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b0nes posted:What were those "mini records" called? 45s?  Flexi discs?  Fisher-Price music box record player? 
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Jul 14, 2012 16:54
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b0nes posted:No they were not singles, or 45's or flexi discs (which were loving cool). I remember we had a thread similar to this one before, they are like records but small enough to put in cars. I think they were marketed for cars yet they were a horrible failure. You're thinking of Highway Hi-Fi, an in-car record player made for Chrysler in 1956 that took weird 10 inch discs that played at 16⅔ RPM. The company that made them was CBS (yes, as in the TV network) Electronics. It's no surprise that it was a colossal failure when you think of a record player in a car, especially one as large and heavy as a '50s Chrysler.
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Jul 15, 2012 18:18
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I don't know if these were mentioned, but I was at the thrift store the other day and these popped into my head after seeing a couple: telephone & alarm clock radios in one. Every household it seemed in the 80s and 90s had one of these in the master bedroom. They were designed to save space on nightstands and the like since telephones took up valuable real estate on a small nightstand, and by combining two things into one, you now had space for a glass of water, your glasses, gently caress toys, dentures, and what have you. The rise of cellphones and the shrinkage of landline owners pretty much made these things obsolete. Also, how about console TVs and stereos that were made to look like, and blend in as pieces of living room furniture?  Man, that's swanky.
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Sep 15, 2012 19:33
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DrBouvenstein posted:A million times this. I hate keyboard trays, and I don't get why people use them. Not only are they too low, but they are never sturdy enough and wobble every time you type. Should have gotten yourself a 1950s-ish office desk. These things can support the weight of six elephants, are fully functional with plentiful drawer space, can be found at most thrift stores and on Craigslist for incredibly cheap, and will be the only remnants of humans ever existing long after we're gone.  For added coolness, you also should have gotten yourself a sturdy chair from a similar era. gently caress these plastic chairs they sell at Office Max and the like; these chairs will also be found by a distant future race of beings along with the desk and wonder where they came from.  I'm currently sitting in a chair from the 1970s that is all heavy and polished stainless steel (including wheels) with cushy brown frizzy fabric. It may not be modern, but I'll be damned if it isn't like new still, is incredibly strong and sturdy, and comfortable as hell. I've also got another chair similar to the picture that is all beat to hell and back that I keep outside for lounging and working on projects and cars, but it still rolls like a new chair and is equally comfortable. I love my old rear end chairs.
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Sep 27, 2012 05:52
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:More old house wire chat: my aunt lives in a very old house in Upstate New York (one of the earliest ones in the area she lives in, actually). It got electricity very early on too, and a lot of the original wiring was left in place in the basement when a more modern system was added. It was back when electricity was scary and unpredictable I guess, because all the wires are uninsulated and held up by fairly large ceramic stand-offs that look like miniature versions of the ones on high voltage power lines. The whole wiring job looks like a Tesla invention. You're talking about knob and tube wiring which was used from electrical wiring's infancy in the 19th century to the 1930s. I think others have mentioned it in this thread. It is pretty mad inventor's laboratory, though. The picture of the industrial use of it in the wiki article is just scary. BigHustle posted:KP Surplus is the warehouse where old poo poo goes to die. I got this link from here some while back, but there is a lot of new old stock of cool poo poo at Jack Berg Sales.
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Oct 5, 2012 06:39
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0toShifty posted:Oil CAN. It can't be terribly old because it does have a barcode. Bar codes came out in 1974. The last time I saw oil in cans like that was the mid-1980s, and even then I think they were just older stock. That can's probably 30-34 years old. But my god, I've never seen knob & tube wiring up close like that before.  That is some scary-looking poo poo, especially the cloth wiring that would probably disintegrate if you breathed on it. Thank goodness none of that is live anymore, but it is really cool to have in your home just to see how wiring was done nearly a century ago.
