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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."
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
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
...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 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..
How I miss my Game&Watch double-screen Donkey Kong (1982)! *nostalgic sigh*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
It still works for me, but just in case, some text and the list:
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 Hyperion Computer
06/01/02 1987 Fisher-Price PXL 2000 Video Camera
06/08/02 1981 Handheld Football Game by Bambino
06/08/02 1970s Panasonic RF-2200 Portable Multi-Band Radio
06/15/02 198? Technicolor Compact Video Cassette Recorder
07/6/02 1970s Bellsound CB-8 CB Receiver to 8-Track Adapter
07/20/02 1987 Sony D-88 Discman (World's Smallest CD Player!)
08/10/02 1983 Horse Race Pocket Computer
08/17/02 1976 PocketCom XB-100 Pocket CB Tranceiver
08/24/02 1970s Super Buster Vintage Radar Detector
08/31/02 1983 Sony SRF-A1 AM Stereo Walkman
09/07/02 197? Lloyd's Accumatic E613 LCD Calculator w/ Alarm Clock
09/14/02 1981 Buscom AutoDialer
09/28/02 198? Sony M-50 Micro Walkman
10/19/02 MTV Stereo Broadcasts
10/26/02 1981 Sony KV-4000 micro Trinitron TV
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.
The 80s Cult High Tech Wrist Watch
mirror of links off of main page
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!
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.
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.
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
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."
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!
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.
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
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.
http://slushdot.org/mirror/forgotten_elec/
Got it before they took it down.
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
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).
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
Both my great uncle and my Grandfather passed away some 10 years ago. To be honest my cousin isnt good enough to be a Master undertaking an apprentice.
BESIDES I kinda have a phobia of things that tick, no joke, while I lived at my grandparent my room was the "watch room" all 4 walls were covered in although beautiflly crafted shelves FULL of clocks in need of repair, and litterally THOUSANDS of watches in drawers and boxes needing fixed.
NOW imagine waling into the room, the very act of walking created enough vibration to set many in to motion ticking away, as a collector I am sure you are familiar with how sensitive to atmospheric conditions especially the clocks are, clocks striking at all hours of the night because the started working again , watches starting and stopping, PUT all this in a VERY quiet country setting, It took me almost a year to release the mainsprings on anything I could find, but 3 years later watches would still start and stop ticking ALL the time....ZUUUUGGG enough to drive a person half mad
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 ?
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..."
I had the big brother version, the Tomy Omnibot (not that cheap 2000 version either, but the original). I remember playing with that thing for hours and hours and hours, training it to do stuff (by recording moves on an audio tape). I even remember in grade 5 having to create a little play with 2 of my classmates, and we used the Omnibot... and it was a smash.... Ahhhhh, the memories.... E-Bay, here I come! :)
It's better to burn out than to fade away
It's not a plain old LP record, it's a different system with finer tracks and faster speed (I think about 20x finer tracks and 450 RPMs). The page linked by the grandparent is cool (yet a bit difficult to navigate to the technical specs), but I found a very cool 20 minute video explaining both disc and player manufacturing made in 1981 here (beware, it's 101 MB)!
/. 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
He's dead, Jim.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
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.