Spencer’s itself is probably unrecognizable to most under-20s these days unless they’re weirdos who still hang out at malls.
I wouldn’t worry too much. The wikipedia page lists as its “cite” that 8-tracks were “popular” in Germany an 8-track fan page that has a grand total of 2 German email addresses of 8-track collectors. What a time to be alive it must have been during the heady days when 8-track fever swept through Germany.
Sorry for the “I’m going to shit on wikipedia” detour.
cartridge video games … my nephew found an old atari Pacman game and thought it was a movie… now we’ve played the old games but he’s just never seen a physical atari 2600 game cartridge
what makes it confusing is my aunt and a lot of people always referred to any cartridges as “tapes”
if anyones not seen one before :
Yeah, I took a computer science class as a college senior, in 1982, and we used punch cards, but they were already on their way out. “Relatively recent” they aren’t.
Percolator? Maybe. Hand boiler. Nope, never even heard the term.
As for FM radio, I haven’t used one (AM or FM) in at least five years…
On my first computer programmer job, about 2 months in, they took all the younger IT staff (MIS back then) and had us empty a large closet. It was filled of boxes of programs. Yes, programs as they were on punch cards. The oldest programmer looked kind of teary eye as us kids were laughing and dumping this old stuff.
There was also a card sorter for when some hapless Operator accidentally dropped a box or stack of cards.
I did come up in the era of reel tapes still being used however. Huge racks of tapes in the computer room storing all kinds of sales data.
Do pagers count? I remember my dad had one when I was a kid. No idea how ubiquitous they were in the 90s and 2000s. I doubt kids today will recognize a pager.
~Max
As Pagers died off under 20 years ago. They should count. Good addition I would say.
Ah, pagers! When I was a 1st year medical resident, I got my first one. Audio pager only, no screen or text messages on it. It only worked within the hospital. Damn thing shrieked at me day and night, “whoop whoop whoop, Dr. M, call the ER, 8175!” Of course half the time the message was incoherent so I couldn’t return the call. It ruined naps, fun conversations at the nurses station, and everything else. One of my fellow residents flushed his down the toilet on purpose when it woke him up one too many times.
I’m thinking a modem. If we are limited to items and not people, can I throw “John Hughes film” in here?
Actually a lot of kids still know John Hughes films. Also they are not items.
But even if they don’t know his great teen movies like Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller, they probably know Home Alone and maybe Beethoven.
My kids would recognize one; I had one (audio only) as a volunteer firefighter just over a decade ago.
Since you mentioned AM, I heard recently that one of the major car companies has stopped putting AM receivers in its cars. I can’t remember which one, though.
I can understand radiometers being obscure. Hand boilers, though, I’m surprised that people here haven’t seen. They are mass-marketed as “love testers” or “love meters”.
How about this?:
Hand boiler sounds like something you’d encounter in a science class (except for biology and ecology I avoided these because I am unable to do math), or for some period that I missed, as a novelty item.
Now film cannisters, boy I spent a lot of time with those.
It looks like it is a motor with an off-center weight that is strapped to the top of your hand to make your hand vibrate. Something like this.
I did programming in FORTRAN on punch cards at university in 1980. We did the chaff in balloons trick in a guys dorm room. We rigged the balloons to pop when he opened the door. He got us back by pouring the chaff into the air inlets on our cars so it was a confetti storm when you turned on the fan.
I know of everything in this thread so far but the only one I haven’t used (or had used on me in the case of the head massager) is a slide rule. I’ve fiddled with one but never for any actual calculations.
How about microfiche? In my first job as a programmer not everyone had their own terminal so if you needed to look at your code it was on a microfiche reader.
In 1998 I was working for a company and for Y2K reasons was pressed into being a SAS “programmer” again after a few years working in Finance.
I got a message telling me that some data I was trying to access had been migrated to tape. I had to open a ticket to have it restored to Random Access Storage.
I thought this was some kind of figure of speech. But apparently it really was some guy in the data center next door who would go get some kind of tape cartridge with the data on it and load it back onto the mainframe.
Oh yes, microfiche. When I started studying at Siegen University in 1989, there still weren’t any computers for users in the libraries and all the research for books had to be done by microfiche. It worked.
When I started the tapes were reel-to-reel and had to be manually mounted by operators, or as we referred to them, “tape apes”. At the insurance company I was at the actuary master file spanned 80 reels of tape. Then cartridges that looked similar to 8-track tapes replaced reel-to-reel, but still had to be manually mounted. These days the tapes are all handled by robots in a big box full of tapes and tape drives. Manual intervention is only needed to add or remove a tape from the tape library.