There would have been lots of Instamatic and other point-and shoot cameras still in circulation in 1986 - but even inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras had built-in electronic flashes ( no cubes ) by the late 70s, so a good number of them would have had the built-in flash.
That reminds me of another hobby that was huge from the ’50s through the ’70s: control-line model airplanes.
I got one for my birthday when I was about 10, which in retrospect may have been too young. Or too stupid. Possibly both.
Naturally, I wanted to try it immediately. Unfortunately, it was snowing outside. So, using the flawless judgment of a 10-year-old boy, I decided the kitchen was basically an indoor airfield.
I started the engine.
Good Lord, that thing was LOUD.
It scared the hell out of me, I lost control almost instantly, and the plane began whipping around the kitchen, knocking over my mother’s prized kitchen gadgets and assorted household treasures while I desperately tried to shut it down.
Mom came running in just in time to witness what must have looked like a tiny gasoline-powered Luftwaffe attack on her kitchen. (BTW, Mom was a British WWII war bride whose house had actually been bombed (more than once) by the Luftwaffe during the war, and she’d developed a lifelong fear of the sound of airplanes and thunder. So, in retrospect, firing up a screaming model airplane in her kitchen was perhaps not my finest moment.)
The good news: the plane eventually stopped.
The bad news: mostly because it broke.
I never flew it again.
And yes, I got a whoopin’ for that one. Deservedly so. Aviation safety regulations became considerably stricter in our house after that.
How old are you?
Old enough to remember when toys came with gasoline engines, exposed moving parts, and absolutely no concern whatsoever for the survival of the child.
Did you read the OP?
I did read it. I just don’t think my examples are quite as far outside the lines as you’re suggesting.
Slot cars and control-line planes technically existed before I was born, but they didn’t really become a mass-kid craze until the late ’50s and ’60s — during my childhood — and they very definitely faded away in my lifetime.
So yes, I may be stretching “weren’t there when you were a child” a little. But not enough to call the thread police.
Also, I did not realize U-Control airplanes got their start in the 30s when I wrote the post—my bad.
I think I figured out some of the confusion here…
Is it “introduced during your lifetime” or “became ubiquitous during your lifetiime”?
There are plenty of examples of products that may have been introduced in some fashion before our times, but that did indeed become ubiquitous during them.
For example, the Polaroid camera was introduced in the late 1960s, but didn’t actually become ubiquitous until the 70s and 80s, becoming as much as 20% of film sales. Then digital photography killed them nearly stone dead, until the Fuji Instax cameras restarted the instant photography craze sometime in this century.
I’d say that counts as “in my lifetime”, even though I was born in 1972.
Well it applies to my lifetime, then. I was born in 1955 and had a Polaroid Swinger in 1967.
The Polaroid Land camera was first sold in 1948.
I remember Polaroid cameras being pretty ubiquitous, at least in family and my friends’ families, in my childhood in the early 1960s. I remember the appearance of the Swinger when I was a teenager. It was a new simpler version of the long-existing Land cameras. The Swinger developed the film outside the camera, unlike the earlier models which tied up the camera for several minutes while a photo developed.
This may be stretching the ‘became ubiquitous’ in my lifetime, as I cannot find exactly when these machines first appeared. But they have now completely gone away.
When I was a kid, it was very common to see life insurance policy vending machines in airports. Due to a number of factors, they have now completely disappeared.
I got into model rocketry in the mid-late '70s, as a kid, and continued with it until I went off to college. I picked it back up maybe 20 years ago, and was really active with it for a while, building a bunch of rockets, and doing a lot of launches.
The hobby isn’t dead, but a lot of the interest today among adult participants – and an aspect of the hobby that barely even existed when I was a kid – is in higher-power rocketry: bigger rockets with bigger engines than the old Estes and Centuri black-powder A, B, C, and D engines.
However, at least for me, one of the challenges is that there are few places locally where one can safely and legally launch even low-power rockets. It’s banned in many public parks now, and I’d have to drive 30 to 60 minutes to get to a field that both allows rocketry, and is big enough.
Speaking of camera Flash Cubes, they made an excellent display when you hit them with a hammer!