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Oct 6, 2012 02:38
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Phanatic posted:Pyrex/Corning stuff Corelle dishes (part of Corning/World Kitchen) are also made of Vitrelle, a three-layered tempered glass that's nearly resistant to chipping and breaking easily. I think World Kitchen also tweaked the original formula of Vitrelle because I've seen a lot of reports online about dishes that explode like bombs with shrapnel everywhere when they are dropped or tapped (like this one, for example), whereas the old Corelle dishes (we're talking 1970s to 1990s) were practically indestructible. I wouldn't buy any new Pyrex or Corelle stuff because it's just a name now. I myself eat off a set of Corelle dishes and bowls that are about 35 years old, and they are daily microwaved, heated, cooled, refrigerated, manhandled, and washed in hot and cold water, and they are all still in one piece and look like they were just taken out of the box yesterday. You can't beat old plates to get guests to reminisce about how they had the same dishes like this when they were a kid (not my picture, but same dishes:  Other older goons probably had Butterfly Gold or Old Town Blue dishes when they were kids.
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Nov 2, 2012 05:00
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Geoj posted:On this token... I'm using this same exact trackball right now to scroll down and mouse around on this very page. I never thought about them back when, I don't play games or work extensively in CAD, but I do work in Photoshop and Illustrator beautifully with this thing, and I only recently bought it at Goodwill about two years ago on a whim after my wrist was getting arthritic. My wrist has never felt better. re: gas dryers. Gas dryers seem to have been a thing for a lot of older homes here (I'm thinking 1940s to the 1960s), but 1970s and up homes seem to use electric dryers exclusively. My folks' home that was built in 1973 has always had an electric dryer, even though the rest of the house uses natural gas. Gas water heater, gas house heater, and gas stove. What's weird about the house is behind the stove, there's a 240 volt hookup so you can have the option of an electric or gas stove, but there is only a hookup for an electric dryer in the washroom and no capped gas valve. Dumb.
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Nov 18, 2012 17:10
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TommorowComesToday posted:The Mitsubishi VS507R I remember an ad for something like this TV in an old National Geographic from 1980. I even remember it was some dude in a leather chair making GBS threads himself because a pirate on TV had a parrot that had flown off the screen into the man's living room implying the TV produced "life-like pictures that will look like they're in the room with you!" And the pirate on TV is all like   I've seen those color mirror projection TVs in action and they are quite sharp in the image department, but the ones I remember were giant console furniture TVs with plastic screens. You know, those '80s rear projection screens that aimed at the plastic screen and made crude images. I always thought (even as a kid) that they blew rear end and had terrible pictures. These things:  You had to be front and center and not a millimeter off from the exact dead center of the screen to see anything, because otherwise all you were going to see was black moving things if you were off to the side. They had a really dark and dim picture, and I remember you couldn't leave a VCR or video game on pause for more than a minute because the fear was that it would damage the bulbs and screen with burn-in. My friend had one when I was a kid, and he insisted that BIGGER = BETTER when it came to playing NES on it. Okay, so at the time I had this 19" Zenith TV from the early 70s that I had to hook the RF modulator to with one of these:  That is ubiquitous with 1970s and earlier TV sets and the then recent 1980s technology, and man, that TV had an awesome picture when playing NES on it. So what I was seeing on my old rear end TV with my NES looked like this:  Looked like this on my friend's 46" piece of poo poo TV with the same game:  gently caress my childhood friend, and gently caress those old school big screen projection TVs. I mean, the technology did get better because the early 2000s HDTVs with the same technology look mighty fine, but the early technology just sucked really bad and didn't account for BIGGER = BETTER at all.
