Companion thread to Bertha's: What things do you still OWN that an under-25 person

probably has never seen, or may have seen but never used? Mine:

-A dial phone

-A television with a dial for changing channels and NO remote control, not even a wired one.

-8-track cartridges, AND a stero that plays them (it still works).

-An original 128K Mac (May, 1985), all the floppies to run it, and the original casette-tape manuals (one still in the shrink-wrap).

-A computer that uses casette tapes for storage and a TV for the monitor (TI-99/4A).

-Manual typewriter

-SyQuest 44 MB cartridges (and a drive, still in the original box).

-Not to mention an Iomega ZIP drive and cartridges.

Redstone

recognizable to anyone over, I'd guess 40, but probably not to many younger folks.

Redstone

I'm only 31 x(

Redstone

dating he bought us matching Zippo lighters and once in awhile I would buy him a new one. A lot of people here still use them but I cannot bear to hear that sound anymore.

My 13-year-old begged for one.

There's just no substitute. The smell, the nice, solid, heavy feel of it in your hand, the fact that it will light in a freakin' hurricane.

Bake

it's got his military unit insignia on it and his name engraved. One of my most treasured things. I'd like to get it in working order but I'm afraid to send it in to Zippo for them to fix because it's irreplaceable and I'm afraid something will happen to it.

that I have to buy from computer repair places.

It weighs about a zillion pounds.


Heck, I also have a dual cassette player and cassettes because I think many younger kids have not seen those either (although I can tell you EXACTLY where it changed tracks right in a certain section of The Babys Anthology 8 track tape....~baby baby bay <click? be baby take me in your arms and love me...cause I need some of what...you got~)

Sigh. I did wait long enough for my clogs to come back in style as well as my jeans from the 70's...however, if the fashion world even THINKS I am going to re-embrace high waisted 1980's Meg Ryan mommie pants...they got another think coming. And take that big hair and shove it.

:)

Redstone

And check ebay and the web; some of the early Marantz tube gear is worth big dollars.

I was just sitting here saying to myself...

I Hate compressed music... funny you should mention it :)

Now stand back while I get my Montrose-Montrose tape out and turn it up to about 1/4 volume...you don't want to get hurt now.

:)

as well as an old Heathkit ham radio.

I haven't used it since my check ride. It's still in my flight bag, though.

Handy gadget.

Might even remember how to use it!

Hand made in 1972.

They went on a camera. That used film.

Redstone

However, keeping it clean, how about a Kaypro, portable computer!
My tv bugs people when the dvd remote does nothing. Use your hand to turn it on/off, volume up/down. Yes, you have to stand up and reach it.

Still in my Graphics Master.

I still have my pica pole but my kids lost my proportion wheel a long time ago.

I also have t-squares and various triangles. Want to buy a waxer?

And some Varityper fonts too if you've got 'em! :)

I love it.

Lot's of 'em and an old DUAL turntable to play them on. Although it's getting increasingly difficult to find replacement styli (sp?) for it.

Q

I have a turntable and replaced the stylus a few years ago. It was a Shure stylus, and it turns out they still make them, lucky me.

Dial phone--used. My family had a couple until the early 90s
TV with dials--used. My family had one until around 1992.
8-track--used. A high school teacher kept one in his classroom and let students use.
128k Mac--used. My middle school had a bunch of them in the mid-90s. I used to have an Apple II clone made in 1982 too.
Computer using tapes/TV--seen, didn't use
Manual typewriter--used. Typed homework assignments on one for a while. Bought an electric typewriter at a garage sale and thought it was awesome.
SyQuest cartridges--seen. Friend's house
ZIP drive--Used. I threw mine out about a year and a half ago after buying a 100 GB external hard drive.

Never underestimate what someone born in the early eighties will have seen or used.

young when this stuff was around, your generation started with electronic stuff much earlier than mine did.

My 23-year-old son has much the same in the way of experiences with this stuff as you do; he grew up with it being around our house.

I should have considered that there would be others of his age with similar experiences.

Redstone

to have seen/used/know what some of it is.

and probably some other concert t-shirts left over from the 80s

a turntable

I have a ton of music on vinyl and cassette as well.