Yeah, it’s completely stupid that they got lumped in with fireworks, which is the main objection to model rocketry at most city parks.
Here in Dallas, model rocketry is not addressed directly. The fIre code says it’s ok as long as it conforms to a set of NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) standards, while the park laws pretty much say that you can’t fire fireworks or set off pyrotechnics in city parks. And the NFPA stuff says you have to get permission. So I imagine there’s either a dusty form somewhere that I’d need to find, or it’s just considered illegal. Then again, we’re short on cops, so I doubt responsible model rocketry would be bothered with.
The other nearby cities are more clear- most ban them outright, or limit them to certain parks and require permits for those parks.
It’s absurd, and I doubt there were ever fires or problems. Probably just nervous Nellie types complaining about people “shooting fireworks” and calling the cops, and messing it all up for everyone else.
Old enough to have learned to program Z-80 and 6800 microprocessors with 1s and 0s.
With respect to slot cars, as a child in the 70s they were very popular in my group of friends, and very prominent in the toy catalogs. I personally had the Total Control Racing sets and several cars, which a couple other friends also had. Their disappearance coincided with other electronic toys consuming our parents dollars, such as handheld Mattel games, Atari, and NES. Dungeons and Dragons also took over our attention.
I happened across an auction last night with tons of slot cars, control line airplanes, small engines and lots of other hobby shop stuff from decades past. The items are mostly from before my time but some of those store displays are neat.
You weren’t imagining this. NYT has an obituary today of the man who pushed for the first “pooper scooper” laws in New York City in 1977. The article makes it sound as disgusting as you described.
And don’t forget the slot car ads in comic books. Slot cars were quite popular in my group of friends in the early 1970s—one of my friends even had an amazing track set up in his basement, laid out with straights, hairpins, and ramps, so cars could pass over the track. We all owned slot cars, and his place was the place to go after school. Well, if we decided not to play road hockey, that is.
Proving that things rarely completely go away, I visited a video store this week.
Magazines don’t qualify, but the specific genre of “lads’ mags” - FHM, Maxim, Loaded etc - do.
Although they started with high-minded intentions of being lifestyle magazines for men, slightly more accessible than GQ and the like, with articles on fashion and sport and cars and interviews/photoshoots with male and yes, sometimes female celebrities, it wasn’t long before the relationship between having a good looking woman on the cover and increased sales became inarguable. And so the slide began from featuring women who were famous from other arenas and also good looking, to women whose looks were as much or more of a driver of their fame than e.g. acting or singing talent, to “glamour models” whose fame consisted solely of appearing in these magazines in various states of undress.
It was pretty rapid - when I went to university Loaded still had men on the cover, 5 years later if you walked into a newsagent you were greeted with a wall of gorgeous pouting models either in bikinis/lingerie or nude in strategic poses. Porn mags were still on the top shelf and covered up, but this was an open display of sexualised female bodies.
In the UK, the trend reached its zenith/nadir with the launch of two weekly mags, Nuts and Zoo*. The monthly magazines had to fill a lot of pages and did have some other content - the slimmer weekly variants were little more than a series of “glamour” shoots.
There was some controversy over this - some retailers created modesty covers for the magazine racks so that children didn’t see the wall of cleavage - but what killed them off was of course high speed internet, which meant you see these pictures and more without publicly buying a soft core magazine and thus intimating your evening plans with the cashier. Looking it up, it seems the last holdouts shut down in 2015 in the UK.
(We are of course now at the time and distance that former 19-year-old topless models who were quoted at the time saying what fun it was have found their own voice and it turns out this wasn’t all good-natured healthy cheer, but sleazy and exploitative. Gosh.)
*I worked in market research at this time. We’d done a big piece for a beer company breaking down the audience into different segments, one of which was 18-24 y.o. men. For the launch session of this expensive report, to illustrate all the different types of beer drinker we bought along examples of the magazines they would read, which - for this professional business meeting - meant buying the latest issue of Nuts and Zoo. This was the MD’s idea and he realised his error pretty quick and took them away, but he had just bought in images of two naked models rubbing sun cream into each others boobs while winking at the camera to - again - a professional environment with male and female clients. Ouch.)