Slashdot Mirror
Forgotten Electronics of the 70s and 80s
Ant writes "This is where you can find photos of those unusual items which somehow missed our keen attention in the 70s and 80s. Be it a specialty product, electronic novelty or an utter boondoggle from a major electronics outfit of the day, we'll dig 'em up and talk about 'em."
That is the page where Nokia N-Gage will be in about 10 years.
the epitome of cool..
especially if worn while carrying a boom box blasting old school Beastie Boys on your shoulder.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
It won't be too long before much of the stuff sold there will be listed in "Forgotten Electronics of the 90s and 00s" :)
My dog ate my sig
5 posts and its slow as hell.
My dad is a bit of a tool. On his stereo he has the following components hooked up AND WORKING:
DVD
VHS
Beta
Record Player
CD Player
8 Track
It's all in 5.1 surround sound, so they all sound their best.
I just wonder if there's room for a player piano and a cannister recording device.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
I don't see my old Radio Shak Color Computer II
It took me a long time to realize that my nostalgia for old electronics is really based on memories of the fun times. The toys and games really were not that fun in retrospect. They were just all that was available. Fortunately I didn't spend too much money on eBay learning that lesson. It is fun to browse them and go down memory lane though.
When I was young (about 7) in say 1976 or so my father bought a NEW digital watch , you know red LED that lit up when you presses a button, we were sitting at my grandfathers kitchen table, my grandfather was a watch maker, not some repairman he actually MADE watches from scratch at a rate of about 3 a year.
Anyhow my father being very proud of his $800 new invention showed it to my grandfather, who looked very carefully at my fathers watch, he sat back, sipped his coffe and said "How is that progress when now it takes 2 hands to tell time, one for the watch and another to press the button to make it show time ?" My father kinda sank into his seat his bubble being burst instantly, I dont think he ever wore it again.
I found a couple of those at thrift stores a few years back. Very unreliable (apparently they used a cheap casette tape transport at high speeds, which typically refused to move), limited image quality (large grayscale pixels that only take up half of a TV screen), no audio, and just plain wierd. Some cinematographer types love 'em because of the wierd effect they give.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
My favourite forgotten electronic device from the 1980s was the Ludman Electric 56A. An excellent device but unfortunately today its almost as if it never existed. I used to use it all the time. It was perfect for the job and reliable too. Then I retired for a while and by the time I returned to the industry everyone had moved on. If you can get one on ebay, I strongly advise you to do so. I wish I had kept mine. It'd probably be worth almost a $1,000 today.
apt-get install deathstar && deathstar alderaan && echo "You're far too trusting"
...that this website seems to be hosted on a server with all the power of a TRS-80.
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
kind of ironic that the old diskmen were the smallest. I always tought diskmen were shrinking. In this1988 model the diskmen doesn't even fit an entirer disk.
My dad used to have a huge ancient calculator from the 60's or 70's. I vividly remember it because it had a red alarm-clock style display.
:)
When you performed an arithmetic operation the whole screen would turn to garbage for a moment, then the answer would be displayed.
I never saw this for myself, but he claims that if you tried to divide by zero the machine would just keep chugging away forever.
here: http://www.dottocomu.com/b/archives/000585.html
I had that casio calculator watch back in the day. Another cool item was my old Pac Man watch. Anyone remember that guy? It had a little metal joystick. I can't believe it didn't make the list!
I have a few of these analog effects that hook up to the speaker outputs of stereo receivers. Think the extensive drug use of the 70's sparked demand.
I still have a working Kaypro II, and Kaypro16 in the back of the garage. I also found the original SNOKUG library disks with it. ..... Crap I am a geek..
Coincidentally, X-Entertainment is running a story on the Pocket Rockers kids collectable tape players from the 80's. Anyone remember those?
How I miss my Game&Watch double-screen Donkey Kong (1982)! *nostalgic sigh*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I got me one of those... Orignal owner as well, Very cool. $400 on ebay. Very tempting, But I must resist. Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
In the 80's I found this cool gizmo at a garage sale, it was called a CB Receiver by "Conic". I attached it to my bicycle handlebars and listened to cursing truckers as I cruised around.
Parallel port software anti-piracy dongles.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Alright, admit it - how many of you clicked on 1981 XXX-Rated Digital Watch (Caution: Explicit!) first thing? I know I sure did. In elementary school in the 80s this would have been worth far more than its weight in gold.
I remember getting one of these calculator watches for Christmas. On the website they don't mention that those babies had a 1/100th second stopwatch and could store phone numbers, too. I wore short sleeves for most of the winter just to show mine off! In fact, I remember wearing through the band (which was cheap plastic) after a couple of years from taking it on and off showing it to people.
As a teenager I remember I had an early walkman. I can't recall now the make of it, but it was huge and it had cassette-loading slot, like a car stereo. The funniest thing about it was that it had built-in signal splitter to share the music with your, um, significant other and a built-in microphone - not for recording, as it was unable to record anything, but just for listening to the ambient sound. Obviously, whoever designed this device, considered the whole idea of using a walkman in solitud with no vocal contact with the outside world too freaky. In fact, I think he was partially right - I bought a signal splitter for my iPod so we can sometimes listen together, but I really miss something like a built-in mike for the ambient sound. Now when I see somene looks at me and his jaw is moving, I have to remove the earphones with "whaddidyasay?". Would be nicer (or at least geekier) just to push a button or something.
Okay, so it has audio. But unless you mod it, it only has an RF output. And apparently people using it for artistic reasons prefer to not use the built-in tape unit (which doesn't suprise me because it's crap.)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The 80s Cult High Tech Wrist Watch
mirror of links off of main page
... comes in handy if you are traveling with an Autistic Savant who insists on watching the Peoples Court
Boy, that Bambino Football game brought back some serious memories. My dad used to do some legal work for them and knew the president of the company, so I had their entire line of games for free before they had been released. Pretty awesome at the time for a 9 year old. I remember telling my friends about the company, but no one would believe me until I showed up one day at school with their first game out, Master Blaster. Boy, I was certainly popular for that week.
