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Old Tech

My beloved HP 11c calculator.
An A/B Printer switchbox (my first home computer "network").
My husband's 1960's Fender Princeton Reverb tube amp.
My 1969 Fender Stratocaster (with original pickups, case, and whammy bar).
A 1950's BMW R50 motorcycle.
A whole bunch of old/antique wood shop tools in my husband's shop.
A telephone just like the picture in the OP (but white, not brown).
A bunch of 5 1/4" floppy disks (no idea why I am saving those).
 
I've got an Astrolabe, Quadrant, Cross staff & Nocturnal on my wall, next to my other re-enactment stuff... :)
 
For that olde-tyme feel, I've got the mame32 emulator with way-too-many-to-count ROMs of the old classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders.
 
joobz said:
I have an old Odessey and a TI/99-4a with tape drive.

BTW, with all those duckies, are you a zefrank fan?
Click to expand...

Had to look up zefrank as it was new to me. The pirate ducks came from a town on Long Island. The town people seem to fancy themselves as pirates...as do some on the forum, so I guess they followed me home.

Wish I still had my old SR-50. Got me through the first two years of college. I had a subsequent TI with a tape drive, but I forgot the number.

glenn
 
Got a museum full of stuff like this:

pdp8-02.jpg


A magnetic drum from the late 40's or early 50's

i0000108.jpg
 
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Pup said:
Sigh. Those little hand-cranked metal blowers are the fashion with all the blacksmiths at olde-tymie reenactments and fairs because they're so cheap and convenient to haul from event to event, but it's amazing the ridiculous stories they make up to justify them.

Here's what a real portable forge from the Civil War was like: http://www.oldsouthblacksmiths.com/fw/fw.htm Bellows, not crank. And huge, and horsedrawn.
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/civil-war-army-forge_Picture2.jpg
Click to expand...

Also hand crank bellows are no longer manufactured. Only electric now.
 
My wife has an Amiga 2000 and Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster, Commodore Monitor, and a rack full of old analog video editing gear. It all still works, though it's all quite obsolete. She refuses to get rid of any of it despite not having used any of the gear in years.
 
Nothing interesting at home, but where I work is loaded with old tech- stuff like:

Neumann microphones: U47 (introduced 1949, ours is from before the 1956 redesign), M49 (introduced 1952), KM54 (introduced 1954)

AKG C-12 (produced 1953-1963)

RCA 77DX (produced ca. 1944-1974)

Ampex ATR-102 analog tape machines (produced 1976-ca.1980 and still one of the best mixdown machines around).

Teletronix LA-2A, Gates Sta-Level, RCA BA-6B, Fairchild 670 (these are all tube compressor/limiters from the mid-'50s to early '60s).

We even have a limiter which was manufactured by Wilcox-Gay for the Civil Aeronautics Administration which I fixed up for studio use. Judging from the components and construction techniques it was probably built in the late '40s to early '50s. Since the CAA was replaced by the FAA in 1958, it can't be any newer than that.

The prices some of this gear command today are surprising. The Neumann U47 retailed for $360 US in 1960 (equivalent to about $2500 today); nowadays they can fetch 10 grand on the vintage equipment market. A C-12 in good condition can bring $12,000, and that Fairchild 670 is worth $25,000-$30,000.
 
The quaintest things I have are:

Old:
1. Grandpa's slide-rule from the 1920s.
2. Grandpa's Zeiss Ikon camera (with bellows extender) from the 1920s.
3. Great-great-grandpa K's pocketwatch, from the 1890s.

Not-so-old:
4. One of those rotary-dial phones from the 1950s. Quaint.
5. My first Motorola cellphone, from around 1990. Quite the brick.
 
Oh! And I have a cassingle of "I Don't Remember" (B:side is "Solsbury Hill"). There's your time machine.
 
Oh, and the oldest artefact I own is a Roman coin my G-g-grandfather dug up in his yard as a child in the 19th century. Approximately 1800 years old. I'm not sure if coins count as 'tech,' though.
 
I have an Atari 2600 and about 50 games sitting in my closet. The great thing is that only two or three years ago I had the thing set up and working, and my stepson, seven or eight at the time, loved it. He would beg to play its crappy version of Frogger or Space Invaders.
On a related note, in the mid-nineties, while I was in college, my roommate and I set up our apartment living room with televisions in opposite corners. In his corner were all of the Nintendo systems avaliable to that time, from the original NES to the "Super-Nofriendo". In my corner was the little 2600, getting played ten times as much.
I maxed out Megamania.
 
glennmr78 said:
Had to look up zefrank as it was new to me. The pirate ducks came from a town on Long Island. The town people seem to fancy themselves as pirates...as do some on the forum, so I guess they followed me home.

Wish I still had my old SR-50. Got me through the first two years of college. I had a subsequent TI with a tape drive, but I forgot the number.

glenn
Click to expand...

Slight Derail... I just came from four days in Shenzhen, and the hotel actually gives you a yellow rubber duckie in the tub! How cool. No explanation... just a little friend to swim with you!

See below link for more on unsinkable rubber duckies.... They can follow you anywhere! I thought this was only famous in my business (I'm in logistics but specialize in ocean freight), and have been surprised over the years to see stories around the world on the famous traveling flotsam....


http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/elements/shoes.htm
 
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I did some digging as well and came up with my old ZX Spectrum, complete with tape recorder storage device and Lone Wolf game :jaw-dropp . Fired it up and got all nostalgic about BASIC again. Not.

Hello World!
 
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