- 8-tracks

- 45s

- slide rule (Mr. MG's)

- ZIP drive and cartridges here too

- manual typewriter, travel size

- dial phone--a really great one from the '40s--all black and weigh about 1,000 lbs.

Redstone

But they can have my Jarts when they pry them from my COLD DEAD HANDS! :evilgrin:

"When Jarts are outlawed, only outlaws will have Jarts!"

Redstone

Despite the fact that they're actually my brother's (sssshhh let's not tell him I'm laying claim to them--he's 3,000 miles away so I say they're mine by default), I refused to sell them. Especially because I hated that boss--she was an idiot.

In the AF, the F-16 is known familiarly as the "lawn dart," but the trade name Jarts fell by the wayside somewhere.

I inherited it from my mother who used it in college, back in the 30's. It came in handy in Eastern Europe, where power outages were common. Come to think of it, it might be handy today, though most folks use battery laptops if their profession requires a lot of writing (like journalists). I haven't a clue where one can get ribbons these days, though.

212-674-7700

They used to be located in the Flatiron Building in NYC, but have since moved across the street to a bigger office.

If you call, tell Paul a happy customer from NC sent you. He did a great job restoring an old Hermes typewriter of mine about 8 months ago. I dropped it off (at the Flatiron Building) when I took a trip to NY, then he sent it back to me. I'd wager that he can find a ribbon to fit any typewriter ever made, and fix it too if it's broken.

:hi:

-app

best answer on the whole thread. You just took it to a whole other level.

:rofl:

It preceeded the Spirograph by decades.

Who here knows what it is?

Curta Calculator

Sherwood HiFi with tubes and a tuner retrofitted to receive stereo FM signals

They may have seen one, but used one? No way. :)

Love it...

:)

It's still parked in the garage of my parents' house. Both my parents are dead, but my crazy uncle still lives there (long story). It hasn't been driven in ages, and the paint is oxidized, but otherwise it's mint - no dings or scratches. It's probably some vintage vehicle collector's dream machine. I guess we'll find out if my uncle ever dies. Ours might be a 63 or a 64, though. My 'rents bought it for a furniture repair business that never got off the ground.

It looks like this, right? (not ours, but looks just like it down to the color)

Here's mine:

A Boy Scout Canteen

A Flexible Flyer sled

A box full of 45 RPM "adapters" (the yellow things)

An Erector Set still in the metal box - with instructions

A drafting board and T-square

I do not own any now other than a dial phone (for emergency use of the land line.)

We do have cassette decks and a VCR. Do they count?

Redstone

Originally made in 1992 (I was just a girlfriend then, so I was a witness). Rewritten in 1994 (I didn't witness, maybe he figured I was a keeper), many of the changes and dates were crossed out, with his initials beside them. The attorney was a good friend, and in 1992, he wasn't technologically enabled (most sole practitioners were not at the time). So the current will has replaced pages, and in other sections the dates were scratched out with my FiL's initials written in next to the changes. At the time it was just easier to do it that way.

In 2002, we flew to Nova Scotia with a souped up zip drive to download pics from our very expensive (approx. $600) 3mp digital camera with a ridiculously small memory card in today's terms. We had no problems going up. On the way back, in Toronto, as we were boarding at the gate, they stopped my spouse and told he couldn't board until he demonstrated the zip drive working...and I had already boarded ahead of him, and they refused to let me deboard. After a strained 15-20 minutes, they allowed him to board. However, now you'll get into trouble over 3.5 Oz of toothpaste...go figure!

records, 8 tracks, and has a radio. The whole piece is wood, and the top is on hinges. I also have all the equipment for viewing slides, the projector, tripod screen.....I have an Intellivision



with games and it still works! That actually belongs to my husband, it was his when he was a kid.

8mm / Super 8 projector, or at least an editor?

Damn if I'm transferring ALL my parents' home movies to DVD without editing.

Redstone

:-)

A working rotary phone (aqua, ca. 1965)

A 1980 Sont Trinitron TV (my living room TV)

A working 1960 Westinghouse TV (in a rosewood case, which is the stand for my 1980 TV)

A 1955 Wurlitzer piano

Assorted floppy disks

Assorted casette tapes

Assorted records (and player, which I use regularly)

My dignity

(I guess all this makes me a hipster)

Redstone

I am really upset about the analog signal being turned off next year, because it's quite the impressive piece of kitch in my living room.

