With all the griping about the Apple iPhone I got to thinking about this.
Back in the mid 70s, LED watches started coming out. Not LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) that would come later, but LED watches the ones with the red displays.
Anyway these were the kind that were blank and to see the time you had to press a button and it would light up in red and, get this…The time would be DIGITAL not in the clock-like analog format.
Well I was 11 at the time when they came out and man I wanted one. They were $25.00. And since lawn cutting was $4.00 for a front/back, I got to taking my lawnmower and set out to earn the money.
So I got the watch and I was impressive to all my friends. They all thought it was so cool. Well the cool wore off in TWO days, when I realized I had to press the damn button everytime I wanted to see the time. What a PAIN IN THE…Well you insert your own bodypart. I mean you couldn’t tell time if your hands were full. :smack:
My mother even pointed this out BEFORE I bought the watch. I said, “I’d rather be surprised.” OK stupid but I was just 11 years old LOL
So my question is what gadget did you want. I mean REALLY want to the point where you save up or sacrificed or got a second job or whatever to get. Then once you got it, it turned out to be useless or a complete disapointment.
Because dad would never allow us to have a real size trampoline I always thought it would be great to have one of those miniature ones like they use in gymnastics or basketball dunking stunt teams use.
When they came out with those small excercise/jogging trampolines I thought my dreams had come true. I saved my money and bought one from Kmart.
Sorely disappointed when I found it didn’t have enough springyness to launch me and my friends around the yard.
Pretty much ALL of them (a large percentage of them phones) up to and until I got the first gen iPhone.
Then about 8 months after that I was depressed. It was doing it’s job so well that I wasn’t jonesing for that next gadget fix, I didn’t ‘need’ a new phone.
There was a digital music player back before 2000, when MP3 players were getting popular, that I HAD to have. There was no question, I had to have it. Not only did it play music, but the creators promised incredible extensibility; you could add a phone to it, games, a translator, whatever. The possibilities were endless. So I badgered my parents until they got it for me.
I don’t even remember the name now, but I call it a digital music player instead of an MP3 player because it turned out that it didn’t actually accept MP3s. The only input possible was a Line In jack. You had to actually record the music onto the player, in real time. And because the gadget was understandably nigh-useless, it sold poorly, which meant that none of the promised extensions ever came to be. Utterly disappointing little thing.
Music players! We had an RCA Lyra…it took Compact flash cards…the ONLY way you could put music on it was using THEIR compact flash reader, using THEIR drivers, transcoding the music into THEIR format, in WINDOWS 95. (or so, I may be misremembering), but it wouldn’t work on the current OS I had installed on the main computer. I had to install an os on a spare computer to put music on the card…and it took FOREVER.
The iPod that replaced it was a freekin godsend in comparison.
Synthesizer keyboard. Finally got mine from Radio Shack when I was about 10. After playing The Young & The Restlesss theme over a tinny bossa nova beat 20 times in a row, I was over the thing.
For me it was my first smart phone. At the time the phone I had was special because it had a color screen(!) and was even able to sorta access the internet! Oh yeah! I had that phone for like two years and it was still running strong. But I needed more function, I wanted to do more stuff. So I got a smart phone. You know what it could do?
It had a full slide out keyboard! Under a touch screen! I could put tons of music on it, and take pictures, and put my documents on it! I could check my email and even surf the web! Wanna know what else it had?!
Windows Fucking Mobile. Within a month I had to restart the phone every couple hours or it would lock up. Sometimes it would lock up while just sitting in my pocket, and if I didn’t happen to notice right away, I’d miss every call and text sent to me. After two months the phone would lock up whenever I got a text message or phone call. Can you imagine having to restart your phone every time you get a call or text, just to find out after the fact who called? It was the world’s shittiest and most expensive pager, Fucking thing! Sucks!
I got so frustrated I terminated my contract so I could get an iPhone because I desperately needed something that “just works.” Luckily the hype was justified in that case. A year and a half later and I’ve had to restart my iPhone maybe four times, which was a half a day’s number of restarts on that first smart phone.
I may be a little older than some of you but, back in the early '70s, when I was 11 or 12 years old, I absolutely, positively had to have a General Electric Loudmouth 8 track player or I would keel over and die. My mom bought one for my birthday and I was in heaven…for about a week. I lost interest in it after playing the same five cartridges over and over. I remember seeing it on a shelf in my parent’s bedroom closet a few years later. For all I know, my mother still has the thing.
I must have been in the advanced class. In addition to The Young & The Restless I also learned Axel F, the Close Encounters 5 tones, and the Cure’s Close To Me.
Hey, I had one of those LED watches, and loved it.
The reason you had to push the button was that the red LEDs were energy hogs. They ate up their tiny batteries in no time. That’s why they couldn’t be on all the time. And that’s why both watches and calculators (which used the same LEDs) switched over to the LCD displays when they became available – you could leave an LCD display on all the time – it ate up little power (although you either needed a push-button still to light up a light so you could see it in the dark. Or else have a tiny radioactive source in the watch (true!)
When LCD watches came out, there was a TV commercial that had two Sumo wrestlers fighting with swords (overkill). in the middle of the fight, one asks the other the time, and he has to put down his sword to push the button, and suddenly realizes that he’s screwed. Should had an LCD watch.
But a measure of the LED watch coolness was that James Bond had one when they were new
I bought the tiniest digital camera in the world*. It could fit on your keychain and was only about 1" x 1.5". It held about 15 pictures. Sure, it had a small memory size. Sure, it had no screen to view the pictures right away. Sure, you had to transfer them to your computer before viewing, but it fit on your keychain, OMG!
The resolution was terrible. I guess it worked well enough to, say, document a crime, but not enough to be of practical use. Oh well. $15 down the drain.
