New inventions in our lifetime........

[MaineWriter]

Calculators


I took chemistry my freshman year in college and was still using a slide rule. I was a whiz with a slide rule! Calculators came out shortly thereafter. My father bought one and as I recall, it cost $300 and it didn't do much more than basic math functions. Now calculators are given away as promotional business items.

Leslie

[Jeff Wrangler]

Calculators


I took chemistry my freshman year in college and was still using a slide rule. I was a whiz with a slide rule! Calculators came out shortly thereafter. My father bought one and as I recall, it cost $300 and it didn't do much more than basic math functions. Now calculators are given away as promotional business items.

Leslie

That's what saved my ass in high school chemistry (sophomore year, 1973-74  ), an early calculator. I was getting the concepts but continually screwing up the math. My dad bought one for me--I don't recall the price. All it did was add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but that was enough.

Jeff

[mvansand76]

Does anyone know a good brand of coffee maker out there? I'll buy it just as long as it doesn't piss vinegar all over the kitchen counter.

You're so cute! I would recommend the Senseo coffeemaker that uses pods:

Senseo is a registered trademark for a coffee brewing system from Dutch companies Philips and Douwe Egberts, a subsidiary of Sara Lee Corporation. The two main characteristics of the system are its coffee pods (called pads in some countries) and its design.

He, twee vliegen in 1 klap, new coffeemaker and it's Dutch as well!

 

[saucycobblers]

I still remember my excitement when my parents bought our first VCR - a now-defunct Betamax model about the size of a small shed with massive push down levers that squeaked when you ejected the video tape out the top of the machine. Before that my only option was to watch films on TV or travel 15 miles on the bus to the nearest cinema after our little town's only cinema closed when I was small. We had a tiny video store that had a choice of about 40 films to start with, and I queued excitedly to join and take out my first video - David Lynch's 'Elephant Man'. I carried that video home like it was the most precious thing in the world, and felt just as excited pressing 'play' as I did when watching a film at the cinema and the Studio opening music started up. Going into that video store was like walking into Santa's Grotto for me in those days...

[Arad-3]

The fax machines. I remember when everyone was in awe when the fax became trendy.

This is still one contraption that I still can't figure out. How they send these images through telephone wires to another fax machine is beyond me.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Cable Television?

When I was a kid, Indianapolis only had 4 television stations: ABC (Channel 6), CBS (Channel 8 ), NBC (Channel 13) and Channel 4, which was a local channel. Many people couldn't pick up Channel 4 very well. The reception was very bad in parts of the city, and if you wanted to watch Channel 4 you had to point the tv antenna in the correct spot or wrap some foil around it (or stick a coat hanger in it). Later, Channel 20 (PBS) came to the city, and we had 5 channels.

People risked their necks mounting TV antennas on the roof. We had an electronic device called a "tenna-rotor" that actually rotated the antenna up on the roof to change its direction to improve reception.

[Pipedream]

It's crazy what has changed at my radio station during the last ten years or so. When I began to work there, the editing of audio material was still real handicraft, and "to cut" meant really just this: cut the audio tape with a little knife and then glue it together again at the place you wanted. I remember working through whole nights at one of these machines in our studio:



Today, it's all digital:



In fact, I can do a lot of stuff with a relatively cheap software at home. It's gotten easier and more comfortable in a lot of ways, but sometimes I still miss the "good old times" when you didn't have to sit in front of a computer all day...

 

[Jeff Wrangler]

When I was about ten years old, my parents got me a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.

And anybody else around here, besides Leslie and me, old enough to remember 8-track tapes? 

[moremojo]

When I was about ten years old, my parents got me a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.

And anybody else around here, besides Leslie and me, old enough to remember 8-track tapes? 

Jeff, I remember 8-track tapes, but didn't own any. My sister, three and a half years older than me, owned at least one (an Art Garfunkle album [or tape, rather], of all things).

[David In Indy]

And anybody else around here, besides Leslie and me, old enough to remember 8-track tapes? 

<raising hand>

I do. That was one of the most God awful inventions in all of history. 

If you wanted to listen to a song again, you had to wait until all the other songs on the track played (normally three or four). If you hadn't lost interest by then, you would have to fight with the machine to keep it from changing to the next track.

Yep. I remember the 8-tracks all right.