built right in, made in the USA, by big muscular men who work hard and play hard. Every body dance now! Bum bum bada bum!
@@TheLuizSouza : Yes. Take a lighter and heat the paper. One side becomes brown while the other side remains white. Also, thermal printers can still break down.
Haha, that's a lot of smoke and mirrors for what is effectively a real-world color picker. Love how it makes the whole "color reveal" part into almost a wheel of fortune thing with the blippety bloops and text box flashings. It's clearly done for effect, so to make it seem more... advanced? It's just so 80's!!! Thank you for digging up this wonderfully weird stuff and showing it off to the world. :)
Software companies have been doing this for ages and still do it. It basically goes like this: Developer: "Heres the thing" Product Manager: "But it doesn't look like it's doing anything." Developer: "It only takes 120 milliseconds to do the thing" Product Manager: "No, that's not convincing. Make it take 4000% longer and add some beep boops and screen animations so it looks sciency"
Yes, I was actually referring to the whole thing when calling it "So 80's!!!". :) But I can see how it sounded like I was merely thinking of the smoke and mirrors part.
I wouldn't even be surprised if the whole thing is more or less random. Clint should have checked if the results are reproducable (with different persons also).
Surely any skin will have pink undertones if you repeatedly jam a hard plastic tube against it. I wonder how many Avon customers had a colour profile of "ultra cool".
Fun fact: that skin tone light gun deal is about the same tech used to match a paint color sample at a hardware store. ...okay that wasn't fun at all but it's true. Worked with that type of equipment for 6 years. Fun stuff. odd that it calibrates to that pink tone, rather than a pure neutral gray / white / black tricolor set like most other guns of that type.
I know this is an older video, but I just found your channel a few weeks ago. My grandma used to sell Avon lol when I was little. She never had one of these, but it brings back fond memories. Grandma's clients orders would arrive in an Avon box and we would go through it. She would always give me the samples of lipstick, eyeshadow and whatever else. My grandma had all kinds of Avon stuff of her own, Imari really brings me back, she definitely had that perfume. Thanks for doing this one!
"I mostly enjoy a wood grain scent." > Woodsy Wow, it specifically caters to retro-computing wood enthusiasts! This software was *way* ahead of its time.
Please be advised that a noticeable taste of blood is not part of any test protocol, but is an unintended side effect of the Material Emancipation Grill, which may, in semi-rare cases, emancipate dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, and teeth.
My grandma passed away a little over a year ago. She was 87 years old and had worked for Avon most of her life. I actually remember seeing something like this at her house once. I'd completely forgotten about it until I watched this video. You said it came out in 1988, which is funny because that's the year I was born. Up until I was six my grandparents were our neighbours and sometimes I'd spend the night at their house. The guest bedroom had a bunch of miscellaneous items, like it was used for storage as well as a guest bedroom. This was one of the items. When you opened it and I saw the inside, it came flashing back to me and I was overcome with a huge nostalgic trip. It was one moment that happened 25 to 30 years ago that I hadn't thought about since then. I didn't know what it was, and I was afraid to ask my grandma because she didn't like me going through the stuff in there. I distinctly remember pretending the scanner thing was a gun. Being that young I didn't know what a computer was, so I didn't even know to turn it on or that it could be turned on. lol So this is probably a terrible story of someone who has seen one.
I sold Avon in the early 90s while in high school lol. I sold to teachers a lot! I had a beauty computer too, but it was more like a big calculator then. I had no knowledge of makeup, so I needed it!
I kinda wanted to see you run a Sierra adventure game on this The surreallity of running a then-high-tech game on the thing the Avon lady uses to sell you 50 lbs of foundation and wood-scented cologne would be funnier than what's happening right now
Reminds me of the portable computer terminal that Schwarzenegger used in the 1990 movie Total Recall, which instructed him how to remove tracking device from his head through the nose...
Lol that's funny, these still exist. My ex wife used to work as a "brand representative" and had a similar system, it was usb, and I'm talking only 10 years ago.
That light is a camera flash. The high pitched noise comes from the system that charges the capacitor. I'd modify the software a little, though; so it would run that gimmick recognition part a little faster (only 2 seconds), and play la cucaracha instead of the avon song (the first 4 notes are already good to go).
Hey LGR! I used to work at a paint store, we had something similar to that skin analyzer but it was for color matching paint, Its a fixed aperture low res camera with a flash on it. The computer takes the image and calc's the average rgb value of the image, then compares that with the baseline (which is most likely that flesh colored you pointed out that the analyzer sits against). Paint stores were doing similar things with this sorta tech in the 80's too! The software sure has come a long way but the hardware is relatively the same tech today.
Used to have CM II spectrometers (made by Minolta) - IIRC they cost a few thousand pounds. The noise is probably the capacitors charging up for the xenon flash tube used in it. With the correct software you can measure various colour parameters (LabCH etc.).The flesh-coloured panel is for calibration - the machine will have the colour of that panel set at the factory and will use it to make sure it's measuring correctly. Normally you'd use a white tile and a black trap.
Easily - the early software for these devices was pretty rudimentary. Knowing how we hoard stuff where I work I wouldn't be surprised if the disks aren't still lying around somewhere.
Yeah, I keep forgetting the lack of hard drives back in the early 80's. The first computer I was exposed to ran a form of Windows 3, and wasn't exposed to older computers, barring some Apple ]['s in elementary school, were in my adult years.
Chaos89P You can store about 1,4 million characters on a 1,44 MB floopy, even on a 720K floppy you could store 720 000 characters, the program probably just use a very simple logic to take the value from the skin scanner and use it to get the makeup suggestion. The logo probably take up a good part of it as well.
