The 4 kids in our family got walki-talkies for Christmas . This was in the mid 60’s. I don’t remember the brand. It was the portable cassette recorder I got in 1967 that changed my life. I was able to fix my speech impediment because it gave me immediate feedback. A true miracle.
Oh, yeah, getting your first cassette recorder was a true gem. I was truly amazing to record sounds and play them back. I never used the small reel-to-reel my parents had much. I bought an old reel-to-reel a couple years ago because my only surviving radio productions for college are on reel-to-reel because in the 80's that's how professional audio was recorded.
@@jackilynpyzocha662 Knowing my parents they either came from Radio Shack or Sears. Same with the cassette recorder. I checked out the Radio Shack site. I guess it's still under construction.
My grandfather (RIP) was a GM For Black and Decker back in the day and we were usually gifted a product of theirs from him, we had the original Dustbuster, Spotlighter, under the counter can opener, food processor, electric knife, etc. The only thing we still have is the mini food processor which still works beautifully, they sure don't make things like they used to.
The 70s and 80s were the best times of my life. The freedom of being a kid and roaming around the neighborhood. Nowadays, most kids don’t know how to do outdoor stuff.
I used to love Radio Shack. But in their later years, they would get pushy about selling you a cell phone every time you went there. Probably why the stores are all gone now.
I was a young lad in the 70's and couldn't afford a Pulsar P1, but with my newspaper money, I bought a Texas Instruments digital LED watch, and I still have it.
My mom was a teacher and in 1980 through a Massachusetts program, she got to take an Apple II home for the first semester until Christmas. I had so much fun, and was amazed that something like that existed.
I remember wanting many of those things :) I wonder if my old walkie talkies are still around. They were the fancy ones made by RCA, back when that name meant something. I bet they're still in the old console stereo cabinet. I've still got so many of Mom & Dad's old things in storage. Silly to keep those old things I suppose, but it's hard to think of getting rid of of them.
Omg, my mom bought my dad the Magnavox Odyssey when I was a kid. And guess what, we actually still have it. Still in the original box, some of the plastic covering and all of the games! I shit you not! It's in my closet now. Mom also bought another video game console for dad around that time that is still hard to believe and we have that one too till this day. So glad I found this channel. Subscribing today!
i'm a 90s kid and Walkie Talkies were a blast!!! i loved those and found them absolutely cool. The first pair my dad gave me was a very basic set like the sears model shown here, which ran on a 9 Volt Block, had just 1 channel, no squelch function and also had a nice little morse button. The TX/RX range wasn't very huge but for me as a kid it was big enough to talk with my sister when we played outside. It was a far cry from the modern PMR / FRS walkie talkies you can get these days, that have multiple channels. But as a kid i felt it was pure magic to talk with someone in a wireless manner and all 100% analog.
When I was in the 2nd grade I saved enough money to buy a calculator. Someone stole it and buried it in the snow (because we live in Alaska). I did not see that device until that spring. Someone found it and brought it to me and I can't even remember if it still worked after that.
I was a co-op intern at the local electric utility in college when the company acquired an HP-65 calculator. None of the engineers knew how to use it; the reverse Polish notation totally confused them. So they gave it me to work with, figure out how to use it, and then teach the engineers.
@@ronk9830 Ha! True. Though those old HP machines were built so tough all that might have happened would be the floor would be dented. I wouldn't want to try it though, they were expensive machines in their time.
There was also the RCA Disk player that was about the size of an LP that you fed into the slot to watch movies! It didn't catch on as much as VHS or Beta but briefly existed. My brother had one a eventually gave it to my sister's family when he upgraded to another system.
do you mean a CED player? my friend and bought 3 from an add in the green sheet. 1 working and 2 for parts . it also came with about 50 movies. we got some enjoyment out of the working one, but you had to take the lid off and tweak something to get it to start playing. don't remember what we had to do to get it started, it was back sometime in the mid 90's
When I was in high school back in the 1970s, I had a classmate who had a TI scientific calculator. It was like $500.00. I bought one that just did addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It was around $50.00 Today, I can buy a scientific calculator at Dollar Tree that does everything the $500.00 one did.
i had the casio calculator watch- did my math, and the teachers hated it. now, everyone has wearable tech, and can text, watch porn, YT, do math, and whatever.@@jamesszalla4274
I had a newspaper route in 1975 and 1976. The newspaper came out twice a week and I was paid a penny per newspaper for each paper that I delivered that month plus I got to keep half of whatever I was able to collect from my customer's subscription of $1 a month. Payment was voluntary and only about half of them paid. I earned about $60 a month from my paper route, plus I earned points that I could save to buy from the newspaper's catalog. The first thing I bought with my points was a set of walkie talkies. Let me tell you, I was hot spit at school with my walkie talkies as my cousin and I walked around our elementary school chatting with each other. At the time, most Walkie Talkies operated on the same frequency as channel 14 of CB radios. Since I lived in a SoCal town where two interstates met, I could occasionally chat with motorists that happened to have a CB on channel 14. The next thing I bought with my points was a calculator. It wasn't as exciting as my walkie talkies, but I was a 6th grader with a calculator, how cool was that? Ah, the 1970s. Yeah, the music sucked but the gadgets were cool
Walkie-talkies were cool, but did you have a cassette recorder? They were all the rage around that time. We had hours of fun with those. You could even check one out at school, like a library book, and they even gave you a brand new cassette tape.
