In grade school my job was running the Film Strip Projector. Yes the good old Bell & Howell. Threading the film into the machine and winding it to the focus slide, preparing the cassette player to match the sound with the correct picture. Usually you would give the girl you liked the “remote control” to press the button at the beep to advance the next slide.
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I was born in 1969, but also at the arse end of the world, where pop-culturally we were at least 5 years behind America and Britain for quite a long time.
We had an old radiogram thingo, sort of like this. It didn’t work, and then we lost it in the house fire (weeks after finally buying our first colour TV).
Soon after moving into our new house, we got a dodgy little record player; the first album played on it was Abba Arrival.
We had a tape recorder, that first my brother, and then I, used to record silly little sketches on, influenced by the Goon Show and Monty Python. Remember having to press play and record at the same time? And turn the tape over after 28 minutes?
We eventually got a proper stereo system in the late 80s, which was on constantly, usually tuned to a radio station as background murmur. My sister and I used to record our favourite songs off the Top 40.
Years later I got my first CD. It was Yello. I still have it. In fact, I still have every CD I ever bought. My collection is tiny, because I am not a big fan of music.
I do not own an MP3 player, an HDTV*, or a Blu-Ray player.
I do own a DVD player, DVR, and a USB Stick.
*Plans are afoot, though
I remember thinking about returning a CD that I got as a present because, heck, I already had it on tape! I guess I was just too beguiled by the allure of rewinding and fast-forwarding all over the place to consider the convenience of only hearing the songs that I actually liked.
I’m 56 and still buying LPs (I’ve acquired about 100 so far this year, at approximately a dollar each)… I also use cassette tapes; I record an LP in the evening and listen to it during the next day’s commute. To do this, however, I have to use a Walkman that plugs into the car’s sound system, and when that Walkman dies, I guess I’ll be SOOL. (More likely I’ll get one of those LP-to-CD recorders.)
I also have a whole bunch of 45s. And I have a few 78s, but sadly, nothing to play them on anymore.
We used to play Pong on our TV… and I can remember the earliest arcade games like Breakout; they arrived when I was in college. Back then, we also were still using punch cards to write computer programs.
And I remember hearing rumors of these new things called CDs and the Internet…
I got a “record player” for Christmas when I was 12 (I’ll turn 60 next month). When you turned it on, you had to wait for it to “warm up” (it used tubes). I had a few albums, but mostly I had 45s that I played on it. Six years later, when I went off to college, I had a couple of dozen lps that I took with me. By that time, components were a VERY big deal. Separate amplifier, turntable and speakers. I was lucky - I always had a roommate with a component system. But no tape player - we played albums on the stereo. By the time I graduated from college, I probably had a hundred albums and a couple of dozen 8 track cassettes.
Most cars came equipped with an (optional) AM radio - FM in autos was pretty rare. An aftermarket 8-track player and FM radio combo was a sweet thing to install in your car. Most 8-track tapes were bought prerecorded. Record stores probably did 25 or 30 percent of their sales in 8-tracks. By the time I graduated, cassettes were coming on strong. I bought my first new car in 1975 (a VW Rabbit). It didn’t have a radio in it - I had an AM/FM/cassette deck installed in the dash and thought I was really something! By then I had a component stereo and before long I added a cassette deck. Now I could record cassettes to play in the car - sweet!
The parents got a “home entertainment system” (I think that’s what you called it) as a wedding present in 1950. It was a piece of furniture that housed a TV and a record player in one cabinet. It had a pair of rabbit ears on top. It’s what I watched “the Mickey Mouse Club” and “Captain Kangaroo” on in the 50’s. I doubt the screen was bigger than 18." Everything was black and white. You had to “fine tune” the stations, and frequently had to fiddle with the horizontal and verticle hold knobs. It only had a vhf tuner in it. Sometime in the early 60’s we got a “portable TV.” It was the size of a medium suitcase - probably had a 23" screen. It sat on a wheeled cart in our den. Also black and white, also only picked up VHF. NO big deal, beacause there were only three braodcast channels then: channel 2 (NBC), channel 5 (CBS), and channel 11 (ABC). It was about this time that Bonanza began braodcasting in color, but we didn’t know anyone who had a color TV set, so it didn’t make any diferrence to us that everything we saw on TV was in black in white. I think we got our first color TV set in 1968 - a Magnavox console. Once again, the TV set was a piece of furniture. You were always having to adjust the “color” and the “tint” knobs to keep the faces from being either too green or too purple.