Yeah, I've seen this thing before, lol I've never used it, but I've been to a couple AVON 'parties' where this was used. It's silly, cumbersome and pretty damn loud at times, but hey! 1991, everyone! lolz
That little "whine" emitting from the skin scanner is a capacitor charging up. Had an old Minolta camera that made the exact same noise when it was charging the flash. On a related note, when I first saw this video, I tried looking up the model number on the scanner itself; and it also seems to be manufactured by Minolta.
You could mod it to run Doom and tweak the analyser to work as a light gun. Then you could apply to be a representative and bring hell to the homes of mothers across the country.
My mom had this done in the earl;y 90's, and the Avon rep kept asking weird questions about flipping a tortoise over in the desert and getting calfskin wallets for her birthday. Then he shot her. I miss her every day.
As a late night ebayer I can tell you with all certainty no alcohol is required for weird purchases. By 4 a.m. all logic and reason have gone to sleep and buying multiple weird, pointless (but kinda cool) items seems very important :-)
My wife actually had a color analysis done with her local Avon Lady. My wife said that the device called her a spring (she was always tanned back then), even though prior to the Avon evaluation she was judged an autumn. That thing appears to be bullet proof. I was willing to bet that the printer needed ink or the floppy heads needed cleaning or something. I guess we can thank the gaudy red case for keeping it so well protected.
Your comment reminds me of the scene in Roger and Me where they talk to the Amway lady who does color analysis, but she did it using a pink/orange drape. They also categorized everyone by season, I wonder if it was a big thing in the late 80s.
DeKalb Deka Color analysts were huge in the 80’s. Avon was just adding a technological twist to it. There were color stations in the cosmetics departments of most of the big department stores in Southern California and it was a very successful way to get sales.
Blue No they don’t. In a thermal printer, thermalchromic paper is heated by the print head. The place where it’s heated turns black. There is also two color paper that can produce both black and red by heating the paper at different temperatures.
Blue No, they don't. They use heat, hence the "thermal" in their name. I work in retail, while we have to regularly replace the rolls of receipt paper because they run out we never replace any ink. That's why receipts eventually fade, especially if kept in a hot car. The only thing that uses ink on the printers is the part that franks checks and the like and that ribbon is completely separate from the part that prints receipts.
“By day, mild mannered gamer and video creator. By night, Avonnnnnnnnman! With the power of Avon’s cutting edge tech... I’m sorry, I can’t do this. Get my agent, I asked to work for Night Rider.”
I really need to send you some of my old tech someday. I have a similar laptop with built in printer for full size sheets. It was the shit in 1990. Came with a clip art disk set too.
To it's credit, that probably really is the most that technology could do for cosmetics at that point in time. It's not like we have color analyzers lying around everywhere.
I've never asked you for a follow-up Clint, and I may never again, but please get footage of folks with different skin-tones using this thing! I'd love to see what it thinks of a dark-skinned African, or an olive-toned Mediterranean lady... Love you, pal. Keep up the good work!
I had a secondhand T-1200 that appears to have used the same screen as this one, and I can say that it's not nearly as bad when the contrast control is accessible. This one was definitely set too low, even for text screens (or perhaps the PSU is just degrading with age-I'm sure the high power draw of the printer and analyzer thing didn't help). As far as moving objects are concerned, my T-1200 would still get some pretty nasty blur if the contrast was bumped up a bit, but moving objects wouldn't just disappear like they do on this unit. I played a lot of ZZT, that silly Arcade Volleyball game, and Chopper Commando on it quite a bit and don't recall ever having an issue with any of them.
Well, the Avon splash was drawn on pixel-by-pixel basis (perhaps programmed on a vanilla Toshiba T1000), while the text is dependant on the hardware it's running on. But then again, they could've go for different text mode to compensate the squished text (some text modes are the ones that caused the squished text look), but that would reduce readability in a slightly further than reading distance.
Funny thing is, this whole system can be replaced by an eyeball (and lets not forget the person attached to the eyeball). Look at the person and say, hey you have X skin color... For your skin color, X makeup color looks good. This computer was created for 1 reason, to get Avon reps to buy the damn things and make more money off them. I've read a comment below about someone mentioning Amway. They run similar scams, one of the things they tell you is how much money you personally will save by getting a discount on the products they sell, if you become a distributor of their products (I knew some people back in the 90's that sold the crap). I would be willing to bet that Avon does the same shit, hey buy this computer and think about all the money that you will make by being more "high tech".
Maybe I should ask my mom if she ever got something like this when she was an Avon Lady. At least, I think she was an Avon Lady. There used to be loads of Avon catalogs in the household when I was a child. For some reason, I liked looking at all the different shades of colors at the end of the catalog.
How didn't get pushing up roses to do this along with you is a crime to comedy! This is absolutely the weirdest oddware so far. It is like BuzzFeed in a box
The T1000 was the first sub-$1000 IBM compatible laptop when it hit the market in '87, and also the lightest. Obviously tradeoffs were made in order to achieve this, such as only including one floppy drive, but there was a 768KB RAM expansion card that increased the base memory to 640KB and the rest was used as a non-volatile RAM disk, allowing you to keep a program disk in the floppy drive and use the RAM disk for working files. It was favoured by the press industry of the time as, although its screen was not backlit and didn't have great contrast, it could be carried onto a plane with greater ease than its contemporaries. Also, it's 100% IBM compatible, so it will boot MS Flight Simulator 1.00!
