Discussion on:

Tech gadgets we once loved but since abandoned (Photos)

A standalone DVD recorder costs around $85 USD. You just plug your VCR into it, pop a blank DVD into it, hit record, then hit play on the VCR. Blank DVDs cost about 25 cents each. About as exciting as doing laundry, tho...

Wow, I had en still have most of them, even an 8-track cassette player on my old timer Dodge Challenger. The pager is still in use at work. When someone rings the bell of ourwarehouse, the keeper is paged up.

I have just put my CRT monitor back to work. Why? I use remote access software to assist my clients and having been having increasing difficulty in reading the remote screen. I put the CRT monitor in place to see what would happen and it appears to have resolved the problem. It is early days yet but from what I have seen it appears to be a big improvement.

I just began a 6 month contract as a healthcare facility, and someone asked if I'd been assigned my pager yet. Felt a chill run up my spine...

Last I heard, Sony had discontinued the Walkman in America, but still produced it for the Asian market.

Those old rotary phones lasted for years and years, unlike every cell phone I've ever had.

Also, cassette is the ONLY authentic way to listen to Strokin' by Clarence Carter...

Now I've got an earwig.

A red one, at that.

Ask any kid now: You know about dial-up Internet. What does the term "Dial" mean? Most won't know unless they are into tech history.

Well, I still see some of our people occasionally punching numbers into a handheld calculator - whilst sitting in front of a PC running Excel!

But much on that list is still active in my home along with a host of newer stuff. I have a great collection of records and a wonderful phonograph. Still use a boom box for tapes and CD's as well as a big tape deck and a walkman. Afterall - transferring a collection of thousands to CD's is either major in time or in money or both.
Also something people don't mention much. These new MP-3 players etc work fine for downloaded music but not well at all for the music one records oneself which is mostly what I listen to. They are all wrongheaded about naming, organizing and playing my own recordings so what lies unused around my house is ipods, zunes, Cowans and etc. So its got to be tapes or CD's for me.
And small calculators? use one everyday and have them in most rooms of the house. Also old CRT Tv's although none for computer monitors. And still have some dial phones as well as land lines in every room in the house. Cell phones are just no good with sound for actual phone calls and besides really don't work outside of major cities. And radio phones don't work when the electricity goes off but the old dial ones often will.
So we are in a fun in between place with lots and lots of items going obsolete in a hurry and others clinging to life for ages. Time to go research a new ultra-lite and make my aging laptop obsolete.

Two Apple IIE's and a GS that still work flawlessly. You left out my quadraphonic reel-to-reel tape recorder. How about an eight track tape player? Some you may remember Heathkit and had the thrill(as I did) of building a TV, component testing equipment and many other projects.Your showing of a slide rule reminded me how bad I was in math in high school. I also own one of the first portable cassette players. It was made by Hitachi and had a separate tuner pack. The unit has a vinyl case and still works!!

I use Modems daily, as a gprs link to access over the air 3G repeaters. I have probelms Getting WIN7 setup to work on some as I cannot manually configure the connection. My Casio fx-100s calculator sits on my desk and I use it daily - the batteries are the same it came with in 2006.
My wife loves her flip video
My record player is still treasured, as is my portable typewriter
Still have to convert MP3 files to WAV files so my wife can play them on her CD player
I see no mention of VHS players, or videodisk players
Ah the memories

I can remember a time when one of my instructors told us in the class when we were filling out our orders for the parts for the computers we would build that we should choose the large 4 MB hard drive because it was so big we'd never fill it and we should go with 4MB of 70ns RAM so that we could be sure of being able to run any program that comes out in the future.

40 MB hard drive. not 4MB.

What's 36 megs anyway

BTW, and strictly FYI (but not FYEO) you can edit your posts here.

The turn table is far from dead! It seems that more musicians are producing LPs!

Also, calculators are still very popular. For example, financial calculators & high school students use them in great numbers.

Remember those tubes that displayed numbers?

The first frequency counter I used used Nixie tubes, as did an error indicator at my first USAF assignment. The first worked quite well; the second, not so much (the problem wasn't the Nixies, but the circuit design).

The first portable electronic calc i ever saw was sold by SCM Corp., eight nixies and a battery that would start an eighteen-wheeler. RGIS bought a bunch of them and we had to add yet and additional huge external belt pack battery (nicad, of course) which occasionally would catch fire on the user's belt. Doubleungood! The stainless steel strain relief cable on the power cord would jiggle around and short the pos. terminal to the neg. grounded frame. Wonderful enginerring.
(Woops, typo...but maybe enginERRING is a better term, anyway!)

I remember well my first printer and it was a horrid little thing to use but it worked well and it produced text that didn't look too good even if it was readable. A Gorilla 7 pin printer, one of the very first dot matrix printers ever created and it's been a lot of years ago now. That thing was very loud too, used that traction paper that you never see anymore because it's not used now.