A few weeks ago, I went to an electronics supply place to buy a new belt for my turntable. I still listen to my vinyl albums, and buy vinyl from time to time. At last count I had around 350 albums and about 500 cds. I have a ton of cassettes that I rarely listen to.
In 2000, I bought a car with a 6 cd changer mounted in the trunk. I thought that was great!
I bought a new car last year, which has a hard drive in the sound system. I put in a cd and it records it to the hard drive. I think I’ve recorded about 50 cds to the hard drive so far.
I like the sound of this. My previous car had a six CD changer in the boot, which was great because I could take out the cartridge and just put a newly loaded on straight in. My current car takes 6 CDs as well but you have to load each one through a slot on the dashboard. Now I’m hankering for a sound system with a hard drive. (I keep forgetting to change the CDs and I’m getting fed up with listening to the same songs over and over and over …)
I had one of these too! For some reason I remember one of the disks was “Camptown Races”.
I’m a slow adapter. I don’t own a Blu-Ray player, and I just upgraded to a HDTV late last year. I still have all my CDs, even though I’ve put all the good songs on my mp3 player.
“I still have a floppy disc writeable Sony mavica”
A friend of mine had one of these when they were new; I bought one recently on eBay for £8 or so, just out of nostalgia, and had a heck of a time finding floppy discs. The camera is bigger than a modern digital SLR and yet I can remember when it seemed the most incredible thing. A digital camera, with a floppy disc drive, so that you can just take the pictures and put them into your computer straight away. You can take photographs of your cock, and no-one will ever know!
If you wanted to. That was a hypothetical example.
I grew up in the 1980s, so it was Walkman all the way. Cheap Walkman clone, at any rate. In Britain, circa the late 1990s, early 2000s, during the dot-com boom, the absolute height of fashion in portable audio was the Minidisc player, or even better a Minidisc recorder, for “field recordings”, which were the in thing. E.g. this discussion from 1999:
http://www.naturesongs.com/MiniDisc.html
At the time portable MP3 players were just starting to became practical, and the writing was on the wall, but I remember Minidisc hanging on for a while if only because the little discs looked nice.
Went the same was as APS film, for much the same reason; wiped out by digital. I was part of a generation that was starting to pull away from physical media, and no doubt there are people a few years younger than me who will one day wax nostalgic about encoding formats. Or RAR. Or the VLC media player. I have a physical DVD drive in my PC, but it’s a legacy thing for installing software; my media consists of files on my hard drive, and one day they’ll be files on some RAID array on the other side of the world.
Remember Zip Discs? The Click of Death? Magneto-optical drives? Electronic still video cameras? Laughter?
I’'ve always been a late adopter of technology. I’m 34. Let’s see, when I was young I had a record player with a handful of 45s. It was a portable player that my cousin Debbie (I think it was Deb) gave me. I had to put a little spindle adapter in the center of the 45s to play them. My favorite was “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” by the Royal Guardsman. I was never too big into music until college and didn’t own a stereo or my own cassettes until I was a freshman in high school. When I was a freshman in college I still owned fewer than 30 cd’s. A sizable chunk of my music collection was taped off the radio onto blank cassettes. I still have all my cassettes and used them well into the 21st century. I didn’t get a CD player in my car until 2008. Most of the CD’s I own came from BMG or Columbia House. I had a small 2 gig mp3 player (that I found on the floor at Dunkin Donuts in 2009) that died after a couple years and now have a droid x that has all my mp3’s on it. I just bought my first car manufactured after the 1990’s and it has an AUX port so I can listen to AM, FM, CD’s (6 disc changer), and mp3’s all while driving. I am now the Cat’s Ass!!!