That Avon gun thingamajig is basically an old (probably inaccurate as all Hell) spectrometer... paint desks in hardware stores use similar, but far more advance, readers to create formulas for color matching a sample (like a peeled off chip of paint from a wall, or a competitor’s color swatch), which then gets sent to a computer which runs a tinting machine. The flashing it was doing at the beginning against the beige card was just it calibrating to what was considered the software’s base neutral (which on a paint spectrometer would actually be white, or very pale sea foam green color).
I finally know what Clint's weapon of choice will be for the inevitable LGR Movie. Avon's Analizer, complete with the big red case and little red light thingy. Even better if he weilds it in the also inevitable TH-cam Avengers collab with AVGN, Nostalgia Critic, Completionist, etc.
Because the sensor is compatible with multiple base units and printers (in this case the base unit is a designated pc) i believe it can also be used as a standalone meter, displaying the chosen color space info on a little lcd monitor at the base of the device (at least it is the case with the similar device i use at my work)
The fact that it talks to the skin tone analyzer thing when you put the boot disk in might be just a verification stage that attempts to stop you using the software on another computer. It might be fun to plug that sensor into another computer (its likely RS232) and try the software on an actual colour computer. 10/10 for true 80's oddware.
If you'd like to mess around with the Avon software sans the computer/lightgun, here you go!
archive.org/details/AvonBeautyVisionDisk
just about to ask this!
Huh, the disk image appears to contain dos and is a format readable by a Linux machine. (not a custom format)
Wish I knew how to read assembly. My bet is on 'color = rand()%4'. Maybe plus the modifier of the skintone light reflection (so it checks how light/dark and makes the rest up)
But hey, maybe this really was more than a marketing gimmick and had actual tech behind it, but it wasn't feasible (thus it never was widespread and this is the first time 99.9% of the world has seen or heard of this)!
I thought it was making stuff up and it looks like it was right.
Oh so it does. It's good you spotted that.
Hah, of course Duke Nukem's skin is ULTRA COOL
Noice!!!
Hes got skin tone of Steel
xD I totally read that in Clint's Duke voice! lol
Hail to the king baby
I'm here to smell of Soft Musk and Night Magic, and i'm all out of Musk
You're my favorite Avon saleslady
Greetings.. Its your avon lady. man.
Greetings and welcome to an... Avon saleslady thing
Finally LGR is making the gradual transition to make-up review videos!
It's hard to tell because of the glasses but he looks like he has hooded eyes, so I bet he does a badass cut crease winged eyeliner. Probably nothing too smokey or bold though cos it just wouldn't suit his attitude.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh for like the first time ever I actually know what I'm talking about in the comments of one of these videos.
I've been waiting
I love makeup and old computers so, I think I am this niche!
New boooty guru in town ahahaha
Wait to see him "spill the tea".
I fucking love that this computer has some fake computer noises coming out of it to trick people into believing "that's the computer thinking." It's like something out of a CARTOON. God... I wish I had this.
Rosemary Marie do do be boop beep doop boo doop bee boo
BEEP BOP BEEP BOP ANALYZING SKIN TONE BEEP BOP SKIN TONE ANALYZED
It's as if they got their ideas about what a computer should be from the original Star Trek...
Welcome to the 80s. Computers were *futuristic*! Only nerds and geeks used them - not middle-aged housewives that had never seen a computer before. That's what they likely thought computers were was those beeps and boops.
An Actual Mother Bear not going to lie even after reading this comment I laughed out loud at that part,
Poor computer. It's main purpose is to help people find their colors, but it doesn't get to really have any colors of its own :(
This says a lot about our society
@@dysphxria1116 now yuo see
Wow that's deep
Damn.
Now I'm sad for this computer.
"It's FREE to use (when you buy a $5 make up)."
"Oh, btw, we may also require 500 Watts from your home's mains supply for powering the computer and Gamma-ray gun."
ElectronAsh I could see using this as a prop for a movie to be honest. Some dollar store version of ghostbusters....except with the beauty tron 50000
I guess it would cost next to nothing since it's not being run for a long time, even if it would have such a high consumption
isn't it much better to use it then buy the makeup based on what the machine said?
Seems like a fair deal.
It's a T1000 in disguise and features a gun. The Terminator isn't quite as intimidating as we were led to believe.
"Being a T1000, it will go up to 512KB that these things came with from Toshiba."
That's it, Toshiba is Cyberdyne and the T1000 only has 512KB of RAM. Mighty impressive!
I had the exact same thought when I saw that it's a T1000. XD
Toshiba must be stopped
What about T800?
a gun that make cancer.
Catch me in the middle of the woods at night playing King's Quest on an Avon makeup computer
It's elfsucc with a generator, presumably
Probably you will play it for 5 minutes
I'm impressed you have the energy and lighting setup to do so. Sounds like a party.
@@AgentTasmania The top of most staircases in the woods have power outlets.
I'll have to join playing PS2 games on my 1991 Mega watchman, with said console being powered by a 2019 Power bank XD
While you're making these vids, do you ever get the acute feeling that you're the only human on the planet that has ever done a thing? Running Sim City on the Avon computer has got to be a wholly unique thing, haha
Tyler Kurth I recover and preserve lots of old files which are practically gone from the internet, and I get a feeling like that whenever I rediscover an old file and load it up onto my PC. It’s crazy to know you have the only surviving copy.
@@justanotheryoutubechannel May I ask exactly what you preserve?
@@justanotheryoutubechannel You should open some for a video series yo
@@justanotheryoutubechannel Put it on Internet Archive for the world to ser!
@@justanotheryoutubechannel kind of feel that as well. Helping out at a local recycling center, the thing that interests me the most is the media people throw out.
