Forgotten Electronics of the 70s and 80s 531
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."
PXL-2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
The first Diskmen ws the smalest? (Score:4, Interesting)
Remembering.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Reverb for Stereo Equipment (Score:1, Interesting)
Donkey Kong (Score:3, Interesting)
Early walkman (Score:5, Interesting)
Weird answerphone for the car (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
older than 70s... (Score:4, Interesting)
80's gaming (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
Good times.
Tom Scholtz's Rockman (Score:4, Interesting)
Super 8mm Home Projector (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Early walkman (Score:5, Interesting)
I always wondered why they got rid of that feature.
ID this Electronic device for me (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Coleco hand-held football and baseball games (Score:4, Interesting)
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 personal favorite: TRS-80 pocket computer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Digital watch a step backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
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....
No mention of VideoDisc?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the calculator watch.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Digital watch a step backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Is there a good collection of 80's electronic toys (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Hehehe.... I do that.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Before there was Game Boy (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I'm old (Score:1, Interesting)
Calculators. My dad waited and brought home a nice one I thought. It has a large LCD display tilted up with a magnifiying back window to brighten it. It ran on 2 9V batteries and had large tactile buttons spread apart so it was easier to use. Very handy, much more than many built since then, and my dad still uses it. I later got a TI-58, programmable but NO continuos memory, which severly limited the usability.
Of course, I still use my 1980 Sony sterero receiver. DVD player works throug it just fine.
The CB craze in the middle of the 70's was kind of precursor to usenet, a lot of noise in comparison to useful information. I did have a nice 23 channel CB, and my friends would talk to each other everynight around 9:30. Sometimes we would talk and comment to each other while we watched Saturday Night Live. That was useful.
Anyway, I'm 10-7 on this post, and I'll catch ya later.
Re:N-Gage (Score:2, Interesting)
In 10 years, there will be people laughing at me because I'll probably be clutching onto my Nokia 5510 mp3 player (GSM will be obsolete by then, so no phone calls). I get crap from N-Gage owners (little brother) already. I just can't let go of my stuff as technology marches on. I still use 3dfx voodoo 1&2 cards, and my 8088 is corroding so it doesn't always work.
Also, regarding the gadgets on that site, why does every second appliance have an embedded calculator? WHY? Was it all the rage back then to have a calculator wherever you went?
~Duane
Re:the calculator watch.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, I remember the Transformer watches. A friend of mine had one, I seem to remember being very sorry for accidentally breaking it whilst trying to transform it.
Thinking back though, considering how cunning some of the Transformers were the watch one was hardly impressive. If I recall the head flipped out of the top of the watch, the two arms just pulled from the sides (They did include some of the cover though so weren't spindly little efforts, this was a real Man's Transformer watch), and the bottom of the watch just kind of swung down on spindly little efforts to become the legs (Okay, the bottom half was less manly.. more Kate Moss in snowboots).
Ah, fond memories of breaking other people's toys! Not like now, of course, where I'm paid to break other people's toys.. well, that's the upshot anyway.
Phone that used punch cards for dialing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
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 not the first (Score:3, Interesting)
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. [pixelp.com]
Hamilton, in turn was sold to SMH, now "The Swatch Group" (which was formed in 1933 when Omega, Tissot and Lemania merged).
Re:Digital watch a step backwards (Score:3, Interesting)
I still use this... (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:the calculator watch.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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,
Re:the calculator watch.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not the original poster, but I remember the days when you could get in trouble (maybe not expelled, but whatever) for having a calculator... or at least for using it in a math class.
It didn't much help me buckle down and do my long division homework when my mom said "it's ridiculous that they spend so much time making you do this... after all, everyone has calculators now!"
Of course, now I sometimes just do the math in my head, because the calculator on my phone is somewhat tedious to use. But it depends on what mood I'm in.
Re:the calculator watch.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I was in the 7th grade when they began this policy. The reason given was that calculators were suddenly cheap and widely available; they wanted to prevent any possibility of cheating. Everything had to be shown on paper, working through all the steps in your mind.
The current policy allows calculators, but the coursework was made more difficult. At the time, it was OK for engineers, scientists, and businesspeople to use them; they had already proven their understanding of math. The conservative policy was an effort to make sure the future generations also understood. Just IMHO, the current school administrators are *much* more liberal than in the past. Overall, it took about 10 years to absorb the change - well after I was gone.
I can't prove it, but I have a feeling that Singapore will become much like the US soutwest. My sister there tells me that her kids are learning Spanish simply because half their friends speak it. Advertising, business, and law are done in both languages. I have a feling that Singapore will be similar, simply because people will *want* to socialize, do business, have friends, etc. They will probably use the speech converters for a few decades until everyone is bilingual, with restrictions placed on school children such as the ones I had. HTH.
Video Work Printer and some custom software (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [mac.com], 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 [mac.com], 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.