Technology has come and gone, and some of the coolest tech didn’t live long enough, but continue in our hearts.
What are some tech you have had in the past that you miss? Bonus points for a picture and a cool story of why you loved that tech!
I’ll go first:
I love my T-Mobile Sidekick! It was the COOLEST phone.
Close second is the Palm Pilot.
I actually still have this and the battery still works.
I had a number of Palm PDAs, but this one had a huge (for the time) 4GB drive and a big (again, for the time) screen.
I kept all my music on it, and it was a great screen to read books on in those pre-Kindle days.
Editing to add another one I miss:
This was another Palm device with a big screen, and it was sleek and slim. A pleasure to use. This one I don’t have anymore.
So, very early tech, but I love teaching the “multiply by 9” trick on your hands to people who admit they don’t know their nines table !
I honestly have no idea if The Kidz™ still use these in school, but way back in Proterozoic era otherwise known as the early 1990s, getting your first scientific calculator was a major milestone in navigating adolescence.
To only then type out 8008135
The Creative Nomad Jukebox MP3 player. I had one in the early '00s. Same size and shape as a CD player but with a 6 GB (amazing at the time) hard drive.
Also, I had an Apple Newton MessagePad 120 in college, which was very useful until the screen got cracked in my backpack one day. But I took a lot of notes with it.
I had one of those, but first, I hade one of these:
I had a Diamond Rio too, but the one I have fond memories of is the Nomad Jukebox.
Oh yeah, compared to the Rio, it could hold a huge amount of music. It was definitely an upgrade… at least until I got a 30gb iPod a few years later.
I also had a media player with a hard drive and a built-in video screen long before the iPhone. I used to watch MST3K on it. I can’t remember the name though.
I’m not sure this is the exact model, but this is the MP3 player I had right before my first iPod. Basically a hard drive with an LCD screen and interface bolted on.
Worked really well, though, and I got a lot of use out of it.
That’s what the Nomad Jukebox was as well, but it had the advantage of being the size and shape of a portable CD player, so it could fit in all sorts of cases you might have already had.
I’m pretty sure that video player I had was an Archos, but none of the models I’ve looked at so far seem to be the one I had.
EDIT: This is going to drive me crazy for the rest of the evening.
Many years ago the company I worked for was throwing out some obsolete tech and I just couldn’t let the QuickTake 150 go.
[case, snap-on “closeup” lens, camera, installation floppies]
Oooh. I’m so annoyed. I’ve been Googling and Googling and I can’t figure it out.
I had this when I was a kid. I had no need for it. I just thought it was really cool. I bought it with birthday money.
I also had this until fairly recently. I have no idea what happened to it. It’s awesome though.
It’s also a calculator!
I used to work for Radio Shack in the '80s and I wanted but couldn’t afford one of these:
Ahead of its time, I would say