I once found a Microsoft Windows crack disk case, only to find graduation disks inside. It had homework assignments, school outings and of course, the photos of said students graduation. Our policy is to destroy all private media that we discover however, and since people come and go plus not having any amenities for storage, that's the only option we see ethical. It's still fun looking through the memories of others one last time, just because of negligence in handling.
This video isn't complete without Clint applaying the lipsticks, eyeshadows and rouges in the advised pallette. We want to see results!
despacito 2 Haha, so true
Silence of the lambs vibe here...
@@davidribeiro :
Clint, show me your mangina.
@@louistournas120 "Would you color test me? I would color test me hard..."
"We want to see results!" 💀
My aunt has sold Avon since the 70s. I remember bringing this thing over to my house to show my mom way back in 88 or 89. I was 4 or 5 and thought that it was pretty cool because all of the computers that I had seen up until that point had been larger desktop models. I thought it was so neat that there was a computer that was so portable and that it came in its own little case and had an attached printer.
Obviously, you were so young that you never saw an advert for the regular Toshiba T1000, but then again, neither did I see any technology-related advertising at that age, from what I can still remember.
Kevin Bhasi Now that you mention it, I don't recall seeing much advertising for computers and all of the things that go along with them until about the mid 90s. I'm sure that there were plenty of ads in magazines catering to tech and business people. But as far as TV and other mainstream advertising goes, I don't remember much.
Kaylee F
I'd imagine "Computer Chronicles" was shown past the bedtime your parents assigned you at the time, if they ever did that.
Being an avid young computer enthusiast at that time: No, advertisements were rare. You had to be looking in business-oriented literature to see something like that.
Even in the early 90s, PC World, PC Computing, Computer Shopper.... all catered to business.
The only computer-related TV ads you got were probably for videogames, and even then you didn't see them much (maybe a tad more in the UK in the 80's, because we had a few "indigenous" systems competing with each other, and even a few dedicated computer shows). I can remember treasuring a tape of The Crystal Maze I had, because one of the ads on it was for Mario. Well, actually it was for crisps, you could win a NES if you sent in coupons. Mario was jumping against blocks, only crisps were coming out instead of coins. He also did a Pitfall-style swing over some alligators.
Showing my age here, but i did have a consultation done using this. It picked up on my rosacea and the rep had to try different areas instead. It didn't get my palette right.
I remember we were all impressed with the technology at the time. That magical chance roulette while it played a song was a real exciting ten seconds back in the day.
Id love to see some people who routinely wear makeup and know their color palette give this a test drive. Perhaps it was only inaccurate on my freak skin.
Btw, imari is a spicy patchouli sandlewoody scent. It's pretty nice.
My mom and I have been with Avon for 15 years. We still carry three of the perfumes that were recommended.
Imari is pretty succesful, but I kinda hate it. Night Magic is better.
💯
I'd have to agree that he's cool toned or "winter" as was apropos for the time period.
mclkai well, you have super nerdy people around so... Bound to happen.
"if you're an Avon adviser get in touch" I think the Venn Diagram between LGR fans and Avon reps from the 80's is pretttttty slim. Awesome video as always Clint
That Avon logo on red is THE quintessential 80s "faux-class" logo.
It's like they took it from every mall perfume kiosk that existed at the time.
That "gun" looks like no joke item but an actual colorimeter/spectrometer/somethingelseofthesort, that has an real xenon flash inside it. Charging the caps for the flash maybe takes so much current that the voltage for the rest of the system goes low. That light at the back of the meter may be a neon bulb turning on when the caps are charged.
The software that analyzes the output does look like a joke :)
It looked like one of those tiny neon bulbs to me. A bunch of 80's appliances had them. I even had a night light that looked like Mickey Mouse that had the bulb in series with a tiny resister.
Its a Minolta CM-2 colorimeter
To me it looks like a tesla charger.
@@RobertSzasz HMM! you're correct. www.ebay.com/itm/MINOLTA-CM-II-Chroma-Color-Meter-Analyzer-Colorimeter-25-Pin-PC-/292166334368
Hardware: Legitimate scientific equipment, clean form factor, ergonomic and compartmentalized placement of accessories, nice carry case, neat manuals and color graphics for showing product selection, a laptop as a terminal for user convenience and computing power...
Software: Thanks to our hardware, we can tell that: your name is "Duke" and your skin tone is "ultra-cool". Thank you. *plays a MIDI jingle*
The sound you hear when gun is loading came from a transformer which is fed with a high frequency square wave in order to produce high voltage. It is stored in a capacitor and released later in the flash lamp. This process draws a lot of current, that's why the LCD screen is dimming.
As far as I can tell, it seems to use a flash and circuitry not too different from a disposable camera.
You know what this system cost new in 1988?
*YOUR SOUL.*
My mom was an Avon lady in the early '90s. I remember all of the scents being similar, noxious, and ephemeral; everything was some mix of sandalwood, vanilla and musk which faded to a tomato soupy aroma before dissipating altogether within a couple of hours. You can replicate the old school Avon perfume experience in the gifts section of any discount store.
Also, your skin appears to have neutral undertones, so you can theoretically look good in any color. Deep greens and muted violets will look especially flattering on you.
Naomi Sutton
Was the gun measuring undertones tho? That's what I was trying to figure out.
That, I don't know. I'm guessing it takes a series of low res (like 1 x 1 pixel) photos and uses that data to approximate the RGB value of your skin.
I don't really have an opinion on LGR's tone, but I just want to say you have a knack for evocative description
It's funny that you could either use an expensive computer to analyze a customer's skin tone or you could learn how to tell what someone's skin tone is just by looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if a trained person could give more accurate results and give more detailed results as well.
