Technology

By using the Action Replay on the Amiga, C64 or PC you could not just make and enter cheats but also edit or program in machine code, strip out MIDI soundtracks, have a full array of disk tools, edit sprites, ...

Is there any brand that better shows the change of the times? Within 5 years in the 1970’s and 80’s Betamax became a icon of advanced technology, and then an icon of failure.Betamax was released just before VHS video, and ...

Does anyone remember the little handheld Casio Keyboard from the early 80's? It didn't really have proper keys, more like key 'pads' but, and here's the great thing, it had the exact rhythm from the 80's Trio hit record "Da ...

I never see anything written about this keyboard - I must have the only one in existence. Basically, it is a Casio VL-1 with an extended keyboard (but the same little buttons), and a 4 note polyphonic capability. Its main ...

I started out with CB radio in Hull in 1982 with my very first Pegasus 3 120 channel radio, an SWR meter, a power pack and an aerial stuck on the top of a biscuit tin. I was 15 years ...

Pre cell phones, I can remember as a child everyone had a CB Radio in their car and house. My dad used to stay up to all hours of the night and talk on the radio to people all over ...

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I remember going to the local Clarks shop for school shoes and made to stand on a machine that used to scare the life out of me that was supposed to tell your shoe size - always thought that the ...

Ahhh yes... Even if you scratched them they still played. Tomorrow's World must have had a magical one! ...

Not actually a computer but a peripheral; however it still seems to belong here, rather than in the technology section. Does anyone remember concept keyboards, as used at school with the BBC Micro? They were a large, flat, blue-rimmed keyboard ...

Many people associate corridor railway coaches with earlier decades than this website covers, but they were in fact in service with British Rail up until the mid-1980s.Even if you've never travelled in one, you will have seen such carriages in ...

Dansette was a battery operated cassette recorder that looked like a flattened brick, with the usual 5 control buttons and a speaker in the top half. It had a little microphone that you could plug in. ...

Dial-a-disc was a telephone service provided the the Post Office beginning in the 60's. You simply dialed the number 16 on your telephone and a current 'pop' tune would be played down the line. This tune would be different each day ...

Digital watches first became available in the 1970's but were so expensive and rare that few people owned one. It wasn't until the 80's that the technology became widely available and it was common place to see people wearing digital ...

The world's first portable CD player came from Sony at the end of 1985 and retailed for a whopping $800 in the US. But by this time, there were finnaly CDs available from non-classical, non-jazz modern artists like U2 and ...

Disco lighting - ring counters, sound-to-light, strobes - every DJ built their own, and they were a product of the arrival of the transistor technology that also brought us transistor radios. It made all the difference to our disco dancing ...

As a lover of technology and photographic kit, Dixons in the late 70s and early 80s was techno heaven. Decent cameras and lenses, Prinz binoculars, Chinon stuff. Heady stuff.My favourite purchase was a Prinztronic TV computer game. TV tennis (Pong?) ...

The early mobiles were normally huge, heavy and useless. The most popular mobile was the can phone made by Motorola, as seen in the picture. There was also a type of mobile, called the portable phone, which was cheaper ...

The 8-track was eons ahead of it's predecesor, The Four Track. Remember those? ...

I just found my Ghetto Blasters (portable cassette player) whilst clearing out the shed and bad memories came flooding back! I remember asking my mum and dad for a ghetto blaster with twin tapes for Christmas.My face must have been ...

A basic Kodak camera that had been developed so that you inserted a film cartridge of 24 exposures. Previously you had to thread a film in a camera in total darkness. Revolutionary at the time it meant that you could ...

Microchip Electronics was an 80's electronics set comprising a blue console and a selection of electronic components including resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, diodes, and an LF353 op-amp IC.You could build over 100 circuits including metal detectors, motor controllers, and sound ...

From the likes of Ferguson and Grundig, Music Centres were the height of fashion for those with absolutely no musical appreciation, but longing for a sideboard that made noises. Primarily seen as a piece of furniture, at worst they looked ...

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Once upon a time, pay-phones/public telephones used to only cost 5p to call someone. Now you hardly get to say much at all for a minimum of 20p. British Telecom must have spent millions on repairing damaged phone-boxes over ...

I was about eight when my oldest brother got a 'pocket' calculator. It was pale brownish-grey, and the numbers showed up in red. It did the four basic rules of arithmetic - add, subtract, multiply, divide and we were all ...

No one remembers these.....my baby sitter had one and it was like a toaster....you slipped in a 33 vinyl and away you went! I think the batteries went after about three tracks on an album and it must have taken ...

Kids used to - and still do - like to collect anything and everything (remember Lucky Trolls?). So, when smelly rubbers hit the school scene in the 80s, they became a coveted collectible. Not only did your mum not mind ...

There was a whole craze for stationery that smelt fruity. I went through an apple phase, with apple glue paste (bought in France - probably wouldn't have been allowed in the UK), an apple note pad and then even got ...

Remember paying £575 for one of these around 1980. First exposure to home computing. The machine had 48KB of RAM, 32KB of which was available for programmes. Had BASIC and Assembler which was loaded from the cassette into RAM before ...

Surely you remember these? They were so iconic, and such a visible icon of reaching for the sun, and falling well short.Sir Clive Sinclair (yes, Sir!) launched the Sinclair C5 on 10 January 1985. It was a vehicle that he ...

I don't know what they were called. There were two types of sound-effects keyring. They were both small plastic boxes that could fit in the palm of your hand and the first type had 6 small grey buttons on one ...

I have memories from around 1980 of visiting some friends of my parents who had a television with teletext. The television had a remote control and when you pressed a certain button the picture vanished and was replaced by a ...

Apart from the world of Hi' Def' and Plasma screens, television is not what it was.I remember getting a ?500 telly for ?120 in 1992 when Rumbelows closed down. It was, and still is, one of the best tellies I've ...

Fond memories of playing this as a 10 year old. Remember being amazed by the Telex machine. Quite inventive too. I am going to search ebay for a good one. I have started to collect all the favourites board games ...

The Locker Answering Machine was a device made by Worlds of Wonder, which you'd stick on the inside of your locker door near the vent. I thought you were supposed to pound on the locker to start a recording, but ...

Trim phone ...

Trimphones are a model of telephone that were designed in the UK  in the late 1960s. It was considered a more fashionable alternative to the standard telephones available from Post Office Telephones. The name 'trimphone' is an acronym which stands ...

When I was a little boy, back in the early 1950s, I remember going to the drugstore with my dad whenever our television set quit working. He would have a paper sack full of vacuum tubes; he pulled out of ...

VHS machines hit their peak of quality nearly ten years ago and it has dropped again.I bought a few from the peak period and apart from the resolution you can actually get a superior picture to DVD with the right ...

Video 2000 (or V2000; also known as Video Compact Cassette, or VCC) is a consumer videocassette system and analog recording standard developed by Philips and Grundig to compete with JVC's VHS and Sony's Betamax video technologies. Distribution of Video 2000 ...

The Walkman was invented by Sony Corp. and was the device that changed the way we listened to music. With the Walkman, we could listen to music anywhere for the first time.The first Walkman required 4 AA batteries and came ...

The earliest wordprocessors were simply electronic typewriters which appeared in the 1970s. They had electronic keyboards (just like computer keyboards) and a display which would show one or two lines of text. You would type a single line and it ...