Now if someone would tell me where I can find a working positive ground radio for my car (yes, really), I would appreciate it.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
These were hours of fun
www.gameandwatch.com
I found one at home, and it's still working to this day, keeps me from being bored.
I have a weird answerphone type thing that sits in the car (one of its supposed uses). You record a message and stick a speaker on the inside of the window.
The speakers says "Tap Here" and you do... a few seconds later your message starts playing out.
I have no idea what possible use it could be, but I am pretty sure if it was used now some little git would smash the window just for fun...
Paul.
someone in the EE lab at my university brought in a really old audio recorder yesterday. It recorded onto wire, which he also brought in. I don't remember how hold he said it was, but to date it I noticed it had a tiny light bulb as the "power light"...so apperently predates transistors and LEDs.
$cat
Ah, remember this thing? Does anyone know what it actually did anyway?
I remember having a pocket calculater in the early 80's that played a very simple and addictive little game. It worked using a numeric LCD display. A string of numbers and the occasional letter "n" would march from the right of the display toward the left. On the left was your number. Your goal was to use one button to increment your number and another to fire when it matched some of the numbers marching towards you. When you fired, all of that number were killed, causing the advancing line to retract. If you scored an "n" then the entire advancing numeric army would be wiped out, giving you a breather. The pace would slowly pick up until you simply couldn't keep up any more. There was elementary strategy involved -- do you shoot off this 8 right now, or save it and roll over to the 3 because you can hit three at once?
Good times.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
It is kind of ironic that the old Discman were the smallest. I always thought Discman were shrinking. In this1988 model the Discman doesn't even fit an entire disk.
(I Posted that one too fast)
Here's a picture of the recorder: http://www.videointerchange.com/wire_recorder1.htm
$cat
As a guitarist I can't help but think about the original Tom Scholtz Rockman from the 1980's.
I think you can safely say not much has happened since then regarding portable computers. Well, nowadays, laptops are rarely equipped with two floppy drives, laptop screens have grown a little and are unlikely to be CRT. And the colours of the case are usually not that ugly, but hey it was the eighties!
All in all, I think anyone here who uses a laptop to hack on would soon feel comfortable with that old beast. Given a decent supply of floppies, of course.
I've been looking for a portable record player that sony put out in about 82-84. It's tall, and clamps a record and holds it vertically, clamping it in the middle. About 80% of the record was exposed, much like the d88 discplayer mentioned at the site. A linear needle moves to follow the groove.
Of course you couldn't use this while walking, or even jogging or in a car, but it was the smallest record player I've ever seen. Does anyone know the model number or have more info?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Smallest calculator in the world at one point...I think I got it in 1977.
man rtfm
I probably wouldn't even be a g33k now if it wern't for the vic 20. Ahhhh, programming crappy shooter games in BASIC on my T.V., wouldn't have been 1981 without it!
As a teenager in the early 90's NOT hearing what anyone else said was EXACTLY the reason for having a walkman! I didn't want outside contact! I wanted angst.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I think CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) are cool they're from the 80's. Imagine a vinyl disc. The concept of vinyl playing both audio and video is cool. If you don't know what CED is you can go here
He desperately wants to convert them to digital format, because they're really fragile. Any pointers, one how to go about this in a cost-effective manner?
We've tried the brute-force method of re-filming the projected video off the wall, but it's *very* lossy. Some of the rare stores that do it charge anything from $5.00 per foot of film and up, which will cost a *lot* of money for the 200 odd reels lying around.
Not exactly on topic, but any pointers to do it at home (I am willing to shell out upto $1000, if I need to buy a kit or something) will be *most* welcome.
Thanks!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The one from the article was capable of running apache, judging from the current state of the site.
ah well, time to go hunt for a google cache
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp ?c=252
Those little ear radios are great. When I was in college (and thus could afford not to pay attention) I used to put a portable cd player+fm transmitter in my backpack and then listen to it "wireless" on the ear radio. Problem was the SHITTY battery operated fm transmitters always seemed to drift (the only good ones are the fixed frequency car ones).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Looks like their website is running on some "forgotten electronics."
Perhaps, while we're discussing old electronics, someone can identify one for me.
It looked like a large calculator - a one line red LED segment display, a number pad and mathematical operators and such. The display and keys were the bottom 1/2 or so of the device, the top half just having artwork on it. It could work as a simple calculator, but that wasn't the main purpose of it.
It had a number of mathematical games in it. A few basic ones, then there were six overlays that went over the top. You selected a game, and the overlay would cover some of the display, leaving holes for information for the games. For example, I remember game #6 being some sort of moon landing like game - you'd select a number for thrust power, and the game would update the display with fuel remaining and distance and such.
There was also a football game, #5 I think, and others that I can't recall.
I remember playing with that quite a bit. I have no clue whatever happened to it.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Their servers. Never knew what hit them.
- Sherman
I miss the old Coleco handheld football games, where the "game" was just ten LEDs in a 5 x 2 grid.
:: they didn't run on electricity. Purely mechanical devices. Sweet! Usually only found in rural areas.
Seinfeld mentioned them in "The Toys" episode -- George loved them. Ran on a 9-volt battery.
Man they rocked!
Also: my pre-Atari 2600 Pong machine: On/Off, Tennis/Squash/Pong!
Let's see, forgotten technology: my first student ID at UNC in 1989 had holes punched into it representing my SS#. By the next year they were handing out ones with magnetic stripes.