I inherited it from my stepgrandmother, who inherited it from her grandfather when he died six months after buying it new. It had been sitting in the "Big House" (I'm a Southerner) next door to her since then, in a closet. My dad and I found it two summers ago, plugged it in, and were amazed to find it still works perfectly.

And it only has like one scratch on it. It also has a pink speaker box on the bottom. Pretty cool.

never want to buy that TV from you, even for a dollar, after reading your post.

It's a treasure, and if you ever felt that you needed to sell it, I'd GIVE you the money so you could keep it.

Hey, when the analog signal goes away, you could probably find a place in the cabinet to hide the converter box and keep it going. I'd hate to see you not being able to enjoy the warm glow of those tubes.

Redstone

Unfortunately, my turntable doesn't work anymore. x(

even though they've come back in style, I have the one that I had in the 70s.

Also, have a bunch of those old big floppy 5.25" disks. Even have a drive that will read them (but it's not in any computer).

Tape drive/tapes for computer

Also, two typewriters, one manual, one electric

The complete set of Schoolhouse Rocks

Stormwatch was my first Tull album. Turned me into a Tull-Skull! :evilgrin:

Do those count?

Trying to explain how Combat! wasted may hours is a fruitless task.

and my Argus 35mm Slide projector and screen.

My 2000 or so pieces of Melmac Dinnerware.

My 1959 Telefunken Contessa Console Stereo with turntable (Tubes).

My Heywood Wakefield furniture (those pieces that I haven't had to sell off yet).

My Aqua-lid and chrome Kromex Kitchen Cannister set.

My pink 1964 Frigidaire Imperial Flair Double Oven (Works great!)

My 1959 Ericofon (Still works and used it up until recently)

Hell, My 1979 Gibson Les Paul Custom (guitar) that I bought new is older than they are...

:hi:

RL

The black & white portable TV I watched Nixon's resignation speech on.

A pressure cooker.

A portable dictaphone.

A Mac Plus.

A turntable (phonograph) and a whole lot of LPs.

A slide rule.

An E6-B.

A reel-type lawn mower.

Maybe you're not so old as you think.

...built in Markneukirchen, Germany in 1932.

Also, a Japanese Petal spy camera.

My dad bought it when he was stationed in Okinawa.

"The Petal Camera was the spy camera from the 1940's horded by American private eyes and sold for ten dollars (US). That might seem reallly cheap by today's standards but ten bucks was a lot of greenbacks back then. In fact, that was almost a week's pay. The Petal Camera is a tiny, round camera about the size of a US quarter. It has a fixed-focus 12mm (f5.6) lens. Speeds could be set at B and I and it produced six, 6mm circular images on a 25mm film disc in a special cassette. The Petal is so small, in fact, that it is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as being the smallest camera ever produced. To advance the film, the back is rotated until a number engraved around its circumference aligns with a red coloured dot. The cylindrical tube mounted on top of the camera is the eye-level optical viewfinder."




Earlier, a pine chest that was brought to the U.S. by an ancestor in 1835...

A computer, came out in...err.. 1981!

Black and white, 40x22 resolution. Standard memory 1k byte. Can be expanded to 16k with added RAMPack. It had its own printer that printed out on thermal paper, kinda like store receipts. Programs came on cassette. The whole computer was smaller than a Letter sized piece of paper and had a touch membrane keyboard. Heck the cassette player I used was bigger than the computer!

I upgraded it to an Acorn Electron later on. It had colour output, 32k memory, floppy disks came as an optional extra (but I was stuck with cassette tapes). It had a word processor on a cartridge, which meant you could turn it on and it would start working right away (no need to load software). I couldn't afford a printer but school was still using BBC microcomputers, which were compatible with the Acorn Electron... so I took my work to school and printed it out there.

Mark.

I never KEPT anything I owned back then. I usually simply donated them to someone who might have wanted them. Until I was nearly thirty, almost everything I owned could either be carried on my back or fit into a single medium sized trunk (primarily books and my own notebooks filled with my writing).

we have entire farm buildings filled with all that crap and more.

I have told him repeatedly that he is going to leave a nightmare for our children when he dies.

