My mom had one of these too. My wife and I don’t, but we do have a portable gas stove that accepts butane fuel canisters, similar to this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Butane-Stove-Carrying-Listed/dp/B001TF8UY8
We use it a few times a year to cook sukiyaki. This is a Japanese dish that is typically cooked by diners right at their table, so a portable stove like this is a must.
I have a heated mattress pad for that. Really like. And since it’s under the bottom sheet, it rarely needs to be washed. But my parents bought my first one, and though they had a old electric blanket, I don’t recall t ever being used.
Both my parents and grandparents had an adjustable directional tv antenna. A nifty little box next to the tv set would incrementally click as the antenna on the roof rotated around to help the viewer find the best signal
Ha! My mom has one of those! She used it to cook hamburgers and steaks fairly frequently. Man, I haven’t thought about that thing in decades. I’ve never heard of anyone having another one until this thread.
I just asked her, she says she still has it and they still use it occasionally.
My contribution to this thread… hmmmm. We definitely don’t have an electric can opener but my parents (and my in-laws) do. The “new” style can openers, the kind that sperate the lid from the cylindrical portion of the can itself, works far better than the old style with the little wheel that cut the lid off. For that reason I’ve never felt the need for an electric can opener.
Most of what’s been noted (like the can opener but also things like stereo equipment and car phones and the like) are things that were modern tech at the time but have been replaced with modern-er tech. I’m trying to think of something my parents had that would be more technologically advanced / modern than what I have. Let’s see:
My parents have satellite TV with all the premium channels, we don’t even have an antenna – certainly no satellite or cable. But we do have several streaming subscriptions, something my parents can’t even comprehend let alone actually use.
My parents have a big riding mower and we have a tiny push mower, but their yard is big and flat and free of obstructions and our yard is small and oddly shaped so a riding mower wouldn’t work.
My mom did have one of those electric potato peelers that someone upthread posted. Daisy Stripper, IIRC, and the 11 year old me couldn’t stop giggling at the name. It actually worked well. Despite that I use an old-fashioned potato peeler (but have yet to regress to using a paring knife, I’m not that much a luddite).
The closest thing I can think of that fits with the OP is vehicles: my parents have always owned newer and / or more high-tech vehicles than I have. My newest vehicle is a 2020 and while it has all the modern safety features their newest vehicle is a 2022 F-150 hybrid that has more buttons, screens, settings, bells, and whistles than a F-35.
If it’s the one that’s about 2" deep, that’s what my grandmother and her daughters used to make fried chicken in the '60s and '70s. I bought a new one a few years ago and have only used it a couple times; once for breaded fish and once for pancakes. With the lid, it’s a space hog. It’s buried so deep in the pantry it’s too much of a pain to dig out.
Anther gadget I had thought long unavailable but have managed to purchase is the Toas-Tite. It even comes in retro packaging. The same as I remember except I think the aluminum saucers used to be cast iron.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/WEBP_402378-T1/images/I/51nwPbiemgL._AC_.jpg
Have pizelle makers been mentioned? My mom had one when I was a kid, and it looked like an antique back then. She’d bake the pizelle dough, put a ball on her pizelle maker, squeeze the handles together, and cook it over a gas burner on the stove.
She’d spend a whole day making pizelle, which were mostly gifts for the holidays.
I have one of those, I think it was my great grandmothers. I don’t think I’d call it a ‘modern’ device, since it’s a hunk of iron you have to heat over an open flame to operate. It IS a rather soothing tradition, I get a couple of hours to myself, maybe put on a podcast, and bake a batch.
A slide rule? My father undoubtedly had one in college.
The slide rule goes back to the 17th century, so I’m not sure I’d call it a “modern” device in the 20th century.
But, it was still the state-of-the-art for a portable mathematical calculator, and was still in wide used by engineers and scientists, up through the early 1970s, when the handheld electronic calculator was introduced.
That said, in reference to the OP’s question here, I’d have a hard time still classifying it as a “modern” device today.
I just thought of another one for me, although I’m not sure it’s quite in the spirit of the thread as I wish I did have one: a DISHWASHER.
In all my years of adulthood, I’ve almost never had a dishwasher, due to a combination of living in developing countries, old houses, or in homes with kitchens that simply couldn’t be configured for one.
I love to cook, so I end up spending a lot of time doing dishes. Luckily my current home has a deep windowsill above the kitchen sink, so I often put my computer there and watch streaming TV while dishwashing. Not so bad, but it is still a time sink (no pun intended).
They still make modern electric pizzelle bakers. They’re more or less a waffle iron with weird plates. My new wife has one.
Fair point. Reel-to-reel tape decks have already been cited as a modern device our parents had that posters don’t have now, so I guess slide rules fit in the same category. My own dad had both. I have his slide rule now, but only as a keepsake, not something I use.
TV trays. I still eat my in front of the TV but my lap suffices.
[Speaking about a countertop broiler] My mother had one, too, back in the '60’s. She’d cook my father a steak every morning and many evenings in it. It was easier to keep an eye on the doneness of the meat in it than in the oven broiler. I think it may have been easier to clean afterwards, too.
Heh heh. Both things I had and my adult kids don’t. Still have in the case of the slide rule.
Sometime in the 80s, my parents purchased an actual Word Processor. It looked like a glorified electric typewriter, with an LED screen that showed perhaps 3 or 4 lines of the text you were typing. It had a built-in dot-matrix printer for output. IIRC, you could save your files on a small floppy disk. I don’t remember what formatting options were included, and I also have no idea what brand it was.
The resume writing service that helped me in 1987-88 used Wang machines. It could do bold, italics and underlined text and right, center and left indentation for pieces of text on the same line.
I still have copies of my resume from that time. The print quality (some kind of high density dot matrix, I think) looks terrible by todays standards and indeed compared to my 1992 resume (WordPerfect on an HP LaserJet)
The one I had in the early 1990s was a Brother with a daisy wheel (it may have had two so you could switch from elite to pica). It looked something like this…
We lived in a large house, so we had intercoms in many of the rooms. It allowed my mom to call us without screaming. It was also a radio, so she played it a lot. “Luncheon at the Music Center” was one of her favorite shows, with lots of classical music, concerts, and operas, followed by learned discussions over a background of clinking cutlery and tableware. She also played a lot of Japanese music for some reason. (We’re Irish American.) There were 8 of us kids, so perhaps she found it soothing.
I don’t know if anyone has already mentioned this, but an electric carving knife. Are those still popular today?