Category: Retro

I’ve been doing another attic purge, and in the midst of book recycling and comic donating and unwanted toy trashing I found a few boxes of almpst-forgotten old tech. Let’s see some of what was in them!

The above is a small Polaroid camera that used special film to produce tiny stamp-sized photos. The photos we took using this have mostly faded over the years, so this is a classic example of ephemeral technology. The same technology continues today in the Instax cameras, which I’m sure will fill attic boxes in years to come.

The above was our first Polaroid, and produced the full-sized pictures that were known worldwide. We never used it much since the film was so expensive. Over the years the plastic of the flashbulb yellowed, the rubber used for the strap became brittle and broke, and the adhesive on the back of the brand sticker lost its stick.

This was the only portable CD player I ever owned in the US (or ever?) and I don’t recall ever using it except perhaps in a car via the cassette adaptor. It no longer works, probably due to a belt for the motor having perished long ago.

To my great surprise this portable minidisc player worked, and the disc inside contained a recording of a physics lecture I attended about 24 years ago! The detritus on the microphone cable is the remains of an elastic band that had perished over the years. I used to have a minidisc player in my car, and we still have a console-sized minidisc player set up downstairs, although I haven’t powered it on for many years!

This is a relic of a bygone era: a wireless mouse from the days before Bluetooth! That thing on the left is the receiver, which connected to the PC via a serial port. I can barely remember ever using this, although I imagine it was wonderful when I got it.

We used our first (and only) camcorder a lot, although these days it seems impossible large and cumbersome. It also no longer works, having problems reading the tape and with the eject mechanism. Many years ago I encoded all the movies from cassette onto CDs but we haven’t watched any for decades.

Some computer memory and an Ethernet card. These were for old laptops, including…

My first laptop! I loved this and used it mostly for gaming. It seemed fairly small and portable at the time, although by todays standards it’s far too large and heavy to port around. I plugged it in but it doesn’t get past the above screen. I recall the hard-drive failed one day when I was using it and it has basically been a brick ever since.

This was my last laptop, a still-small Sony model. I used this a lot including to code my PhD simulation and have very fond memories of it. Alas it broke in two ways: first the harddrive started failing and then this happened:

I had another laptop as well; a very small VAIO model I took with me when I traveled. I recall it also broke but don’t remember what I did with it. Perhaps it’s still in the attic in another box?

The left was Kristin’s first phone, the middle my first, and the right my first that could message. The Virgin one still feels wonderful to hold, and closes up to be extremely tiny. I remember I had to pay per text sent, and since I didn’t have a contract I had to purchase top-up cards at the store!

There’s also this phone, and to be honest I don’t remember it at all. The Ultraman Tiga sticker on the back is proof it was mine, and my guess would be I used it between the two in the previous photo, in the very early 2000s.

As technology improved so did our phones, and the above were what we (and most other people!) were using before smartphones took over. They’re still beautiful little pieces of tech – especially the ones on the right – and I have fond memories of them.

Incidentally I attempted to power on the phones I had chargers for but none of them would get past the startup screen. Maybe they’re looking for a signal that no longer exists?

We’ve had lots of digital cameras over the years, and the above are what remains. A couple of them are dead and the ones that still work utilize memory cards I can no longer read and even the best one (the lower right) produces images of quality much, much less than our current phones. They were all great in their day, but they’re just curios for non-collectors now.

This one is very small and I remember I loved how easy it was to carry it around with me. We even had a smaller one, but the CCD failed and I’m sure I trashed it years ago.

As Apple users for decades now we have a good collection of obsolete Apple products including the above two tiny iPods. We actually have seven iPods in this house, two of which are still in active use!

All the above – two iPads, two iPhones, an iPod touch, an iPod (that went through the washing machine and emerged unscathed) and a first generation AppleTV – are old enough now they can’t be updated and some can’t even hold a charge. They’re all electronic junk now, and will soon be recycled at our local Apple Store.

With a few exceptions (the minidisc player, iPods and one phone) everything on this page has now been trashed or recycled. This is only a selection of what I found, and the amount of items tossed was heavy enough that I could barely lift it all.

A few of the other items I kept are worth sharing here as well, although special enough they warrant their own dedicated posts. Watch for them!