Technology That You Loved from the 70/80/90's?

modi123 asks: "I was spending a large chunk last weekend watching VH1's I love the 80's: Strikes Back with a couple of friends. We would comment and laugh at all the dreadful things we were into, and then the topic shifted towards old tech and gadgets from then. I brought up my old 486 Packard Bell (DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1, Doom, all for $3700.00), and it spiraled out from there. The usual things cropped up: Nintendos, Sega Master Systems, Apple II Gs, and so forth. Then it delved into more weird items: Rob The Nintendo Playing Robot, HyperCard, cell phones with 50 lb batteries, and the pager craze. I am curious what the /. community remembers as their favorite technology from previous decades (be it 70's, 80's or 90's). Perhaps we can even chart a timeline if people toss in when they first remember it."

Comments

Osborne I luggable

[renehollan]

Subject says it all, a portabe computer with a 5" monochrome CRT (16x64, IIRC) and two 5-1/4" full height floppy disk drives running CP/M on a Z80.

this

[nocomment]

10 print "Derek likes Lisa!! ";
20 goto 10
run

ahh the joys of elementary school in the 80's. :-)

One Word

[D.A. Zollinger]

PONG!

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Zmodem- the friend that made downloading possible on my rotten phone lines at 1200 baud (why? Because the downloads could be RESUMED! Now there's something they should add to firefox!)

The internet has always been here, right?

[JavaRob]

Okay, I'm almost 30... but somehow my mind edits everything in retrospect, so unless I sit down and think about it, it feels to me like I've had an email address since I knew how to spell. Like my Mom must have ordered "Where the Wild Things Are" for us kids from Amazon.com, then googled up some info about the newest line of Transformers.

Weird... of course, that's all nonsense.

When I stop to think, I remember playing Jungle Hunt on my uncle's TI computer, which had cartridges, but could also save data to a cassette tape. Most schoolwork was hand-written, though I wrote a few papers the hi-tech way, on my Dad's (expensive!) computer with no hard drive, but TWO floppy drives, one for the Word Perfect diskette, and one for the save diskette. When I went off to college, I had to use actual, paper maps to figure out how to get there. And I brought along a Macintosh computer with an 80 MB hard drive. And Tetris!

I know why I take modern technology for granted, though. This IS my life. The internet has totally pervaded my existence. What would my life be like without these technologies?

I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer... at work and often at leisure as well. I have now moved hundreds of miles away from the company I still work for, communicating primarily over email, writing code in a language invented less than a decade ago, adding features to a system that runs over the internet. Checking changes into a source control system that is, likewise, hundreds of miles away. Or updating my other source of revenue, a website that I built entirely using free tools and which I host in a server also hundreds of miles away from my home. When people pay for something on my site, they are shunted to s different server on the other side of the country. When a customer lives in Zambia, or the Netherlands, or in North Pole, Alaska, it's interesting but no surprise. But when a customer actually lives somewhere in my area, I'm startled. I wonder with an curious shiver if I may have actually SEEN this person before -- that would be amazing!

I had some serious vision problems last year (long-term damage from an infection I had as a kid), and went through a series of operations to replace various parts of both eyes (and advances in medicine are off-topic here, but again, thank you modern technology). But as long as one eye could make out magnified text on a 21" monitor, I could still do my work and still earn a living... it didn't make a difference at all that I couldn't see well enough to leave the house.

So how would my life have been different if I'd been born 50 years earlier? Even 10 years earlier? I can't even imagine it.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[egarland]

Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT (an ssh client for Windows) has support for it and it's great for logging in somewhere and quickly sending files to/from your local machine, no filesharing necessary.

Many Linux distributions still have Zmodem installed. I think the package is "lrzsz".

Just to plug SecureCRT, so far it's the fastest, most convienent, best SSH client I've ever used on any platform, which is sad considering it's a Windows app.

VINYL!

[Phreakiture]

I still have a good-sized collection of 80's and 90's (and some 70's) vinyly records. Some of them are a little scratched, but most of them sound great.

Actually, my collection has been growing in recent years as people are ditching their collections at yard sales.

Let me head off the likely next comment, though. Vinyl doesn't sound better than CD's, neither does it sound worse, for the most part. It sounds different. I have a good turntable, though, and that makes a big difference. The highs seem a tad crisper on my sound system from vinyl than from CD, but the noise floor is higher, and there is more frequent distortion on the vinyl.

Pinball

[xsbellx]

Flippers, steel ball(s), tilt, blinking lights and ringing bells. Few things are more fun than being able to shake a machine just the right way to keep that ball bouncing between two or three bumpers or making that backhand shot (right flipper shooting the ball up the right side of the machine) for a free ball.

Ahh to have the days of three-games-for-a-quarter back!