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May 5, 2013 20:43
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DNova posted:OK I tried to not to sperg out after TomorrowComesToday's post but now I can't help it anymore. I'm sorry, I grew up poor and didn't see many big-screen TVs or even an HDTV until I was given my first 720p HDTV in 2006. Until then, I was using used CRTs. I have virtually no idea about the inner workings of large projection TVs, but I really meant the burn-in happened, not that it was a myth. People would just yell at you "DON'T PAUSE IT TOO LONG OR YOU'LL BURN THE IMAGE IN!  " all the time, so you listened. I used to take apart old broken CRTs as a kid and found the inner workings fascinating since there were these Radio Shack comics I used to collect and read about how electronics work. Oh, and those comics were and are still boss.By all means sperg away if someone's incorrect, but it's not really so much pendantic as it is condescending when you put "bulbs" in parentheses. Just say it didn't use bulbs to correct me instead of "'bulbs', heh  " When you're a small kid and only see a projection TV like the ones I'm talking about maybe twice in your short childhood life, then try to remember back to how they worked, those miniature CRT screens sure do look like a red, green, and blue stage light v v
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May 6, 2013 02:28
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leidend posted:An HDTV in 2006 made you an early adopter rather than a "poor" didn't it? edit: unless you're counting 480p as HDTV? I remember going to Best Buy around the beginning of the millennium and seeing the first HDTVs for sale. Six years down the road from 2000 isn't exactly adopting to new technology early. Weren't those very early sets upwards of $6,000 to $10,000? I remember they were a ridiculous price at the time. But nah, a family friend won it in a raffle, but since she already had two HDTVs (she rich and shows it off with the newest expensive things), she gave it to me as payment for working on her car. That was nice of her, even though the TV died a year and a half later. I was expecting money to, you know, pay for things that needed paying, though. Still honestly poor.
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May 6, 2013 03:58
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Krispy Kareem posted:I guess that fits with other obsolete technology, because as far as I know no automakers use wrap windshields anymore. Maybe they just aren't necessary, but sometime around the mid-1990's the trend moved to flatter windshields. Wrap-around windshields actually died out by the mid-1960s, not the 1990s; cars were pretty aerodynamic by the 90s with flatter windshields. Example: 1963 Chevrolet truck:  Notice how the A-pillar tapers toward the door instead of the front? That's a true wrap-around windshield. Then, sometime in 1963, the all new totally redesigned for 1964 Chevrolet trucks came out that same year and looked like this:  Yep, The windshield is now flat, and the A-pillar resembles a modern truck for the first time. Other vehicles quickly followed suit, and wrap-around windshields were practically gone forever.
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Jul 4, 2013 06:46
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Pham Nuwen posted:I occasionally pull out one of these at home: I was using this same exact setup (monitor and keyboard) at a previous job around 2007. At the end of my day, I'd put my data into that glorious monochrome green screen and go pick up several pages of a dot-matrix printout on green striped paper. At the time, I thought those terminals were hilariously 20 years out of date, but thinking back on it, they still did what they were meant to do. Why get something more modern when all it is is data entry and hard copies of the printouts?
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Jul 24, 2013 23:06
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Sunshine89 posted:This is the Dodge La Femme. Chrysler Corp also tried another gimmick originally geared toward women with their cars (specifically, Barracudas) in the late 60s by offering the Mod Top, a flowery pastel vinyl roof option that extended into the upholstery. It ultimately failed and was only available for two years, but I think the imagery fit more with the counterculture of the time (this was 1969, after all) more than with women and was bought by them. They're pretty rare today.     
You Are A Werewolf has a new favorite as of 06:57 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 06:55
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This is the stereo I currently have in my truck: The Clarion DUZ385SAT. I've had it for a few years now and it is the best head unit i've ever owned. Not too flashy, very simple, works with everything I've thrown at it, and matches my truck's interior to look almost stock. I also have a permanent hidden iPhone cord hooked up the rear USB input that runs under my bench seat and is hidden in the middle of the seat because I'm loving classy like that. Then there's my friend's bone stock stereo, a 2003 Toyota JBL unit with a tape and CD player that doesn't play burned discs, like wtf? I had a Kenwood CD player that I bought in 1997 that played burned discs just fine. Her stereo plays regular CDs just fine, but pop in a burned disc (not even a file disc with AAC and MP3s on it, just a true-to-original CD) and the unit whirs and whooms, then spits the thing out in disgust. That sucks for long drives.