At my grocery store job in high school, when somebody handed us a credit card, we'd just walk over to this book and see if the number was one of the stolen ones (but only if we didn't "trust" what the person looked like -- i.e. a little old lady). This was because *no one* used credit cards at a grocery store -- very few people had ATM cards.
Manual "Toms" or "Lance" vending machines
The main freaky thing about looking at old pictures is seeing how all the companies' logos were completely different, but they all looked normal then!
Anybody besides me remember these dinosaurs?
I win! Yes! I own this deck!
Had the spiffy feature to ff up and stop on blank spots.
Now it's carefully archived in the garage, along with a scadload of tapes. Near the turntable, and the albums. Oh, and the 8088, of course.
Anyone else have one of these? It was like a giant calculator, with a non_qwerty keyboard and a three line LCD display... I think it had 1K of memory (upgradable to 2K) It came with BASIC, and I used to take it to math class and write programs to solve the equasions. I loved that thing
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I was very surprised to find no mention of RCA's VideoDisc Format, which allowed video to be stored on vinyl records and was the first consumer video format.
I don't know if I'd say that 3" disks were a fad of the 80's. Last I checked you can by burnable 3" disks at Wal-Mart. Personally I like the size of the 3" disks a lot better, but I can't really justify paying more for a disk that holds less data.
One interesting thing was the integration - I have a cassette tape player from 1987 that has an electronic basketball game built into it.
Other interesting toys from the 80's that I'd be interested in seeing would be the XL video camera that used cassette tapes to record video onto.
Teddy Ruxpin (another casste based toy) is from the 80's as well.
If you notice on the parent site - a lot of things deal with cassette tape and radio - I would say 80's was defined by the cassette tape.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Hey good lookin! We'll be back to pick YOU up later!
It's on, or around, page 3 on that site.
I require music to maintain any semblance of productivity. What is interesting is that people think "Wow, she has headphones on, so I can say whatever and she doesn't know." So, incidentally, people will hold relatively confidential/secret conversations within what would be earshot of me. When I installing and tweaking the ALSA sound drivers on me laptop (Slackware 9.1), I came across this idea and implemented it accordingly. So now I have my system volume set to an appropriate level.... AND have my laptop built-in microphone on too. So, I can listen to music at a good volume, and not be deaf to what people are saying around me (whether TO me, or in spite of me). And boy do I hear the most interesting things...
There was the Nintendo Game & Watch, a portable player that played only one game. I had a modest collection: Donkey Kong, Mario, and a bunch of Kung-Fu/Martial Arts games. Come to think of it, I had some Casios also. This was back in Asia, however, so I don't know if these toys were ever popular here in North America.
We thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea.
Some disagreed and thought that we shouldn't have come down from the trees.
Others thought that even the trees were a bad idea and that we should have never left the ocean.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I still have one of these. Although the antenna has trouble, umm, maintaining an erection, it still works.
The game from Parker Brothers facinated me as a child. One of the reasons I went into computer science was to find out how it could play tic-tac-toe.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
yeah, right, the server gets slashdotted just before I get to see the 1981 XXX-Rated Digital Watch...
http://slushdot.org/mirror/forgotten_elec/
Got it before they took it down.
In the late 70s/early 80s they sold computers, wristwatches and calculators, in kits too, and iirc also a micro 2'' crt television.
||_|
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
When LEDs 1st got cheap one of the major car compaines sold a sports car with a an overhead pannel with lots of red LEDs to tell you that everything was OK. Does anyone know what that car was?
http://slushdot.org/mirror/forgotten_elec/
Got it before they took it down.
I just trashed mine to see if there were any salvageable parts. Not much but I got a nice optical grating that splits up a laser pointer beam rather nicely. Enough steel. I should have sold it on the scrap metal market.
I've got a Novus calculator (from early 70s I guess, it was my mother's), it has a display which looks like several small dots of red leds.
It's scientific and operates in RPN, rechargeable battery and, yes, the display turns crazy while calculating (nice effect though).
Hmm... I've never tried dividing by zero.
If at least I could remember where did i dump that piece of tra... uh... historic technology.
as my wife tells me, but since I was teenager in the 1970's I guess I'll remince and try not bore all you young whippersnappers.
Calculators. My dad waited and brought home a nice one I thought. It has a large LCD display tilted up with a magnifiying back window to brighten it. It ran on 2 9V batteries and had large tactile buttons spread apart so it was easier to use. Very handy, much more than many built since then, and my dad still uses it. I later got a TI-58, programmable but NO continuos memory, which severly limited the usability.
Of course, I still use my 1980 Sony sterero receiver. DVD player works throug it just fine.
The CB craze in the middle of the 70's was kind of precursor to usenet, a lot of noise in comparison to useful information. I did have a nice 23 channel CB, and my friends would talk to each other everynight around 9:30. Sometimes we would talk and comment to each other while we watched Saturday Night Live. That was useful.
Anyway, I'm 10-7 on this post, and I'll catch ya later.
The problem is that your television and your Super-8 use different number of frames per second. (c. 30 vs 24)
Consequently getting a good copy to tape is not easy. Before video, TV stations used a telecine machine, which coverted 16mm film to video.
Finding someone to do it with 8mm is even tougher since the number of people filming on the format has stabilized at oh a couple thousand.
One resource to start with though is here or here or here.
Three Squirrels
My favorite calculator watch was the Casio CFX-40 because it had a nice complement of scientific and hexadecimal functions. I was totally bummed when mine broke. :(
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
OMG.....do you remember the MADNESS and RIOTS at Christmas time when Teddy Ruxpin was released? Fights, fists, stampedes.....total chaos; and a total joke for a toy. Seems times have not changed.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
Cool. My last databank watch (CASIO) lasted from high school years to college. Almost a decade! That's pretty good from my usage. I was surprised the watches haven't changed much over the past few years. I had to get a new one because the labels fell apart and battery was low. No points of using it again.
