Technological blast from the past

With technology’s rapid advance, today’s must-have gadgets quickly turn into yesterday’s has-beens. Here are a few technologies that were either an integral part of our lives or iconic at their time, but have since been relegated to history.

1 – Cassette tapes

You know you’re old when you know what a pencil has to do with a cassette tape. The answer, obviously, is to manually rewind a cassette tape. Cassette tapes were originally used for recording audio for transcription purposes but they were soon used to record mixed tapes and record songs from the radio. But perhaps the most important use for cassette tapes was for saving computer programs as audio signals for your early Commodore and Sinclair computers. Occasionally the mixed tapes and the computer tapes got mixed, with ear-splitting consequences.

Cassette tape

2 – PDAs

Palm Pilots, Newtons, iPAQs. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) were the height of cool back in the early 2000’s. As cool as they were however, they did very little more than your standard paper diary: they could record notes, to-dos and calendar events. It sounds fairly simplistic now, but they paved the way for the tablet PCs and smartphones we have today. And they had arcane handwriting recognition techniques.

PDA - Personal Digital Assistant

3 – Pagers

Long before cellphones, pagers were the must-have gadget if you had a mobile job. Until they were rendered redundant by cellphones in the early 90s, every journalist and sales rep worth their job had a pager clipped to their belt.

A collection of pagers

4 – Calculator watches

When I was at school this was the must-have gadget. I never actually owned one (my parents sensibly pointed out that it was a complete waste) but I can still appreciate their appeal. In practice the buttons were far too small to do any actual maths, and most of us had no real need to do sums while out playing, but they were cool. Of course today we have cellphones that do everything the watches did and more.

Calculator watch

5 – Dial-up modems

It’s just a few years since ADSL became the default internet connection for most of us, but chances are most of us have already forgotten dial-up modems. The high-pitched screech, the exorbitant connection costs, the painfully slow downloads. Ah, the good old days.

Dial up modem

6 – Zip drives

I used my Zip drive about four times. I was lured in by the promise of 100MB of data on a single disk. It was the stuff of science fiction in a world of 1MB “stiffy” disks. Also, I liked the design of the Zip drives; their chunky feel was perfect for all that data. Soon though, the era of Zip disks was over.

Zip drive

7 – Polaroid cameras

A friend’s father had a Polaroid camera which he took on holiday with us once. It was the height of cool, having that almost-instantaneous photo in your hand. The Polaroid format, with the wide white border, was iconic, and while we may have moved well beyond the Polaroid into digital photography, hipsters around the world still love this iconic brand.

Polaroid camera

8 – Home movie projectors

Home movie projectors were an event in themselves. They would take ages to setup, then the bulb would burn out, or the film would break and everyone would have to wait while the roll of film was pieced together. Eventually you would be able to watch home movies which were filmed by your grandfather and they were generally uninteresting. Unless of course he played it backwards which made even the most mundane home movie fun.

Home movie projector

9 – Betamax

Sony’s Betamax video tapes provided hours of childhood fun. Initially we watched videos rented from the corner shop – and most of them were stretched and scratchy – and later we used blank tapes to record hours of Pop Shop on TV. The tape inside inevitably broke or got tangled up just as you got to the crucial part of the movie you were watching. Good times.

Betamax

10 – Portable turntables

Along with your collection of vinyl records what you really needed to be cool was a portable record player. The ones that were really cool were the brightly coloured plastic ones in which the lid doubled as a speaker. They certainly didn’t produce great sound but then most of your records were scratched anyway so it didn’t make that much of a difference.

Portable turntable