As for TV, I remember when we just had over the air tv reception. We didn’t get cable until I was 8 or 9 years old. I remember my family’s first VCR. The tape deck popped out of the top and the remote was on a wire. Most of the TV’s in the house were 70’s vintage pieces of furniture (well into the 90’s). We had an Atari 2600 and later a Nintendo Entertainment System. I was the last of my friends to get a NES. I personally did not have a color TV until I went to college. The TV in my bedroom (which I was finally allowed to have in high school) was an old 9 inch portable black and white set with rabbit ears. I kinda miss the days of adjusting the vertical and horizontal controls and fine tuning the UHF dial to pick up WSBK TV38 out of Boston. They played Hogan’s Heroes every weeknight at ten. I did not own my own VCR until 1999. I still have it and use it frequently. My TV is an Emerson 15 inch (CRT) that one of my old roomates left in the apt. after moving to RI in 1998. I do not own a DVD player. My computer has one, but it doesn’t work anymore. I own a whopping 15 DVD’s and an enormous, overflowing box of VHS tapes, some dating to the mid 1980’s. Most of the VHS tapes are shows and movies recorded off of television.
I bought my first real film camera in 1996 and my first digital camera in 2007. I have not gone back to film since then.
I have nothing against new technology. I think most of it is pretty cool and recognize the advantages it has over older tech. I’m just cheap and if it ain’t broke, I won’t fix it.
Wow. I’m backstage at the Republican Debates in Orlando. I finish a conversation about just this topic, open Cafe Society and see this thread. Karma !!
We were discussing the days when we had to drag around a 3/4" “” Portable “” video deck for shoots. What a relief when BetaCam™ came in.
Remember those days?
What ??? 
I’m 35 and remember first my Dad’s Apple II with the 5 1/4" drive (and how bendable the disks were). Then he got an IBM XT, which I seem to recall had both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2" drives.
11 years ago right now, I was taking a CAD class and had to shell out for an Iomega Zip Drive. I bought the big one: a whopping 250MB!
I get nostalgic this time of year when it comes to computers. It always seemed like the big things came out in the Fall. I also remember a few years of going to the office supply store close to Thanksgiving time (or being picked up early from school) and seeing all the games and new systems.
Now it seems everything is so bland!
I’m 48 and grew up with 5 TV channels, but that 5th channel had all the syndicated shows like GIlligan’s Island, Bewitched etc, so every day after school was a party. [okay, there was a sixth channel, the religious one, but I’m pretty sure I only checked it out of boredom]
I personally installed an 8 track player and 6x9 JVS speakers in my 1974 Olds Cutlass (the one with swivel seats).
I had a crappy little portable manual typewriter. I wrote a lot of ‘stories’, and still remember trying to get that stupid black-and-red ribbon to stay in place.
I miss the excitement of using a rotary phone. Any time I had a new number to dial, I instinctively checked how many 9s and 0s it had. Remember how you might be dialing quickly and not paying attention, and your finger would slip out around 7 or 8?
Some of you old timers remember no zip code! (introduced in an important year, 1963)
Oh, man! I had an APS Pentax film camera. One day I bought an APS film reader made by Kodak - the idea was to hook it up to your computer, pop the APS film cartridge into this thing, it would “read” the cartridge, and convert it all to digital for you to download! Sweet!
Dutifully following the directions, I hook it up, popped in a cartridge, and the “reader” began to hum and whir and do its magic. Result: my hard drive crashed and I lost every bit of data on my computer!
I still have the APS camera, three rolls of film, and the reader if anyone wants them!
I’m 37 years old.
Started off with vinyl at about age 7; my first album was KISS “Love Gun”. Used, of course. We had a few turntables in the house, mostly all hand-me-downs, so I have no great nostalgia for vinyl.
Other stuff the original poster might remember: Presto Magix, Popeye Cigarettes (later gentrified to Popeye “Candy Sticks”–how retarded), Lik-m-aid, flash cubes, the Kodak “Disc” camera, Viewmaster… the list is endless.
My family has a plethora of slides from the 70s, many of which never were made into actual photos, and I’m trying my best to archive them digitally. Fascinating stuff.
I remember the plastic stick that was about three inches long. Rounded at one end. Used to dial the rotary all day without wrecking your fingertips.