Clint passed away after having shot his face with a random Avon scanner and briefly becoming a makeup covered hulk before melting into a puddle of goo that smelled of old lady perfume.
Soft musk.
@@RAFMnBgaming FRESH OATS
Wh.. What about all the Avon customers? Representatives would walk into their houses and just blast them with it... "Hi want to buy makeup? Just melt yourself with this ray gun first"
Perfume that smells like the Great Depression
Then youhear the avon song...
*My mom had one of those back when we were real young. Like '89 or '90. She's been with avon for like 40 years now.*
O-oh no
Me: "Clint can't find anything more odd for Oddware"
LGR: "Hold my oddware"
"Hold my oddware... against your face so I can tell you which makeup to use!"
Indeed, if this isn't oddware, I don't know what is.
Thanks for showing us this, Clint! Always glad to see more Oddware and Tech Tales
Hold my wood grain would be better.
*Fixed*
Me: "Clint can't find anything more odd for Oddware"
LGR: "Hold my wood"
Nordern What foundation will match my beard?
I’m most impressed that the printer still works
Dude... actually... yeah. Fuck this. I have bought 3 home printers on the process of a 2 year span. None lasted more than 3 months. And this thing survived +20 years.
@@icecold1805 :
It's got Avon quality built right in, made in the USA, by big muscular men who work hard and play hard. Every body dance now! Bum bum bada bum!
Isn't it because it's a thermal printer so there's no ink to dry out?
@@TheLuizSouza :
Yes. Take a lighter and heat the paper. One side becomes brown while the other side remains white. Also, thermal printers can still break down.
Things were durable then. Hell, I still have appliances from the 2000s that still work alright. Now everything is disposable. Planned obsolescence.
Haha, that's a lot of smoke and mirrors for what is effectively a real-world color picker. Love how it makes the whole "color reveal" part into almost a wheel of fortune thing with the blippety bloops and text box flashings. It's clearly done for effect, so to make it seem more... advanced? It's just so 80's!!! Thank you for digging up this wonderfully weird stuff and showing it off to the world. :)
Software companies have been doing this for ages and still do it. It basically goes like this:
Developer: "Heres the thing"
Product Manager: "But it doesn't look like it's doing anything."
Developer: "It only takes 120 milliseconds to do the thing"
Product Manager: "No, that's not convincing. Make it take 4000% longer and add some beep boops and screen animations so it looks sciency"
Yes, I was actually referring to the whole thing when calling it "So 80's!!!". :) But I can see how it sounded like I was merely thinking of the smoke and mirrors part.
I wouldn't even be surprised if the whole thing is more or less random. Clint should have checked if the results are reproducable (with different persons also).
Timm Not to mention his skin and hair undertone is clearly of a warmer hue. It's either broken or just an expensive sham.
to me it gave the strong impression of it being fake...
that's really bizarre - in 1988 at a women's party that would have been a huge gimmick and the rep would have made a fortune!! great show. love LGR.
“What is my purpose?”
*You diagnose make-up recommendations.*
“...Oh my God.”
Yeah, welcome to the club..
When I saw Avon in the title and the "gun" in your hand I thought of Homer's makeup shotgun.
Don't forget the cold cream gun.
Lol!!!!
Women will like what I tell them to like.
Surely any skin will have pink undertones if you repeatedly jam a hard plastic tube against it. I wonder how many Avon customers had a colour profile of "ultra cool".
Fun fact: that skin tone light gun deal is about the same tech used to match a paint color sample at a hardware store.
...okay that wasn't fun at all but it's true. Worked with that type of equipment for 6 years. Fun stuff. odd that it calibrates to that pink tone, rather than a pure neutral gray / white / black tricolor set like most other guns of that type.
Yes, but WHICH WHITE?! I still get flash backs going through the 150+ shades, only for people to choose 1 of 2 different shades...
we have cameras you shove against a car door to take pictures of exact paint shades when doing auto collision repair. i figure this is the early model
Cosmetics counters in shops still use something like this, albeit much smaller, to match your foundation shade and to recommend lipstick colours.
I love the music it plays when it delivers the results, sounds like you just beaten a game
that's the old avon jingle from the 80s, "look how good you look now"
I know this is an older video, but I just found your channel a few weeks ago. My grandma used to sell Avon lol when I was little. She never had one of these, but it brings back fond memories. Grandma's clients orders would arrive in an Avon box and we would go through it. She would always give me the samples of lipstick, eyeshadow and whatever else. My grandma had all kinds of Avon stuff of her own, Imari really brings me back, she definitely had that perfume. Thanks for doing this one!
Can we expect a Lazy Beauty Reviews channel to appear soon?
Featuring Pushing Up Roses.
I would watch it.
+1
"I mostly enjoy a wood grain scent."
> Woodsy
Wow, it specifically caters to retro-computing wood enthusiasts! This software was *way* ahead of its time.
this is my favourite response.
@@jamtea388 I was kinda bummed he didn't select "conservative" :(
Do not touch the operational end of the device. Do not look into the operational end of the device.
Do not taunt happy fun ball.
Please be advised that a noticeable taste of blood is not part of any test protocol, but is an unintended side effect of the Material Emancipation Grill, which may, in semi-rare cases, emancipate dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, and teeth.
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/fairlyoddparents/images/4/4d/Secretorigincrocker526.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160517100355&path-prefix=en
ComradeSch lol
Hats off to you if you remember that TV special of the show. When the show was actually good XD
4:29 I like how there's just "BLOOD" perfectly framed by the lid handle.
I honestly never saw that until now, and will never unsee that.
is that subliminal messaging? or just liminal?
