I had two DVD players that would do that - one for up to 25 discs. Of course, streaming services also do that.
Real wine corks. Winemakers are increasingly using synthetic corks and even screw-top caps now (even for good wines). Nothing beats popping a good, old-fashioned wooden cork and smelling it afterwards. Unscrewing a bottle of wine feels cheap and unexciting.
Ftg mentioned one in another thread: the 500+ page Computer Shopper magazine. I used to just love thumbing through it, comparing computers. “Wow! Maximum Computer has a Pentium 100 with 16 megs of RAM and a full 1-gigabyte HD, Sound Blaster card, with a whopping 2 megs of video RAM - and all this for only $1,995! How the hell do they make any money?”
Then there’s the Sears Catalog, easily the most popular book in the country among the 4-18yo set for 3+ decades… at least in November and December, it was. 
My dad was an executive at JC Penney, but we preferred the Sears catalog to the JCP one.
Wow. Computer Shopper. That used to be as thick as a phone book and twice the size. Then as web advertising and shopping began to dominate the computer parts business, which obviously was one of the first things to go that route, it started to get thinner and thinner. Then they changed the format to a more normal magazine size and then next thing I knew, like that line from the Usual Suspects, poof, it was gone.
I want to buy myself a boombox that plays and records tapes, I have a working tape deck in my 97 pontiac but nevertheless would like to be able to record tapes. I picked out a Hello Kitty box for like $40 USD. It’s just callling my name. I’ve managed to pick up an ok collection of tapes between the library and thriftstores.
I miss slamming the phone down, the bang and the chime. You can’t do that with an Android or iPhone but maybe you can make a tone to play at the end of calls that disconnects whoever is on the other end.
I carry handkerchiefs but they are used mostly for cleaning my glasses and for me to cover my mouth when i burp. My Grandparents used Mercurochrome on me. my sisters and one cousin.
Another nice thing about VHS tapes - if a DVD has a scratch or other imperfection on the disk, that’s it. No getting by it - your viewing is dead. With a VHS it would just keep grinding along until it was past the imperfection, and all was well again.
Having said that, I’ll admit that I wouldn’t want to go back to VHS - the DVD image is so much better that one can put up with the occasional bad disk. And they can get so much more stuff on the DVD, too.
I miss LED watches-those red displays were nice. also, shoe x-ray machines-see your foot bones in real time!
PC games that came in boxes, all different sizes and shapes, and often with a manual you could choke a donkey with. These days it’s all standard DVD cases and the manual (if there even is one) says “Here’s how you put a “CD” inside your “computer”. Beyond that there’s a PDF file on the DVD, piss off”.
Well, I lie : these days you don’t even get a DVD case since you buy it through Steam, and then you can’t play it because Steam conks out :).
Dot-matrix printers, too. I loved that Devil screeching they did, and that you could see the letters and words getting painstakingly put down, one line of pixels at a time. Great excuse for a smoke break, too. These days it’s “vrrrrr, here’s your 200 pages stack, NEXT !” :(. At least fresh laser prints have that smell going for them.
[QUOTE=Agent Foxtrot]
Nothing beats popping a good, old-fashioned wooden cork and smelling it afterwards.
[/QUOTE]
On the other hand, the new ones hardly ever fragment into happy little sprinkles of cork dancing in your expensive wine.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
also, shoe x-ray machines-see your foot bones in real time!
[/QUOTE]
Yay, bone cancer !
The old ma bell phones you could bang the handset HARD on the desk a few times before slamming it into the cradle for those times when just slamming it down wasn’t enough. Never heard of one breaking.
I really feel all the comments on phones. Seems like voice quality has been greatly reduced with the triumph of cell phones.
I may still have a copy of Wordstar if you’d like to try it. Be warned, any printer that is used with it dies in 6 days.
I miss cars you could actually work on if they broke down on the side of the road. I could replace a fuel pump, carburetor or distributor in 5 minutes. I just rode in a new Lincoln the other day. Absolutely everything was electronic. If the central display died then everything stopped working. I want’s me an old school car sitting in the garage.
Wordstar! Now there’s a blast from the past. Kinda like Intellivision.
I’m sure I would feel the same, if I had a car that actually ever broke down. I love my 2000 Accord.
Maybe it’s just that I’m a longtime Honda owner, but ISTM that cars that last way longer, and with way fewer problems, than was the case 40 years ago has been one of the big improvements in the quality of life over that period of time.
yeah. you’re right. my 2000 Saturn is the most reliable car I’ve ever owned. 200K miles and all I did to the engine was replace an intake gasket (normal stuff like plugs changed). I did get the tranny rebuilt at 165K because it seemed harsher than normal. Should have run it out to see how long it would last. I still remember my Pinto. it was completely rusted out at 75K miles and I was always under the hood. What a POS.
I’m having better luck than my Honda but I liked the way the Honda was engineered. It was like they had a mechanic in the design room going “wait, do it this way instead”. So I’m a little torn. I had to replace a lot more stuff on the Honda but it came apart easier.
I’m glad the 4 cylinders are so powerful now. Not sure I want to work on a V6 stuffed sideways in a car.