First printer I saw was from an IBM system taking a couple of big rooms. The printer itself was as large as a small closet and worked with a long rubber chain to which a row of typographic metal characters was attached. The chain spun very fast and there was behind it a row of little hammers, one for each column, pushing the letter towards the paper just when it was speeding in front of it.
All that made for a very fast (and very noisy) printing. The paper modules were spouting out from it at an impressing pace.

My 8 YO child brain was massively striked by this

although i'm pretty sure it was made by IBM.
I didn't service it cause that was another dept., but it seems that keeping the belt and hammers in snyc was a headache.

I wasn't going to get old...but here I am. 8)

Maybe YOUR turntable is collecting dust, but we've got 1200 LPs that would take me years, and terrabytes of space, to digitize. I use my turntables - yes, multiple - on a weekly basis!

I have every item but number 10 right here in my room - I even have a working Bomar Brain in the drawer with my slide rule (actually 2 - a 6 in and 10 in) - I don't quite understand why you counted the phonograph and the 45 individually - perhaps a beer opener could have taken on of the spots - good stuff - thanks

A decent run of interesting old stuff. It was sad to see Kodak "hit the skids". Slide rules could still teach a lot about mathematical relationships. Vinyl records were actually an amazing analog data storage medium. Ah, the rotary dial telephone, I bet my finger could still work on of those with elan! The transistor radio, so cool... but in another time. And the modem's "song", something interesting coming my way. All these things so important and valuable in their time. Things change my friend. The future is upon us.

You forgot the typewriter. My nephews see them in museums nowadays.

I'm in my mid 50's and I used to use a slide rule until I came across a paticular electronic device. the HP35 calculator. What's more I still have mine and it still works although I no longer use it regularly.

The slide rule or the calculator?

was when i was working for The Singer Co., which had recently bought Friden, and was still selling mechanicals at about 1500 bucks a shot. One of our salesmen came in showing us a new Casio, i think is was an fx-10. It would fit in your shirt pocket and would do any division in a few milliseconds, when any division would take thirty or so seconds with any of our 15 pound desk space eating, earsplitting, room shaking Singer/Friden models.
We were quite justifiably scared to death of this thing.
I soon quit Singer, bought my own Casio and started teaching electronics, since now i didn't have to solve the math problems myself.

"I'll give you my Flip when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. "
I've got two of these little beauties for myself and another for the shop. I don't want an "all in one solution" for my video. These pocketable 720p rigs record great sound and decent video. My youtube "Empire" is ever expanding (Hawk1964 and pcfunfactory). I only wish Cisco would have went one more step up and made them 1080p before abandoning the project.

As several others have said the pocket calculator killed the slide rule in the 70's not the PC in the 80's. Me I still have 3 in a drawer in my dresser.

How can you say the pocket calculator is dead? I still have 1 on my desk at work, another in my desk with more capabilities, and one on my desk at home. Sure I also have a calculator app on all desktops, and one on my PDA that I use when I am out and about, but it is much easier to pick up the one from my desk if I am sitting there.

Seems to me you just added stuff you may not use and assumed no one does, or maybe you just wanted more slides so you could show more ads. Your list is quite flawed.

like Novation CAT and Andersen-Jacobsen 103J. 14,400; 28,800 and 56K modems were long after the demise of acoustic coupling. And for the die-hards who didn't want acoustic, there was the Western Electric Dataset 103J.

And since when did a "Calculator App" become obsolete? At least you might have cropped the "AT&T" logo and Signal Strength indicator if you wanted to foist off a screen shot as a real device.

The venerable phonograph or turntable is gaining back popularity formerly lost to the small and convenient digital forms of Pods, Pads, etc. The reason for this resurgence is the rediscovery by many individuals who take their music and it's reproduction seriously. They found that all isn't quite what many thought is well with the digital storage and reproduction. Yes, small size is a plus and so too is the loss of those nasty pops and clicks caused by scratches to the vinyl record. There is one thing that is missing from digital, the pure clean sound without the harshness associated with shreaking emphasized treble and booming undefined bass. Analog is here or should I say hear to stay for those of us which love the music.

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match
My sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white





Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!

I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away!

Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away!!

Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away !!!

From the countless yellow boxes of their photo paper to the familiar black-and-gray cans that held EktraChrome, KodaChrome, or even Tri-X Pan film, there are millions of memories there.

In the 70s' those Kodak Instamatics captured many a prom, new puppy, or birthday cake. Between the eye-damaging flashbulbs and the distinct sound those cameras made when advancing the 110 or 126 cartridge.....good stuff.

Here's the million dollar question: if Kodak had made pro-grade cameras, would they still be around? Kodak always made cheaper consumer-grade cameras, while they left the 'good' camera business to Nikon, Canon, and others.

It's been said that Kodak never made the transition to digital while companies like Fuji did.

That was started as an ad campaign for the kodak instamatics. You had to open it first so you could capture the rest of Christmas with pictures...

You clearly don't have teenage children who show any interest in real music, for if you did, you will know that vinyl recordding are very much back in!

That sound you hear is every DJ in the world scratching his or her...turntables in disbelief at lumping their bread and butter in with these "dying breed of devices."