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

Synths

[Monte]

Analog synthesizers. REAL analog, not some pseudo-kindalikeafilter-emulated plastic thing made of CPUs and DSPs, but beasts with discrete component muscles and op-amp souls, machines that could rip speaker cones apart at the twist of a knob.

Back in the day, you could build your own. Now... can you even get the Curtis chips anymore? *nostalgic sigh*

Rest In Peace, Dr. Robert Moog. You will be missed, but your legacy lives on forever.

Simple Games!

[Goalie_Ca]

Games by a long Shot! Grew up with nintendo, C64, arcades, and the super nintendo. Games were immersive, cheap, and very entertaining. I could play them for a couple of minutes or for hours. Graphics stunk compared to today's standards but they were extremely well polished which is all that really counts.

Merlin, Turbo Grafx, oh my

[VermifugeRT]

Not really 80's But I DO remember playing Merlin when I was really young. An electronic Tic Tac Toe of sorts. But my fondest gaming memories are of the NEC Turbo Grafx 16 and it's portable counterpart The Turbo Express.

The system received a face lift in Japan called the Super Grafx but it was abandoned after just a few months. I got one off eBay a few years ago and it was worth every penny.

Capsella

[alta]

I remember this fun toy... a geek's dream
http://www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html

They were a lot of fun, came with motors, gears, wheels, fan blades, all sorts of cool stuff. They weren't cheap though, but I sure enjoyed them. Looking at this site, either the price has come down, or I was really poor as a child.

I'd say I had this in the mid to late 80's.

Cameras made from glass and metal

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

That shot real film. Ok, I love my Nikon D70, but I also love the feel of a vintage Nikon F1 or a Hasselblad 500cm.

Computers that you could understand. I mean understand the whole thing. I worked on PDP 8's and I could keep the entire thing in my mind. I could see the gates that changed state when an instruction executed. Now I'm lucky if I can figure out how the SDRAM refreshes.

Cinemascope and Technicolor. I loved the widescreen of Cinemascope and the soft vibrant colors of Technicolor.

Tube amps. Rich, warm sound, pretty orange glow.

Analog oscilloscopes. Tek 485, the finest portable scope ever made, Tek 7844, 2 completely independent excellent scopes in one box.

Hammond B3 organs and Leslie speakers. If you don't know why, find them and listen.

Analog Magtape Walkmans

[Julian Morrison]

Unlike a CD, you can bounce around as much as you like wearing a walkman, and the thing won't skip. Unil solid state MP3 players, they were the only mobile way to listen to music - and I could argue they're still simpler. No need to preload them from a PC, just pop the cover and snap in a tape. Oh, and tapes remember where you stopped listening, and resume where you left off - even if it was years ago and you've listen to a thousand tapes since.

300 baud modem, CGA color

[DougInthezoo]

I spent WAY too many nights logged into the local BBS with my 300 baud modem. Loved chatting in those places.

And, I had a CGA monitor, with EGA envy. I dreamed of EGA color for (what seemed like) years, and then VGA came out and my world was never the same.

Which colors to choose, Magenta, Cyan, White, Black, or the ever popular Red, Green, Yellow, Black? I just couldn't ever pick.

Re:300 baud modem, CGA color

[daviddennis]

At that time I was a consultant and was driven nuts by the people who would choose totally illegible color combinations on their computers. Things like cyan on magenta with these only half-legible CGA monitors. And I would change the combinations to good ol' green on black, so I could read it, and everyone complained. The colours weren't pretty, you know.

The other thing I remember from that era was running a small multi-line BBS. It was lots of fun and I got to know a lot of cool people. Tragically, after my BBS went down due to a hardware disaster in 1987, my social life took a giant dive it has not recovered from since.

I love the Internet, but nobody seems to have created a really good way to bring local people together in a friendly way ...

D

Tech and replacements

[cei]

10 or 15 years ago I wouldn't have pictured the cell phone almost completely replacing the pager. On the other hand, I would have expected fax to go the way of telex, to be replaced entirely by email by now. Yet fax still persists.

Pagers

[D.A. Zollinger]

Back in the early '90s our dept. all got pagers so we could all keep in touch with each other. We got a good deal with one of the dealers, and we got these monstrous things with multiple buttons being able to do many different things, from displaying messages that had been typed in through a messaging service, to setting and changing the time displayed, as well as cycling through the numbers left and when we were paged.

We all had those pagers for a short period of time as we got used to them, and the contract was smoothed out. When it was finalized, we all got new pagers with one button that did everything depending on how long you held the button down. Upon hearing how we were to interact with the new pagers, one of my colleagues quipped, "God save us from technology!"

1K of awesome power!

[Deanasc]

Sinclair ZX81

Re:1K of awesome power!

[carndearg]

Too right!

I'm not just saying this from misty-eyed nostalgia, the Sinclair ZX81 was a computer that an enthusiast like me could understand at the lowest level because of its ingenious use of the simplest of hardware. Simple hardware meant not so many features but to this day with a electronic engineering degree under my belt that's the only desktop computer I've fully understood every part of how it works at every level. Sure I know how this PC works at a more than superficial technical level but I dont really know what goes on at gate level.

Thank you Sir Clive and your team, you gave me a career!

HP-11C

[xTown]

I got my HP-11C in 1987. I still use it.

LCD Games

[labal]

What about all those cool little LCD Handheld games? The ones where you rescue falling babies from burning buildings, dodge oncoming cars and barrels.

Sure there were only around 4 positions on each screen, but when I was a kid I can remember spending hours playing the damn things, constantly trying to break my own high score. (or that of my evil brother......)

Toys?

[modi123]

Here's some other items to muse on:

When the Tamagatchi craze hit I was working in Target's toy department. I was constantly being harassed by customers (parents more so than kids), and bounced anyone who thought they could wander in the back stock room. I had a fist full of complaints against me when people asked me (for the millionth time) "Where can I find a Tamagatchi?", I would point behind me and reply "Over there - the empty shelves in the shadow of the three foot by four foot sign that says TAMAGATCHI!" Morons ! :)

How about LOGO or just good ol' ClarisWorks? God knows how many times I had to use those in 4th grade!

Another missing item from years ago (rather low tech though) - card catalogs at libraries! How fun were those! I mastered it quickly, then the next year bam - computer indexing! Booo!

AOL 1.0: The digital porn foundation! Using a nice 1400 baud external Hayes modem and giggling with glee as my buddy and I started email lists from chat room names and watched the porn flood in. I swear we might have invented spam!

My most missed was Nike Pumps. The genius that added inflatable balloons inside shoes was a true man of genius!

*sigh* The good old days!