My grandma passed away a little over a year ago. She was 87 years old and had worked for Avon most of her life. I actually remember seeing something like this at her house once. I'd completely forgotten about it until I watched this video. You said it came out in 1988, which is funny because that's the year I was born. Up until I was six my grandparents were our neighbours and sometimes I'd spend the night at their house. The guest bedroom had a bunch of miscellaneous items, like it was used for storage as well as a guest bedroom. This was one of the items. When you opened it and I saw the inside, it came flashing back to me and I was overcome with a huge nostalgic trip. It was one moment that happened 25 to 30 years ago that I hadn't thought about since then. I didn't know what it was, and I was afraid to ask my grandma because she didn't like me going through the stuff in there. I distinctly remember pretending the scanner thing was a gun. Being that young I didn't know what a computer was, so I didn't even know to turn it on or that it could be turned on. lol So this is probably a terrible story of someone who has seen one.
It’s also a sweet nostalgic story 😊
This contraption was made in the eighties so it must beep.
Oh, they mean the cheek on your face....
Realistic Fishing the other cheek prolly would give a more accurate reading
The other one may be a bit more brown
Mike Stroz if that part of your other cheek is brown then something is wrong.
Now I'm disappointed that Clint didn't analyze his butt.
No, he did it wrong! It´ s the *anal*yzer.
I sold Avon in the early 90s while in high school lol. I sold to teachers a lot! I had a beauty computer too, but it was more like a big calculator then. I had no knowledge of makeup, so I needed it!
I kinda wanted to see you run a Sierra adventure game on this
The surreallity of running a then-high-tech game on the thing the Avon lady uses to sell you 50 lbs of foundation and wood-scented cologne would be funnier than what's happening right now
"bow to king"
For all who want to know, the light gun is a Minolta CM-II Color Meter Analyzer used to help with photography.
Now THIS is the oddest piece of oddware I've seen in your channel. ♥ ♥
Even more than the breadrest?
Yes, Tom.
Or the sexy mouse?
Certainly.
and the minddrive?
Reminds me of the portable computer terminal that Schwarzenegger used in the 1990 movie Total Recall, which instructed him how to remove tracking device from his head through the nose...
Lol that's funny, these still exist. My ex wife used to work as a "brand representative" and had a similar system, it was usb, and I'm talking only 10 years ago.
That light is a camera flash. The high pitched noise comes from the system that charges the capacitor.
I'd modify the software a little, though; so it would run that gimmick recognition part a little faster (only 2 seconds), and play la cucaracha instead of the avon song (the first 4 notes are already good to go).
Hey LGR! I used to work at a paint store, we had something similar to that skin analyzer but it was for color matching paint, Its a fixed aperture low res camera with a flash on it. The computer takes the image and calc's the average rgb value of the image, then compares that with the baseline (which is most likely that flesh colored you pointed out that the analyzer sits against). Paint stores were doing similar things with this sorta tech in the 80's too! The software sure has come a long way but the hardware is relatively the same tech today.
It came preloaded with the program "Snake Oil: Enable".
Makeup Gear: Solid Snake Oil
Don't give Alex Jones ideas for future products.
Used to have CM II spectrometers (made by Minolta) - IIRC they cost a few thousand pounds. The noise is probably the capacitors charging up for the xenon flash tube used in it. With the correct software you can measure various colour parameters (LabCH etc.).The flesh-coloured panel is for calibration - the machine will have the colour of that panel set at the factory and will use it to make sure it's measuring correctly. Normally you'd use a white tile and a black trap.
But would those programs be small enough to fit on a floppy disk? That's pretty much the only drive that computer has.
Easily - the early software for these devices was pretty rudimentary. Knowing how we hoard stuff where I work I wouldn't be surprised if the disks aren't still lying around somewhere.
Yeah, I keep forgetting the lack of hard drives back in the early 80's. The first computer I was exposed to ran a form of Windows 3, and wasn't exposed to older computers, barring some Apple ]['s in elementary school, were in my adult years.
I'd like to imagine the regular CM-II included a single 3.5 inch floppy disk with some software that simply provided an output from the device.
Chaos89P You can store about 1,4 million characters on a 1,44 MB floopy, even on a 720K floppy you could store 720 000 characters, the program probably just use a very simple logic to take the value from the skin scanner and use it to get the makeup suggestion.
The logo probably take up a good part of it as well.
Yeah, I've seen this thing before, lol
I've never used it, but I've been to a couple AVON 'parties' where this was used.
It's silly, cumbersome and pretty damn loud at times, but hey! 1991, everyone! lolz
That little "whine" emitting from the skin scanner is a capacitor charging up. Had an old Minolta camera that made the exact same noise when it was charging the flash.
On a related note, when I first saw this video, I tried looking up the model number on the scanner itself; and it also seems to be manufactured by Minolta.
I've watched many reviews of classic computers. This may be my very favorite one of them all.
Didn't need a computer to tell us Duke is Ultra Cool
You could mod it to run Doom and tweak the analyser to work as a light gun. Then you could apply to be a representative and bring hell to the homes of mothers across the country.
Your recommended base is... Cacodemon Red
😆😆 lmao
I read it as AVGN Beauty Vision Computer and I was left very confused for about 1 second.
Real1Gaming that would be one strange but potentially hilarious episode. And the level of profanities would be through the roof. 😆 lol
Clint's gotta send this thing to James. Make an entire episode about it.
Real1Gaming Fuck!!! ASS
The color palette would be 50 shades of brown
for me avon logo looks like 'Gron'
I love how the program looks like something programmed by a student for a school project.
Avon calling!
Holy crap. It's literally like that Regular Car Reviews quote. "It's the 1980s. And guess what: _computers!_ BEEPBOOPBEEPBEEPBOOP"
That's exactly what I thought too.
