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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."
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.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
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!
How I miss my Game&Watch double-screen Donkey Kong (1982)! *nostalgic sigh*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
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
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.
As a guitarist I can't help but think about the original Tom Scholtz Rockman from the 1980's.
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
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!
My dad actually has one. The red LED digits behind an inscrutable nearly-black red filter. Made by Texas Instruments, I think it was the first digital watch available to consumers.
Battery hog, too. Kept good time though. It still works, he let me use it for about a year when I was in college, and it was a good conversation starter. Not much good in direct sunlight, but that was never really a problem while I was an engineering student....
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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.
Oh man, memories. I thought those things were so fantastic.
A friend of mine had one that had a "game" on it; basically numbers would march across the screen and you'd have to match them on the calculator and type them in to "shoot" them down before they reached the left side of the display.
I begged my parents for one when I was a kid, and used to think about all the unbelievably fun things I would do with the calculator watch (?).
I finally got one, when they were cheap enough to be out of vogue. By that time it wasn't nearly as cool, and it broke in a few months anyway. I think by that time I had a digital watch that turned into a miniature Transformer.
Well I am a little sad, I moved in with my grandparents to help on the farm and take care of my 98 year old great grandmother when I was 15, my grandfather asked If I wanted to learn watchmaking, he said it would take about 4 years of apprenticship. I said no, as did my father taking my fathers route into computers (he started with IBM in 65)
The family still owns a rather upscale jewlers store, my cousin a few years older than myself learned watchmaking from my great uncle (my grandfathers brother)
He is one of a VERY few watchmakers in the U.S. he specalizes in repairs on historical timepices. he now makes upward of $200k a year.
I thought the same thing most everyone else did, in this day and age how could a watchmaker compete in a world of mass manufacturing, the sad part is "Old World" craftmanship is dying, and its progressive, the fewer people even capable of this sort of work are able to teach fewer students.
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.
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
I remember when calculators came out; you could get expelled from school if you were caught with one.
Hello,
Was this a high school that you are referring to when you say that you could get expelled for having a calculator or even a middle school?
What was their reason for expelling a student with a portable machine that did arithmetic?
I'm curious because I wonder about the effect that new advanced technology has on deeply conservative societies and nobody is more conservative than an American public school administrator.
I wonder what will happen in places like Singapore, (which is deeply politically conservative, moderately conserative in education, and progressive in adoption of new electronic technologies) when the first spoken-Chinese to traditional character writers appear at low cost? Will students there attempt to refuse to spend ten years memorizing Chinese characters? Will the government ban them except for foreigners as being 'disruptive to society'? Or will they accept them a novelity and as just another electonic product to make and sell?
An even worse dilemma for Singapore will be the camera to speech convertors. This will be (in about 10 years as a guess) a hand-held device that 'speaks' the Chinese characters that the user has in the camera viewfinder.
With these machines will students refuse to spend ten years memorizing characters now that there would be a cheap machine that 'reads' the characters and speaks them?
Time will tell...
thank you,