Who here still wears one? I don't see any of my geeky friends use these types of watches anymore. I prefer them over PDAs.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
HTTP Error 410 - Permanently not available
:P
"We're sorry, this historical site is permanently un-available."
Anyone mirrored it?
My favorite gadget from the 80's was the Speak and Spell, that thing was the gameboy of its day. It even had the freaky Wargames computer voice.
With your neck on my shoulders we could wreck civilization!
Sorry can't allow you access today
Since http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/magicalgadget/ says "Sorry can't allow you access today", just use its home page for some items. That still works until someone notices. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The first HP-45 calculator was awesome! Unless, of course you wanted the square root of 4 -- it's answer was 1.9999999 (or something like that!).
Fixed in later modes, as I recall.
How is that progress? Food for thought:
A watch can now last for years without doing anything to it. No winding, no fixing moving parts. Anyone - and I mean ANYONE - can now afford a decent enough watch these days. The $5 models that Wal-Mart sells keep time accurate to 1 second in a year, and last several years on their included batteries.
Something tells me your grandfather didn't sell his watches for $5 a piece.
You or your grandfather, who always could afford a watch, may not think it's progress, but to me being able to tell time is akin to literacy. It's simply better for society if everyone can do it.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
OK - who remembers the Sony El-Cassette -- Sony's replacement for reel-to-reel tapes?
... Bris in a Lincoln! A car with suspension so soft, a Rabbi could perform a bris on a baby while driving. Heh. OK, so yeah - I am old enough to remember it when it was broadcast in '78 or so. --M
A vibrator in the 70's must have been huge.. oh wait.. :)
That was a good thing
It was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
And a Kenworth pullin' logs
Cab-over Pete with a reefer on
And a Jimmy haulin' hogs
We's headin' for bear on Eye-one-oh
'bout a mile outta Shakeytown
I says "Pigpen, this here's Rubber Duck"
"And I'm about to put the hammer down"
('cause we got a little ole convoy rockin' thru the night)
(Yeah, we got a little ole convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?)
(Come on and join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way)
(We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the USA)
(Convoy)
By the time we got into Tulsa-town we had 85 trucks in all
But they's a roadblock up on the cloverleaf
And them bears 's wall-to-wall
Yeah, them smokeys 's thick as bugs on a bumper
They even had a bear in the air
I says "Callin' all trucks, this here's the Duck"
"We about to go a-huntin' bear"
('cause we got a great big convoy rockin' thru the night)
(Yeah, we got a great big convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?)
(Come on and join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way)
(We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the USA)
(Convoy)
Well, we rolled up Interstate Forty-Four
Like a rocket-sled on rails
We tore up all of our swindle sheets
And left 'em settin' on the scales
By the time we hit that "Chi-town"
Them bears was a-gettin smart
They brought up some reinforcements
From the "Illinoise" National Guard
There's armored cars and tanks and jeeps
'n' rigs of ev'ry size
Yeah, them chicken coops was full of bears
And choppers filled the skies
Well, we shot the line, we went for broke
With a thousand screamin' trucks
And eleven long-haired friends of Jesus
In a chartreuse microbus
Well, we laid a strip for the Jersey Shore
Prepared to cross the line
I could see the bridge was lined with bears
But I didn't have a doggone dime
I says "Pigpen, this here's the Rubber Duck"
"We just ain't a-gonna pay no toll"
So we crashed the gate doin' ninety-eight
I says "let them truckers roll, ten-four"
('cause we got a mighty convoy rockin' thru the night)
(Yeah, we got a mighty convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?)
(Come on and join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way)
(We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the USA)
(Convoy)
I went through 3 of those in about 2 months.
#1 motor transport stopped
#2 Broken in the box. One of the buttons was pushed inside the case
#3 died after a couple of weeks.
When I took the last one back, I even made a coupla dollars profit. I had bought it on sale, ($350?), and they gave me current sticker price ($399) in refund.
These things are worth something now. Fisher Price PXL2000 was a camcorder designed for kids. It would record on a standard audio tape in black and white with mono sound. The lens had a way of pixelizing things, student filmmakers still play with these for fun. I've even seen them modded. It's on the very long list of toys I plan on buying someday.
I knew about this and always wodnered how they showed 24 fps movies on 30 fps television. Turns out they show every fourth frame twice.
Well, now you know.
Unknown host pong.
I still have electronic lawn darts! :-)
The time, the early 90s.
The place: Toronto.
The cast: two single digit agesd male children and a hapless dad.
Herding cats had nothing on these two, yet a Japanese videogame watch had almost a hypontic effect. I could get those little dveils to behave for hours on end just for a 5 minute time slice of aforementioned watch.
Now they want BMWs. And the watch no longer works. Woe is me.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I bet Casio will make a killing if they brought out this watch again. I'd buy two in case the first one would break. I had two CFX-40's in the past. One simply stopped working. The other had the display get cracked from being pushed around in a drawer for many years, back before I knew how rare they were.
I always thought that model was a remarkable invention. You can't find that kind of watch engineering these days. There is simply no unique functionality in watches on the market now. They're all just variations on a theme: alarm/chronographs.
I collect old watches (mostly Lemania chronos of the 40s) and I seriously wonder what's gonna happen when the outrageously great and cheap guy I use isn't around any more.
All the old watch repair guys are, well, old. And there's really not a lot of new blood.
It's not too late! Quit whatever you're doing and take him up on his earlier offer.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Around 1979/1981, my father had in his home office a phone that used punch cards to auto-dial. You'd find the card you wanted, push the card in, and it would incrementally eject itself as it dialed the number found on each row of the punch card, making loud mechanical noises in the process. I was allowed to play with the one that dialed the time of day service. Can't seem to find a picture of one online.