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Apr 9, 2014 02:30
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S-video also makes VHS dubs to DVD or digital look awesome if you happen to have a good S-VHS VCR. 30 year old home recordings and prerecorded movies never looked so good when I find the time to back up what VHS I have left (mainly OOP and rare movies/tv stuff).
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Dec 6, 2014 00:14
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DrBouvenstein posted:Plenty of movies that were recorded off of broadcast TV, though! You either had the commercials present and had to try and fast forward through them, going too far, rewinding, etc... (I mean...DVRs are like this now, but they are at least a little faster) or you were watching the movie live as you were recording and had to try to hit pause during the commercials, and then un-pause at the right time. This was much, much easier in the '80s and early '90s when you had "[TV show/special] will return after these messages / we now return to [TV show/special]" commercial bumpers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BuylHRFZ8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJFQDhq_vds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPra59Kh-qE I was the loving king of recording broadcast TV without the commercials because although it was much easier to press pause after the first bumper, there was always a 15 second low-budget local commercial or local news ID that preceded the "we now return" bumper that informed me to press play after it had finished. Like Colt 45, it worked every time.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:20
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The_Franz posted:Speaking of pay-per-minute calls, those 1-900 numbers were everywhere in the 80s and 90s. The industry was basically completely unregulated and holy gently caress were those things a scam. The industry basically preyed on children, but it was OK because they always warned you to get your parents' permission first. You missed the most  1-900 commercial of my youth:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdQiSGb4Luw Why, yes, I'd like to spend $2 a call to listen to a prerecorded message from an ugly rubber puppet thing. Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70JzRpdI5xg "OH NO! I CAN'T TIME MY JUMP OVER THE FLAME BAR IN MARIO!!  *curls up into a ball*"
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Jan 4, 2015 17:00
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Tubesock Holocaust posted:Before there was a card swipe machine at every register, there was this: About two years ago, I stopped at a Wendy's drive-thru on the way home to grab a quick bite to eat, and when I pulled up to the window, the woman behind the window said the card and payment system was down and handed me one of these. It was actually really loving cool to still see one of these used as a backup means of payment should [SOME GIZMO] take a poo poo at an inopportune time. Sliding that thing and hearing the "  " sound really took me back and made me feel old at the same time.
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Jul 13, 2015 16:45
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Alternatively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcOWum8S3qA
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Jun 2, 2016 03:27
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Back in the 80s and early 90s, my mom used to work in a hospital. In said hospital, they had a coffee vending machine in the cafeteria that must have been there at least a decade prior. Chrome and dark woodgrain as far as the eye can see. 35¢ got you a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. The coffee was just a hint of brewed coffee in some hot water with your choice of creamer and sugar added to it it that was pretty bland, but serviceable. I'm sure a lot of doctors and nurses working long shifts swore by it at the time. The hot chocolate, however, from that thing was loving amaaaaaaaaazing  Welp, that's my beverage vending story. Thanks for reading!
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Jun 10, 2016 10:07
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Trying to keep the grim out, here's something I thought was really cool and a double whammy for two obsolete examples: The world's oldest surviving videotape recording from 1957, and the Ford Edsel (who sponsored the TV broadcast). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0Az9tdkHg&hd=1 This particular videotape was broadcast once for the west coast (The show was broadcast live, but recorded for playback on the west coast three hours later), then boxed up and used by an engineer on his desk for the next thirty years... as a paperweight. The dude who uploaded got it directly from him in 1987, digitized it once the copyright expired, and uploaded it in its entirety to YouTube. Pretty cool comparison between early videotape and kinescopes, too, and how much better videotape was at the time for both picture and sound, even though kinescopes were cheaper at the time. Check out the Edsel pimping throughout, too. You Are A Werewolf has a new favorite as of 03:49 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 03:41
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Exactly. not only is it cool for technology's sake, but there's some amazing performers in it and some great stuff in the show, overall.
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Jul 25, 2016 04:15
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