So wonderfully bizarre and those computer bleeps are adorable
Much like Peter S. Bizarre himself
Ur bleeps r adorable too :)
😳😳😳
My mom had this done in the earl;y 90's, and the Avon rep kept asking weird questions about flipping a tortoise over in the desert and getting calfskin wallets for her birthday. Then he shot her. I miss her every day.
Found the skinjob!
I don't know what to make of this
What?
On a completely unrelated note, has anyone here seen Blade Runner? Great film.
You had to have the customer hold the Analyzer against their eyeball to boot into Voight-Kampff mode.
> Called a "color computer"
> Is not in color
Color sold separately, Individually, and at a 5000% markup.
I am the 70th like. Sorry for ruining the number of likes.
It’s In green
It computes colours
@@tchr.p.3x2 got to get to 696 and 6969 some how
It acknowledge
s male customers... that's progressive.
Inclusive.... as in... they want to include as many people as possible to give them money. 😉
But the calibration skin color is white only
Late night ebay shopping? Am I correct in assuming that an alcoholic beverage was involved?
As a late night ebayer I can tell you with all certainty no alcohol is required for weird purchases.
By 4 a.m. all logic and reason have gone to sleep and buying multiple weird, pointless (but kinda cool) items seems very important :-)
I assumed he was looking for porn VHS tapes.
My wife actually had a color analysis done with her local Avon Lady. My wife said that the device called her a spring (she was always tanned back then), even though prior to the Avon evaluation she was judged an autumn. That thing appears to be bullet proof. I was willing to bet that the printer needed ink or the floppy heads needed cleaning or something. I guess we can thank the gaudy red case for keeping it so well protected.
What are you talking about? Thermal printers constantly need ink.
Your comment reminds me of the scene in Roger and Me where they talk to the Amway lady who does color analysis, but she did it using a pink/orange drape. They also categorized everyone by season, I wonder if it was a big thing in the late 80s.
DeKalb Deka Color analysts were huge in the 80’s. Avon was just adding a technological twist to it. There were color stations in the cosmetics departments of most of the big department stores in Southern California and it was a very successful way to get sales.
Blue No they don’t. In a thermal printer, thermalchromic paper is heated by the print head. The place where it’s heated turns black. There is also two color paper that can produce both black and red by heating the paper at different temperatures.
Blue No, they don't. They use heat, hence the "thermal" in their name. I work in retail, while we have to regularly replace the rolls of receipt paper because they run out we never replace any ink. That's why receipts eventually fade, especially if kept in a hot car.
The only thing that uses ink on the printers is the part that franks checks and the like and that ribbon is completely separate from the part that prints receipts.
“By day, mild mannered gamer and video creator. By night, Avonnnnnnnnman! With the power of Avon’s cutting edge tech... I’m sorry, I can’t do this. Get my agent, I asked to work for Night Rider.”
I really need to send you some of my old tech someday. I have a similar laptop with built in printer for full size sheets. It was the shit in 1990. Came with a clip art disk set too.
To it's credit, that probably really is the most that technology could do for cosmetics at that point in time. It's not like we have color analyzers lying around everywhere.
Love the subtle framing of "BLOOD" at 4:29
I've never asked you for a follow-up Clint, and I may never again, but please get footage of folks with different skin-tones using this thing! I'd love to see what it thinks of a dark-skinned African, or an olive-toned Mediterranean lady...
Love you, pal. Keep up the good work!
or what makeup should my desk use??? or my wallpaper??
How about testing it on stuff that clearly isn't skin colored, just to see how real the measurements actually are.
Same! Thinking about it, the one useful function for something like this would be picking foundation, and yet that's absent.
LGR watchers from every continent, let's send some 4x4 inches skin samples to Clint for test!
What about having a weird white tone that has more yellow and red than most. Makes wearing makeup a pain.
I can't believe people actually worked on screens like this. It's so hard to read anything.
I had a secondhand T-1200 that appears to have used the same screen as this one, and I can say that it's not nearly as bad when the contrast control is accessible. This one was definitely set too low, even for text screens (or perhaps the PSU is just degrading with age-I'm sure the high power draw of the printer and analyzer thing didn't help).
As far as moving objects are concerned, my T-1200 would still get some pretty nasty blur if the contrast was bumped up a bit, but moving objects wouldn't just disappear like they do on this unit. I played a lot of ZZT, that silly Arcade Volleyball game, and Chopper Commando on it quite a bit and don't recall ever having an issue with any of them.
3DSage giant TI calculator
The squished text is annoying. They couldn't make the GUI match the aspect ratio of the screen? Especially since the Avon splash screen is correct.
Well, the Avon splash was drawn on pixel-by-pixel basis (perhaps programmed on a vanilla Toshiba T1000), while the text is dependant on the hardware it's running on.
But then again, they could've go for different text mode to compensate the squished text (some text modes are the ones that caused the squished text look), but that would reduce readability in a slightly further than reading distance.
maybe if they had advertised this as a portable analizer that might have had a better resale than 50 bucks of ebay.
And now Avon is almost bankrupt.
Which means, its not bankrupt enough.
Good. That's what they get
they're probably surviving solely on the sales of that awful perfume that supposedly repels mosquitoes.
That's a shame, they left behind a legacy only matched by Amway.
i think you're forgetting about mary kay's army of pink sedan driving devotees.
Looks like something L.Ron Hubbard would use.
correction: l. Ron Hoyabembe
Barry Roberts check his theatons
He was fruity enough!