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism
It has really bugged me that there are no more really small scientific calculators. Casio Fx-68 is the last one that I know of. I have one but am hesitant to use it since it can't be replaced.
It's a shame that small, metal cased calculators are a thing of the past.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
TI was the first CHEAP digital watch. Before that was Pulsar which was anything but cheap, and oddly stylish today in a retro sort of way. And who could resist using a little magnetic bar to alter the time?
Cheap digital watches drove the market for cheap (and much less accurate) clock crystals. It was all downhill from there.
Pulsar was a brand name used by Hamilton, one of the few and great American watch companies. They sold Pulsar as a brand name to some Asian consortium and the $17 Pulsar you find in Wal Mart today has as much to do with Hamilton as the $17 Gruens had to do with the original Gruen company.
Hamilton, in turn was sold to SMH, now "The Swatch Group" (which was formed in 1933 when Omega, Tissot and Lemania merged).
Need Mercedes parts ?
Use the Wayback Machine for a glimpse into the past...
Ahh.. the casio C80! My Aunt was in the Marines and in the late 70's to early 80's she was stationed in Japan. Anyway I got one for Christmas in 79 For a couple of months I was the only kid around who had one ! Teachers, classmates, friends and thier parents were quite intrigued, it was several months until the watches made it to the states
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
This may be obvious, but what about Ebay? I did a quick search on your items. Couldn't find the XL Video Camera but there is a bunch of Teddy Ruxpin stuff there.
Fully automatic - the bread lowers itself automatically, and comes up at the perfect toastiness. I saw a '65 era model that had been used in the same kitchen day in and day out. My jaw dropped when I saw the toast literally flow into the toasting area. The movement is so smooth, it almost brought a tear to my eye. Then when I saw it silently and slowly advance up into the real world, with a perfect toast job, i abou... Whoa, I need to get out of this room. Here's a link for more information. This is really the best toaster one can buy.
I'm a minister!
I had no idea those existed... it amazes me that something not unlike a plain old LP record could produce video better than VHS quality... and an hour a side? Impressive.
I went searching around on the site for an example of the video quality, but couldn't find a video clip to download... alas. Although the videos of the caddy loading system were great!
Too bad the linked page does not show the whole unit. Picture 1 is only of the player unit. The player slides into a frame that holds 6 C batteries and has a arm strap.
I dont know anything about what my EE friend has done here besides what it is, but, he has some photos of his tube amp in his home directory on my server. He likes the old tech, analog instead of digital. I think its rad too but thats just cause its geewhiz and whizbang, and wiz-like. Yeah. oh, and he always says this: Remember, you ALWAYS keep your left hand in your pocket, no matter HOW STUPID IT LOOKS. Now, what did I just say?! Great Scott look at the time! TO THE CLOCK TOWER! 88 Miiiiiles per hooooura! Any of you engineer types still use tubes and whatnot? I was gonna get him a box of tunes for Christmas, but I figured it would quickly turn into the most useless gift ever, cause who knows how varied they are.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Does anyone remember a blue plastic robot that had an LCD face and a cassette player in it's chest? I remember playing with one as a kid, but everyone I've ever asked about it just remembers the Alphie. I have been looking for one of these for a long time...
User logging on... 300 baud... 300 BAUD?!? (Click!) NO CARRIER
I remember my dad had an old Ericsson NMT450 (re-branded Volvo). It was 'luggable' with a 10lb battery part, a 10lb phone part, and you could feel the heat radiate from the antenna. But man, they were cool at the time, and since the NMT450 band was operating on a relatively 'low' frequency, it was reachable almost everywhere (covering 85% of Sweden compared to GSM which only covers just over half).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I seem to remember some kind of camcorder targeted at kids...you mention the XL, which sounds like what I'm thinking of but I don't recognize that name. It used cassette tapes to record video and there were several acessories that you could buy for it...time to poke around ebay and google.
Teddy Ruxpin was pretty neat for its time. The coolest thing was that it had a little "network" that you could use to hook up the bear's little animatronic friends to. At appropriate times in the story, they would move and (IIRC) say things.
Ok, with the help of some fellow Children of the 1980s (tm), I found the camera.
The device in question is the pxl-2000, aka Pixelvision, aka Pixelcam. You can read more about it here.
While decidely NOT electronic and relatively low tech, and from the 60's, they did make it through the late 70's, and have seen quite a resurgence today(check out ebay, alt.hobbies.slotcars, www.playingmantis.com, modelmotoring.com, scalextric, etc.)
They are STILL fun, can be highly competitive (there are MANY race groups formed around the US now); they are very tactile and aromatic(oh, the ozone and oil smell), unlike computing.
Others would do the hobby justice; I just wanted to make sure they were not overlooked.
It's a very short demonstration, but there's video of a 1964 prototype at Archive.org. as part of the video "Century 21 Calling." There's also interesting sequences with emerging technologies, including demonstrations of call-waiting and a touch-tone phone.
I believe wire recorders are still used in aircraft black-box recorders.
http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/boombox/graphics/s harp-gf777z.jpg
The mighty Sharp GF-777. Shortwave radio, AM/FM, two cassette decks, an 'echo chamber' with mic jack and mixing. In short - the works! To this day, it still provides sound from my computer and it's connected to two nice Sony floor speakers.
Only the GF-888 was bigger - and I only ever saw two of these. One was on a beach entertaining pretty much the ENTIRE beach. It had TWO handles! I shudder to think how many 'D' cells it took to power it up as my 777 used 12 of 'em!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Is Juggernaut.
Slick hollywood fare, yes, but far better than most.
Definitely *not* your typical 'cut the green wire' kinda pic.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
What sort of uniqueness do you need in a watch? All it needs to do is display the bloody time--everything else simply gets in the way, makes it too expensive or both.
