Dear reminiscent of brother ... 
Very cool ... 
I had no ideas they had digital photo graphy back in 63 .... The scalability feature built right in and all ... Very sophisticated stuff indeed ... Thanks fer sharing ... 
It may be possible that a Westfalia / wolfsburg German was on holiday in the same area where your brother was showing off his neatness ... The idea had to come from somewhere ... Maybe was his or maybe Douglas Payne Jones was so well connected to the universe that he pulled the concept out of the river that feeds all creativity ... 
Regards 

There must be a lifetime of thought in the last second if we are to live from moment to moment.

On 2013-01-05, at 7:29 PM, Richard A Jones <Jones@COLORADO.EDU> wrote:

> In 1962 my brother bought a Kombi with split seats and built
> a camper into the back.  A year later, with a baby, he popped
> the top.  This was in Denver.
> 
> Here's what it looked like:
> http://jones.colorado.edu/VW/originalpoptop/Splitties.jpg
> [The 15-window bus is mine; I'm the tall guy in the center with
> my back to the camera, age 22.]
> 
> Here's a better view of the poptop.  You can see the bed level
> in the rear hatch, raised up so there was storage below it.
> Westfalia never did catch on to that.
> http://jones.colorado.edu/VW/originalpoptop/DPJpoptop.jpg
> 
> The best view:
> http://jones.colorado.edu/VW/originalpoptop/DPJpoptop2.jpg
> The front roof folded down and then the rear, which rested on
> the front upright part, so there was a slope from that top
> to the rear.  The pieces were made of corrugated fiberglass.
> 
> He drove it until about 1971, when with a second kid, he got
> an F-150 and an Okie box.
> 
> Anyway, Douglas Payne Jones (1936-2011) built a poptop in 1963.
> It took Westfalia five more years to figure it out.
> 
> Richard