I still have all the discs I collected with my Amiga 1000 and 500, and I still have every PC based computer I ever had with the exception of one of my HPs from about 5 years ago that I gave a computerless buddy of mine since 1993 [my first PC based computer was a custom build with the first gen Pentium which ran something like $900 just for the pentium, and the whole build ran me something like $2500 including a virgin in the box Windows 3.1 and Explorer 1.0 - still unopened, and my first edition of Myst did get opened, installed and played. I also bought Netscape as it was not free at the time.
And we do intend to get a 74-79 vintage International Scout when we get the money again … we have the IH mechanics manual for the late vintage Scouts and mrAru is very adept at working on them, the only reason we had to sell my Scout was the frame got damaged in a black ice incident and it would have cost way too much to actually get it repaired as it stressed and broke a few mounting points. I really miss that scout, I put almost half a million miles on her 
Not actually an item per-se, I miss the pride of workmanship and attention to detail in the modern disposable society…
Very few seem to take pride in their work, it’s all about hitting the numbers and cranking out as much crap as possible to maximize profits, everything has been cheapened and mass produced, skill and talent are dying…
Here are a few examples;
Laser printers; I learned to maintain and repair the old HP LaserJet II and III series, big, heavy duty office printers with steel frames and all parts as independent modules, no plastics on any crucial framing points, the page count was 100,000 pages before servicing was recommended, slap in a new maintenance kit and it’s good for another 100K
HP allegedly remarked that they made a mistake with these printers, they made them TOO RELIABLE
Modern laser printers, meh, all plastic, almost no metal, and designed to be thrown out rather than repaired
Another example, guns, compare an original S&W revolver like a 586 or 686 (686-4 or earlier) with forged metal frame, forged trigger, hammer, and hand-fit internal components to a current model, with metal-injection-molded parts and the loathsome internal locking system (the “Hillary Hole”)
compare a current Marlin 39a lever action .22 to a Pre-Remington-Buyout ORIGINAL 39a made in Marlin’s old New Haven CT plant, the “Marlington” pales in comparison
I miss craftsmanship and pride of work…
Thanks for bring up some very tramautic memories for me!!! I think I have PTSD now…
It’s just flashes of a “Mavis Beacon” typing textbook, an IBM Selectric typewriter and a scary-as-hell teacher, Ms. Sarah Ulysses Weems, whacking my hands with a wooden ruler if she caught me looking at them…evil bitch troll from hell!
As for Word 2007, I agree that it was created by Satan’s crafty minions, at best! Word and Excel 2010 are quite a bit more user-friendly and I’m sticking wiith them for the next decade just like I did with Office 2003! 
Reel-to-reel tape recorders, from a 1950s mono Revere to the Viking 433 (4 tracks, 3 heads, 3 speeds). Recorded: lots of music from the stereo FM tuner, a few of my favorite LPs to save wear on them, the soundtracks of a few TV movies or shows (take the back off the TV and clip the recorder input leads to the speaker terminals), my church choir a few times.
I remember working with the IBM Displaywriter at work. It used an 8"(?) floppy disk and a dial-up phone connection with a phone cradle. Then PC’s came along with DOS and THEN we got one with a hard drive. Prior to that we had to boot the computer off a dos disk and then run a program from another disk. And whatever program was on that disk had to have the printer driver with it or you couldn’t print. So you had to make sure your printer was supported by the software you bought.
I still have the hard drive from it because it broke down and was replaced and I kept it. It’s half the size of a shoe box. It was 10 mb.
And I truly miss the days of opening up the hood of a car and pointing to something and with great confidence identifying the part. Now I see wires going to all manner of objects that could be anything.
I miss the Brunton Compass for measuring dip and strike. A lot of field geologists still use them, I gather, but there’s an app for that now (several, in fact) and while they do nice instant stats, it’s not the same.
Ditto for messing around with actual Wulff nets and tracing paper rather than computer programs.
Forget about Netflix and Nintendo. For pure, unadulterated home entertainment, nothing beat gathering in the living room, buttered popcorn in hand, while dad commandeered the old Keystone 8mm film projector and the Kodak 35mm slide projector. We never tired of the “clickety-clack” silent movies of sibling birthday parties and the “click-whir” slide shows of family vacations. And, for hand-held entertainment we had the totally real, faux 3D slide shows featuring exotic destinations, like the Grand Canyon, on our View-Master 3D Stereoscope. The realism of the movie Avatar pales in comparison to the vertigo one feels peering into View-Master slides focused on the depths of the Grand Canyon, let me tell you!
This reminds me of my High School physics project. I don’t recall how I related this to physics, but I shot and submitted a stop-motion 8mm film starring my old GI-Joe and my sister’s old Barbie Doll. I billed it as a romantic-comedy…
…oh, who am I kidding, it was XXX porn. I knew I could get away with it because the physics teacher, Mr. Bates (who liked to be called, Master), had quite the warped sense of humor. When I showed the film in class, he had tears in his eyes, doubled over in laughter. He gave me an A and asked to keep the film. Many years later, when I ran into him on a visit home, Master Bates was delighted to tell me he shows that film to each year’s class…then he started laughing again, with tears in his eyes.