Thanks for all the responses to my question guys...really appreciate it.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I never thought of that as a possible problem. No wonder the conversion is lossy. Excellent links, btw
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Forgotten? Yes. Most anything made in the 80's deserves to be forgotten and dropped from the history books.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Back then I had a red LED square-window display watch with the name Hewlett Packard on it. It was gold-toned, weighed a ton, and had a battery life measureable in days. Had to push a button to read the time, though. I can't remember what I paid for it... might have gotten it cheap since I was always in customer training in the HP Cupertino plant in those days.
I wonder what it would be worth now?
I've had that page bookmarked for a couple years now. Too bad they haven't updated it recently.
I have some items from the 70's and 80's on my web site, including scientific calculator watches, walkie-talkies, and food!
- Eric, InvisibleRobot.com
Perhaps they are running their web server on some of those forgotten electronics or maybe they are just slow to recover from a slashdotting...
/. does wonders for the servers swimming in it's info stream... It can reduce an underpowered server to froth in minutes.
... ohhhh the humanity.
I can almost hear the silent cries for help and see the avg load meter being clipped; I can see the 500 errors, just before the ping replies "host unreachable"
neilio
I have a 1985 CD player with drawer loading. Unlike current ones, the drawer has a very large hole, really just a 1/2" rim around the outside of a normal-sized disk. You cannot play a 3" disk in it because it falls through the drawer. I also have a ring that adapts the 3" disk, it snaps around the outside to make it full-size, with this ring the small disks play.
Based on these observations, it would seem that 3" disks are newer than the original CD specification, since otherwise I would think my CD player would have been made to take them.
PS: the CD player works great, after I replaced one rubber drive band that made the drawer open/close.
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
As my husband tells me, "boxen" is the multiple of computer box. It does not apply to any other kind of box.
Sort of like "mouses" are multiple computer pointing devices...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
My friend's dad had a similar one. It was about the size of a desk telephone and plugged into the wall. It had the four basic functions +,-,X and /.
It was old when we were plaing around with it in 1977. I think it had divide by zero protection, but if you divided a large number by a very small fraction you could watch it count.
I don't browse at -1. I score all the negative moderations +6 in my user preferences . This way, I see only the comments someone moderated. I get great signal to noise ratio, and I don't have to wade through thousands of score 1 "me too" comments to find the quality trolls.
Yours wasn't, by the way.
make it work like it wasen't ment to. I'm a fan of doing things the hard way, esentially to do it the hard way you'd need to rip apart an old 8mm camera, and adapt it's film feed mechinisim to that of the scanner.
.jpg files. .jpg files.
The Scanner is ment to feed 35mm film only. another way of doing this would be to just make your 8mm film look like 35mm by making a card stock holder for the film, you'd just need to figure out how to do it.
I've used film scanner's before. I've also assembled digitised photo's into stop motion animation. I've never done both together.
It could be a very long process, just as a warning.
From my experiences with 8mm and 35mm film, the two use a substantially different feed system, adapting the mechinisim in the scanner could be a major hastle.
This is basically how film is scaned for digital color correction and editing, just on bigger equipment. You could retain all the quality of the film origionals. I also should warn you to make shure that you are using some type of compression when you capture the video, uncompressed 640x480 video is around 25Megs per second. MJPG would be the best quality, with the least processor overhead.
So a step by step.
1 get the film to feed through the scanner.
2 scan film one frame at a time, use the scanner's automation ability to output the images to sequentially numberd
3 you now have a lot of
4 use your editing, or composing program to assemble the still's back into video. (work at a 24 fps frame rate, show each still for 1 frame, you should be able to automate this process)
5 render what is esentially a very fast slide show into video.
6 you may need to color corect the video.
7 output to any format you want, this process would allow you to make divx, mpg, minidv, what ever formats you want, plus you will still have the origional avi file that you rendered so shifting formats in the future should be no problem.
8 convince umax that your scanner arived that way, it is a manufactureing defect, and you deserve a new scanner.
-good luck if you want to try it.
Well art is art isn't it, but then again water is water; and east is east; and west is west; and if you take cranberries
Bah, still slashdotted.
But I love the servers' response:
"Sorry can't allow you access today"
Another piece of equipment they had lying around was a 1960's-vintage Sony portable reel-to-reel video tape recorder. Now that was fun to play with!
Sounds interesting. I found some videos taken with it here.
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
He's dead, Jim.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I cant honestly think of a way to do this. I have an old TI-99 4A (with voice modulator!!) plus extra stuff for it - that I would just like to get rid of it to a good home. I dont want any money - . - any takers???
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
People stopped asking, "what the hell is that thing?"
gewg_
I had my Casio Module No. 82 watch. (Mid/late 70's)
It played no less than 10 sounds/songs: a song for each day of the week, Happy Birthday, Jingle Bells, and it chimed bells at noon.
Plus, it played the scales when you went though it's menu options. It had a sidelight (If you looked close you could see the little led bulb), and a stopwatch. Kept great time too.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Just think: in 10 years time when you attempt to convert your DVDs to the newest format, you'll face litigation for DMCA violations.
In the attic, when I was a kid, I found a 30 lb adding machine. It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, printing the results on tape. The whole thing plugged into the wall, but all the calculations were done *mechanically* that is, they were done with gears and sprockets instead of microchips or even vacuum tubes. The thing was quite loud, but the cover came off so you could watch the mind boggling assemblage of metal move strangely to calculate the answers, and also so you could change the tape.. The tape was nice before the days of spreadsheets and graphing calculators with nice multiline LCD screens. I still use my TI-81 from my college days to balance my checkbook because I can see what I typed and check for errors without firing up the computer. Oh how the mighty have fallen...
Eat at Joe's.