Books...

Seriously, though... my record player. I still have my Mood Ring floating around somewhere. And a box of t-shirts from the seventies with those crappy, heat-pressed logos and graphics on the front that would slowly chip and peel off ("Going my way, baby?"). My trusty (and still used) Underwood typewriter.

Oh! Oh! Oh! --- I have (in storage) about three years worth of Dynamite! Magazine from my grade school years.

And the crowning achievement of my youth-- THE Farrah Fawcett Majors in the red bikini poster...



(Ahhhh.... good times. Good times.)

A slide rule.

120 film.

:silly:

Now, seriously:

- Matchbox cars - not by Mattel, but the honest-to-God made-in-England ones, by Lesney.
- A bunch of 5 1/4" floppies
- A bunch of vinyls

I don't even know if the disk is still good anymore... but I hope so 'cause there's some information I wanna recover from it.

I mean room.

before I moved across the country... but since they weren't using it, they had it packed away and they weren't sure where it was. :\

Of course, now I have two tiny little SD cards that holds 2 1/2 gigs between them... and I've got a card reader that can plug into any computer that has a USB port. :)

Most of the records I have are out of print, and I'm getting ready to transfer the music to CD. :D

I also have my electric typewriter that I got as a high school graduation present. It got me through college (although I wish to hell PCs had been around back then) and beyond. Right now, it's good as a door stop in the garage, but it still works fine. :P

The one in this picture is almost identical to the one I used as a kid and still have to the is day. Back in the day, you rolled your hair in curlers and then plopped this soft, plastic "bonnet" over your head -- hot air would fill it and dry your hair. This model was a big deal because it was "portable" -- you literally strapped the heating unit to your waist with a vinyl belt! :D I can still remember seeing my older sisters doing the dishes or chores before their proms with their big, poofy bonnets on.

Along with a box of patch cartridges. Circa 1983.

I'm 44 and I had never really used a fountain pen until I came to Europe. Most North American young people have never used a fountain pen, nor have they ever been encouraged to use them or taught _how_ to use them. (primate1 is an exception, but that's true of him in a lot of ways.)

Respectfully submitted,

A middle-aged fountain pen convert

had holes in them for the inkwells.

(Catholic school, in case you haven't guessed.)

Redstone

No more ink wells, though. Kids here are allowed to use cartridges for their "school pens," but fountain pens ("school pens") still are the standard here for students up to 13 years old.

Were you taught in school all of the nuance about fountain pens? For example, one's fountain pen is not to be loaned to anyone else, since the nib conforms to your way of writing, and use by another person could skew the nib.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I've become such a champion of fountain pens is that they inherently support and encourage individuality and celebrate the uniquely sensual, gestural, human act of artistic expression. (Few consider their handwriting "artistic," but even those few are WRONG.)

tucked in the closet somewhere, along with the cassette drive and TV hook up.

And please, do not trivialize the Iomega Zip Drive. I still use mine and saved me when my computer crashed last month!

Those bulbs are harder to find now.

You know, not one of these:

I don't tend to keep things if they're not in constant use. However, I do have some odd old things that fall into two categories:

Still got:

* Metal body 35mm SLR
* ZIP drive and cartridges
* Floppies

Went out and got:

* Wine, champagne, liqueur, and martini glasses that are the right size. I will not drink from a betta bowl with a stem on it.
* two turntables that play 78's, only one also plays 33 1/3's
* dozens of 78's
* Panama, boater, fedora, newsboy, Trenker. I don't usually leave the house without one of these.
* 1934 brown leather overcoat
* 1935 brown bakelite radio, tubes intact, needs an antenna
* 1935 hand cranked 35mm film projector
* 1936 German-English dictionary, in fraktur, used frequently

Then there's the looking to get:

* a Siemens rotary phone
* a disk recorder

Once, at work, I got in trouble for using this paper cutter. I needed one, and one was there. What I failed to notice was that I was using the paper cutter that was part of the display of office equipment from the original office in the 1920s, stamps, desk, adding machine, all that. It just didn't register that any of it was supposed to be old.

It might be from just after 1900. You can find them on eBay. I don't remember the name of the song on it.

It's got the upgraded motherboard, an external SCSI controller and a case fan.

Redstone