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.

100 Minute Cassetes

[gambit3]

ahh... being able to create my own mixes for the first time... making one HUGE cassette of the songs that I liked.

I didn't see how it could get any better than that...

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.

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.

this

[nocomment]

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

ahh the joys of elementary school in the 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

One Word

[D.A. Zollinger]

PONG!

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.

Free porn

[Ratbert42]

I am curious what the /. community remembers as their favorite technology from previous decades (be it 70's, 80's or 90's).

CompuServe GIF, 320x200 256 color VGA displays, uudecode, and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. 300 floppies of 100dpi 256 color porn.

HP-11C

[xTown]

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

Re:1K of awesome power!

[The Cydonian]

Heh, I still have my Sinclair ZX Spectrum + somewhere at my parents' home, and often hook it up to a television for old time's sake.

Let's just say my 10 year old cousin didn't quite see the point of listening to screeching noises for half an hour only to play a text adventure game with shoddy fonts. :-)

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.

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!