Those 8"x11" rectangular games with 12 colored and lighted buttons from Radio Shack ( I still think they sell 'em though they've been sold forever ) There were 12 ( or was it 15? ) games, one for each button. There were various versions of 'memory' where a sequence of buttons would light up and you would have to duplicate it by pressing them. There was also 'tag' where you had to press the lit button that kept moving around ( kinda like bash-a-gopher at the amusement-park-arcade ) It was pretty fun for in the car since it didn't make you car sick, and it ran off D-Cells which meant that the batterys lasted a LONG time.
Eat at Joe's.
I believe that's the proper name. 2XL was a trivia game (mainly) that utilized 8-track tapes. There were four buttons that were mainly A-D for answering the questions. The personality they gave him was quirky and a little silly, but all in all it was fun. They later made a cassette tape version but somehow it wasn't the same.
...was the one whose single button toggled the screen from displaying the regular date & time to displaying only the year.
That's all -- just a handy reminder in case you ever lost track of the big picture.
Never useful, but in retrospect it was my favorite.
[OT]That's crazy. I grew up not fifty miles from there and never knew it existed. There are a lot of odd little world-class skills being taught in those little community colleges in North Texas. There's a world class Viticulture and Enology program at the community college in Sherman, as well, one of only two in the US, I believe.[/OT]
-1, "1337" speak
I've had great success converting super8 and 8mm film at home. I bought a Video Work Printer from a guy named Roger Evans.
Roger rebuilds old projectors, removes the lens, replaces the bulb w/ a low-watt bulb so the film can't burn, and mounts the projector on a base with a 6-inch lens. By focusing a camera through the lens, one can image directly from the film itself. You need at least a 10x zoom.
He's not into software, so he's modified the projectors to run at variable speeds (1-30 fps), and wired up a microswitch to generate a low-voltage pulse each time the film advances. He wires up a standard mouse so that it can plug into to the microswitch, and generate a mouse-down when the switch fires. For software, he recommends running Adobe Premiere in "grab-a-frame" mode, placing the mouse over the "grab" button, and turning on the projector.
I wanted to do this on a mac, since iMovie and iDVD are fantastic tools. I was also concerned with dropping frames and other synchronization issues using the "grab one frame" method, so run my projector at 6fps and film unsynchronized at 30fps w/ a mini DV camera. I then import from the DV cam using iMove, and post-process the film with a tool I wrote that uses frame-differencing w/ tolerance to detect frame changes. My tool plucks exactly one image per super8 frame. The result is a beautiful, perfectly synchronized, full screen movie in DV format. I can then edit in iMovie, burn to DVD with iDVD. or archive to miniDV tape.
I have some samples online, but they are scaled down and encoded in H.263 for better streaming. To get an idea of image quality, some stills are online also, but these were my first experimentations with the Work Printer: my camcorder was not fully zoomed, and the aspect ratio is off.
If anyone is interested in the tool, it's free (mac only), Send email to telecine at black frog dot com
If anyone is interested in a short (1-2 seconds) clip in full DV format, email me and I can make arrangements.
The only downside is $$. The Work Printer is not cheap, and neither is a high quality camera. Depending on the amount of film you have, it may be cheaper to use a service for the miniDV conversion. However, you have to mail the film in (it could get lost), and generally they splice all your reels together. I really like keeping the films as they were, in the original boxes, with the original notes. Plus I must admit I take a lot of satisfaction from doing it myself.
I hear ya. While most of mine aren't too bad, especially in a safe in a cabinet there was one, some 4 jewel prewar Mentor with a stunning dial that was loud. Like "I can't sleep with this thing on my arm" loud. Like "I can't sleep with this thing stuffed under my pillow" loud.
I ended up stuffing it inside 16 socks and putting it ni my sock drawer. I woke up in the morming and found it on my desk downstairs; it had woken my wife up and she'd moved it.
I sold the watch.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I had a 1970-something front-loading record player for the 45's. It was bright-orange, D - shaped with a speaker on the back. It had two controls - a volume button, and an eject button. It used six C-type batteries that lasted for a very short time.
What sort of uniqueness do you need in a watch
Geeks need their Bling-Bling, too......
I actually had an earlier scientific calc watch than this one. You had to step through the scientific functions with a side button.
I wish I still had it. I'd be glad to part with it for $400! I only used it for a year. The battery connection wasn't great, and it would reset at the most inconvenient times.
8 years earlier I had my first LED watch. It Ate batteries but was the talk of the school.
My favourite watch had to be the one with a tritium capsule backlight. It glowed like an EL backlight, but was powered by radioactive tritium and always on. It was safe as long as you didn't break the capsule!
I worked construction last summer (no computer jobs to be found, and I had to eat). We did a lot of old fashioned math. Sure the foreman had a calculator sometimes, they generally lasted a week. Even then he was often on the other side of the house. Much easier to grab our pencil and do the math on a nearby board. Whats 68 times 1.42, and everyone pauses for a moment and then announces their answer (and looks for their mistake when there is a disagreement)
P.S. Without looking anywhere, why did we multiply by 1.42? Hint: think trig, and a right triangle.
SNIP... 8 years earlier I had my first LED watch. It Ate batteries but was the talk of the school.
.../SNIP
My favourite watch had to be the one with a tritium capsule backlight.
You bring back fond memories of my first digital watches -- a cheap battery-eating LED watch in the late 70s and a tritium-backlight Timex from around 1980.
I removed the tritium backlight capsule (which was plastic) and used it to read books at night while I was in the rain forest in Costa Rica. I do believe that the capsule did leak tritium very slowly because it lost more than half its brightness in less than 12 years. Fortunately, tritium emits such weak beta radiation that it is not too dangerous.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Philips MFB (the 545 rocks! :)
McIntosh audio, too much to name these types. My father has them, they're awesome. Btw have you ever heard about eBay?
