Lost & Found
A clear out of the loft reveals all manner of old technology... Maybe we should contact Bletchley Park?
Oh my! Yesterday was a trip down memory lane, as we sifted through the loft, fishing out some of the kids’ old stuff, my Wife’s old stuff and mine…. a lot of old-tech.
So ready for a dose of retro my friends? Let’s rock and roll!
Pocket Television
I have always been a collector of gadgets, some more useful than others. The TV-7 came out in the 1990’s and back in the day, I used it a lot in my very late teens, mostly to watch my favourite TV programmes late in the evening with a pair of headphones plugged in. Since it is FM based, I would very much suspect it is now totally defunct, as so many of the old airwaves have been switched off in favour (of course) for the new world of fibre and satellite transmissions. However temptation to try is always too strong and it only needs, 3 AAs to power it up…… did it work?
Well - no but something strange happened, my bluetooth headphones stopped working. A buzz of static the music I was listening to fizzled out and went dead. I pressed various buttons, spun various dials and flipped switches on the portable TV but it remained dead.
Dead as a doornail.
My bluetooth headphones are still working but only after taking out the batteries from the old Casio. I have created a jamming device it would seem.
Just Zip it
Our first computers back in the day were the Commodores, no not Lionel Richies old band but I am talking of the C64, Vic20, PET and Amiga 500. Later i moved on to IBM and Olivetti personal computers.
Data storage then was just as much of a challenge as it is today. However we now have Gigabytes and Terabytes of it, back then we had kilobytes and at a push a megabyte or two. Floppy disks were becoming a burden and hard-drives were available for the rich folk.
Then along came a company called Iomega with their range of Zip Drives, that took interchangeable large disks that were only a tad bigger than the floppy disk.
Whats more I found a whole box of the above disks stuffed full of old files, mostly my music compositions I made back in the day as a keen bedroom producer, kicking out House, Techno and some early EDM tracks with a Yamaha CS2X, plugged into a Fostex mixer and a mini-disc. Lord knows if I can resurrect any of it?
I do still have the Yamaha, it’s in the loft and under a veil of heavy dust. I am itching to clean it up, find some monitor speakers - if anyone has some I could borrow. Then I will see if it works and perhaps make music on it again. That would be fun. Will I record it and share it? Depends if I make anything decent nowadays!
What became of Iomega? Well they became Lenovo EMC in 2008 which is a joint venture between the companies Lenovo and EMC (funnily enough!)
What’s your 20?
CB Radios were a big thing at the tail end of the 1980’s into the 1990’s. If you were around in those days living in Hampshire and West Sussex, you may have encountered a white Mini City doing the rounds, with a big mag-mount aerial on it’s diddly little roof. Some very good friends of mine will remember this, those halcyon days. David if you are reading this, you will be amused to know that this old rig has taken pride of place on my home office shelves.
I inherited it from my late grandfather when he gave up driving in his early 70’s. So it was transplanted from his Austin Allegro into my W-reg Mini, where we wired it into the same block of cabling as that of the fancy Kenwood stereo that I had in the car.
The stereo was probably worth twice as much as the car
It was a great rig but it was really designed to work in cars but we did get it to work off of an an adaptor in the house from what I can remember.
Later I did buy another rig which had an analog reading for the car based Fox Hunts we went on. A game of hide and seek that uses cars, radios and a bunch of friends to play. Long nights were had. I can remember sneaking into the house on Sunday mornings as the sun was rising. Oh my word, I just can’t bear the thought of doing that now and if our kids did it… they would be in trouble!
There is more…
I shall continue my curation of old tech soon, as we’ve found more bits and bobs. If you want to buy any of this stuff, perhaps for your own amusement or a museum of some kind, please make enquiries with us ;-)
To receive new articles as they are published