Funny thing is, this whole system can be replaced by an eyeball (and lets not forget the person attached to the eyeball). Look at the person and say, hey you have X skin color... For your skin color, X makeup color looks good. This computer was created for 1 reason, to get Avon reps to buy the damn things and make more money off them.
I've read a comment below about someone mentioning Amway. They run similar scams, one of the things they tell you is how much money you personally will save by getting a discount on the products they sell, if you become a distributor of their products (I knew some people back in the 90's that sold the crap). I would be willing to bet that Avon does the same shit, hey buy this computer and think about all the money that you will make by being more "high tech".
Maybe if the computer wasnt sold at a massive markup then I would consider buying it from them. It's an old pc, but hey it has a printer.
My mom was an Avon lady. She sold a LOT of lotion. That was it lol
I could see a lot of customers back then being more inclined to buy stuff because “it’s computerized” vs just trusting an icky human.
I expect you to get a lot of flak from the Multi Level Marketing zombies hahaha.
Another great video!
Izzy e seu ódio mortal pelo marketing multinível hasuhaushaushaush
Não te esperava aqui Izzy
Me: mom can we get a computer
Mom: we already have a computer at home
The computer at home:
Maybe I should ask my mom if she ever got something like this when she was an Avon Lady. At least, I think she was an Avon Lady. There used to be loads of Avon catalogs in the household when I was a child. For some reason, I liked looking at all the different shades of colors at the end of the catalog.
11:13 could be the new theme song for oddware
I was just feeling a bit low and then boom, Clint pops up with another video about a random computer. Bad mood solved. Thanks as always!
I agree, Clint is ultra cool.
Also, I'm a manager for CVS and I LOLed for real at that, thanks man!
y u said my nem
Lol yeah magagers can laugh about it since they don't have to hear about it 47 times a day.
My mom used to be one of those reps back when I was young. I miss being small 😂😂
How didn't get pushing up roses to do this along with you is a crime to comedy!
This is absolutely the weirdest oddware so far. It is like BuzzFeed in a box
This is the silliest coolest oddware ive seen in a while
I really hope there's a follow up to this with pushing up roses where she applies you're chosen super cool make up :P hahaha.
ULTRA cool!
that is so useless! it's so 80's, using an entire computer for something that a set of cards could have handled.
jajaja
its a marketing tactics, im sure at that time computers = professional things.
@@demochannel6146 no, it's like our version of Nano particle mumbo jumbo.
And now you can download the app for the deck of cards/PC that you can use!
@@demochannel6146 :
Some might say: User requests are what computers are for.
Others say, No, doing our business is what computers are for.
2:32 Look at Jackeé on Ebony! So fab!
You should try scanning other stuff like an apple or... dunno.... a green screen
Raposa Dislexa I was expecting him to scan wood grain.
I was expecting this episode to end with Clint wearing some makeup. I'm disappointed...
The T1000 was the first sub-$1000 IBM compatible laptop when it hit the market in '87, and also the lightest. Obviously tradeoffs were made in order to achieve this, such as only including one floppy drive, but there was a 768KB RAM expansion card that increased the base memory to 640KB and the rest was used as a non-volatile RAM disk, allowing you to keep a program disk in the floppy drive and use the RAM disk for working files.
It was favoured by the press industry of the time as, although its screen was not backlit and didn't have great contrast, it could be carried onto a plane with greater ease than its contemporaries. Also, it's 100% IBM compatible, so it will boot MS Flight Simulator 1.00!
T1000, cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal exoskeleton. It needs your clothes your boots and your motorcycle
That Avon gun thingamajig is basically an old (probably inaccurate as all Hell) spectrometer... paint desks in hardware stores use similar, but far more advance, readers to create formulas for color matching a sample (like a peeled off chip of paint from a wall, or a competitor’s color swatch), which then gets sent to a computer which runs a tinting machine.
The flashing it was doing at the beginning against the beige card was just it calibrating to what was considered the software’s base neutral (which on a paint spectrometer would actually be white, or very pale sea foam green color).
“Representatives”
You mean victims, right?
Lol right, or pawns in a pyramid scheme..
I finally know what Clint's weapon of choice will be for the inevitable LGR Movie.
Avon's Analizer, complete with the big red case and little red light thingy.
Even better if he weilds it in the also inevitable TH-cam Avengers collab with AVGN, Nostalgia Critic, Completionist, etc.
you should put some Ultra Cool makeup on your face to test if the results were right.
i'm surprised it didn't say " greetings professor falken... would you like to play a game? "
Clint is gonna start taking this thing to all the vintage expos and offering everyone a chance to find their color/s.
This is the most "I would expect this in some 70s sci-fi movie but it existed in real world in 90s" thing I could imagine....
So.... The sensor has a Trigger but it asks you to press Enter to trigger it? What is the trigger for xD
Maybe it's for the original software that would have came with that sensor before it was modified and repackaged into that case.
Because the sensor is compatible with multiple base units and printers (in this case the base unit is a designated pc) i believe it can also be used as a standalone meter, displaying the chosen color space info on a little lcd monitor at the base of the device (at least it is the case with the similar device i use at my work)
To trigger people like you XD
My assumption is that the trigger probably just pressed the enter key, and you could use either or
It tears a hole in the space-time continuum, which passers-by will be sucked into butt-first.
That's right LGR! You're ultra cool according to the computer!
Neon Genesis Avongelion.
The fact that it talks to the skin tone analyzer thing when you put the boot disk in might be just a verification stage that attempts to stop you using the software on another computer. It might be fun to plug that sensor into another computer (its likely RS232) and try the software on an actual colour computer. 10/10 for true 80's oddware.
11:23 (Duke Voice): "I already know that I'm Ultra Cool"