I work in a canadian nuke plant. I've been in places where one breath could get me the tritium dose in one of those capsules.
I wish they would start putting them in watches again.
And the calulator watch was a Casio CFX 200. I saw one for sale for a ridiculous price. Wish I had it to sell!
I never had one of these as a kid, but I managed to snag one at a garage sale for 50 cents! Basically, it was a color organ for your TV (think of it as a very early hardware sound visualization device). You hook it up to your TV and stereo, and it puts up pulsing, changing pixelated (big Atari 2600 style pixels) colored pulses/shapes, beating to the music. Has a bunch of buttons and knobs on the front, in classic 70's colors - avocado, rust, gold - black vinyl covered case and wood panel sides - knobs were silver.
I am not sure, but it doesn't seem like many were made, and fewer still exist.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Return to the Pocket Calculator top page
What's a Magical Gadget? Your co-host of Pocket Calculator, Paul, gets full credit for the name of this feature. This is where you can find photos of those unusual items which somehow missed our keen attention in the 70s and 80s. Be it a specialty product, electronic novelty or an utter boondoggle from a major electronics outfit of the day, we'll dig 'em up and talk about 'em. We know there's lots of them out there, so if you've got one, contact us so we can get it on the show!
Also featured here are cool electronics that have been spotted out "in the wild." Did you uncover a cool gadget in a thrift shop, tage sale or flea market and got it for a song? That, friends, constitutes a "brag" and is worthy of attention, so let us know and we'll post it here!
We'll keep adding rare and cool gadgets, so check back often, and tune in to Pocket Calculator, Saturday nights on WBCQ!
Date Magical Gadget 12/01/01 1985 Casio Scientific Calculator Watch 12/01/01 1982 Olympus Walkman-style Stereo Micro-Cassette w/FM 12/01/01 1980s Headphone Stereo/Calculator/Clock 12/01/01 1974 Midland Handheld CB 12/08/01 1980 Casio QL-10 Calculator / Lighter 12/08/01 1980s Mr. FM by Hatori Seiko 12/08/01 1979 General Electric Superadio 12/08/01 1983 Seiko Voice Recorder Watch 12/15/01 1981 Osborne 1 Computer 01/05/02 1985 Magnavox Speakerphone 01/05/02 1981 XXX-Rated Digital Watch (Caution: Explicit!) 01/20/02 A Whole bunch on our NYC Trip! 01/26/02 1979 Bone Fone 01/27/02 1982 Kaypro II transportable computer 02/02/02 1982 Entex Adventure Vision Game System 02/09/02 198? Casio TA-1000 Talking Calculator & Clock 02/23/02 1987 Casio IF-8000 Digital Diary 03/22/02 1972 Gruen Teletime LCD Watch 03/30/02 1976 Sanyo Combination AM/FM Radio - Digital Clock - LCD Calculator 05/11/02 1985 Sharp Top-Loading Boombox 05/18/02 1979 Sharp Computer-Controlled Cassette Deck 06/01/02 1983 Dynalogic Hyper
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
The Elcaset was a Sony format, and was introduced sometime in the late 70s, IIRC.
Just FYI - the capsule probably leaked very very small amounts of tritium if any at all. The reason it got dimmer over 12 years is that the halflife of tritium is 12.3 years - in other words have of the atoms will have decayed in 12.3 years, so it will only be emitting half as much radiation to get turned into light. It's kind of neat to see that as something you visibly noticed!
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
...Were totally cool in the mid '70s. Several major electronics makers made true 4-channel sound systems; the only drag was the cost.
.001%THD system, and 8-track was the best signal you could put thru it at the time.
Pioneer made a hellacious 100W RMS
Vinyl is about 60dB noise floor, Good 8-track would run 70dB or better; My first cassette deck wasn't as good as the 8-track recorder I had at the time.
Hard to believe, but true.
I still have the Led Zep II in quad; It's worn out, and I have nothing to play it on, but WTF...
My friend and I soon discovered that you could grab the whole thing (which weighed a good 5kg), tell it to divide by zero, and pretend it was a machine gun: kachaggachaggachagga....
That is hilarious. And it works. Why isn't your post at +5?
My Casio goes one better than that. It has a shock sensing mechanism, and also a light sensor--so it lights up when you flick your wrist to look at it, but only if it's dark enough that it needs to. You don't want to waste battery power, after all.
Oh, except that it's also solar powered. And waterproof to 200m, and shockproof, with a titanium casing.
I really don't see the appeal of old mechanical wristwatches. What I want from a watch is that it tells me the time accurately, is reliable, and doesn't need maintenance. I want a watch that can withstand any environment I can withstand, and which will survive repeated physical abuse such as being smashed into door frames. I don't want to have to adjust it more than twice a year (when the stupid time zone changes), and I don't want to have to change batteries or wind it up.
The Casio is a bit clunky, though not without a certain industrial aesthetic appeal. I tried a Seiko Kinetic, but it wasn't shockproof enough and needed regular maintenance.
Still, if people want to collect fragile mechanical timepieces, I have no objection. I mean, I have quite a collection of cuddly plush otters, so I'm not one to judge.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
A friend is training watchmakers at a technical college, and it is the most successful offering at the school. Before you poo-poo, said friend's been to Switzerland, and has all the international ratings. And his department's getting bux from the watch (mechanical) industry.
This was not a paid promotional announcement, just trying to say that the business is alive and well. Sure, there are a few more A+ certified PC techs than watch repairpersons, but it's not a dying art.
Perspicacity. You have helped me increase my vocabulary by 1 word. Much good.
Thank you,
HVY
I've enjoyed the usefulness of my Timex DataLink [1997] which stores important phone numbers and other trivia I like to call up, but don't care to commit to my memory.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.