@@ronk9830 I did! I used to record TV shows like Happy Days and then listen to it at night while I was in bed. Not sure what the point was since I had just seen it earlier that night. I would also record songs I liked as they played on the radio. I had a lot of fun with my little cassette recorder. I don’t remember where I got it either. I likely got it from my brother. He was quite a bit older and often gave me things that he was no longer using.
@@Randy.E.R In grade school, I did a read-aloud "book" report about TV shows. I recorded the TV show themes on my tape recorder, played them after I read my written report, and the class guessed the shows from the theme songs. Of course, everyone knew all of them. But it was a fun and entertaining "book" report. One of the show songs was, yes of course, Happy Days Rock around the Clock...😃
It's pretty narrow-minded to only mention the Apple II rather than personal computers as a whole. The TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were released the same year. The concept of a computer at home is what amazed people, not the Apple II by itself.
Less than half the kids in my class had calculators so we were only allowed to use them in class or for homework. They were banned from exams as they disadvantaged the kids who didn't have them. A hand-held scientific calculator back then was about $80.00 in 1970's money (equivalent to about $350.00 now). I still have mine and it still works. Three AA batteries lasted about an hour of continuous use so you had to ration its use (I did physics, chemistry and mathematics so I had to carry spare batteries). It did have the option of mains power for study at home.
My father use to have some handheld games that he would not allow me to take home. One was a baseball game. It had a tiny stick as a bat and little dots that ran around the bases. It was fun at the time.
Wow, what memories! You just reminded me about a baseball game watch and a racing game watch. They were from the mid-80s, and had a color background display with a fixed image of the field or the road, and a super simple b&w lcd on top to display the “players” or the “cars” (all just little square dots on the screen lol). I also had a Michael Jackson’s that played Beat It with the distinctive single tone like Xmas cards, and it was way more fun when the battery was dying because of how weird the tune would sound hahaha 😂 thanks for the memories! 🥰
@@JoeOrber That and those hand-held football games, with that distinctive "brreeeep" sound it made at the end of each play. Every time somebody busted one of those out on the school bus, you immediately knew what they were playing, as it seemed we all had one of those at the time.
@@JoeOrber When I think of the song Beat It I think about walking down Clearwater Beach with tons of people we all knew and every radio was playing Beat It. It also reminds me of one of my best friends who died.
I bought one of the first top-loading VCRs in the late 70s. It was close to $700! Took all my saved paper route money. And the 2-hour recording time blank tapes were $20. Now, I don't think they even make VCRs anymore.
As a junior high school kid, my father had been assigned a HP-65 by his company and he brought it home to me. Many hours of making my own programs on that served me quite well when years later, I would major in computer science in college.
😌Ahhhhhh, so much innovation in my 51yrs of existence. Dust Busters: Still in stores today & some are even made for cars too. As an avid Gen X Gamer, I miss the good old days when consoles didn't need name profiles...just plug in, hook up, pick your game, play & HAVE FUN🕹.
@@MemoryManor Pac-Man, & such remains as My Symbol of My loving of Gaming to this day at 51yrs old. It was my #1 scribble on everything, even my record collection of the time. These days, I'm into Overwatch, Fallout, Ace Combat, Borderlands, Skyrim to name a few. If you wanna see my gaming action, seek my page. Much to watch there.
It's pretty safe to say digital calculators were no longer status symbols in the late 1970s. Maybe those algebra calculators, but not a basic one. Around 1977 our family bought a Casio Pocket LC-II, which was an LCD calculator that ran on one AA battery, and our family was poor. it was a rather basic calculator that you can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division and that's about it. I had ton of fun playing with it well into the 1980s. In 1982 my mother bought a TI-30 calculator, and it clearly was a 1970s calculator with that LED screen with numbers that lit up red. It was introduced in 1976. My mother was attending college at the time so that why she needed an algebra calculator.
I agree that the Motorola Dynatac cellular phone (series) is from the 1980s. The video includes picture and video clips of radio phones installed in automobiles and other handheld phones from various years. The anomaly is the Popular Science magazine cover. I don't know what model that phone is or its communications technology and band, but the magazine cover is dated 1973. I don't remember, because I was using the old CB radio for mobile communication then.
@@catreader9733 The Radio Phone I believe goes back to the 1950s. It's major drawback was that service was limited to major metropolitan areas such as NYC or Chicago, and the electronics took up most of the space in a car's trunk.
The large motorola mobile phone call quality was so clear is was like you were in the same room , even clearer than a wired phone. There was no garbled "auto-tune" voice , you could clearly hear music and conversations in the background and never disjointed breaking up
In engineering school my Ti 76 could be programmed, do conversions of polar to rectangular coordinate systems, all the trig and log functions. Prior to that Sears scientific calculator sufficed. They were great calculators. I was able to buy expensive slide rules for a few bucks as they were obsolete.
The thing about Odyssey was that it was before video recording equipment was available in the home. No VCR's or anything of the sort. This was the FIRST thing you could use to actually control what happened on your TV screen. Before that you just turned on the TV and whatever happened to be on, that was what you watched. Suddenly you were the god who controlled what you saw.
It was a mass consumer period where so many thousands of gadgets were flooding the markets and people would buy ,buy, and buy. Anything like lava lamps, fiber-optic lamps,tape recorders cb radios stereo components and everything from Radio Shack. We would buy anything to keep up with everyone else who had everything.
I build my own Ham Radio in 1968. 180 watts PEP output SSB. Covered the World! Heath Kit HW-12 80 meters. I have it right beside me. I started with a set of 'President' Walkie Talkies.
I had a Motorola Dynatac that I got as a hand me down from my uncle. In 1989 the service plan was $50 a month for 10 minutes and $2/minute after that, which for inflation is $125/month + $5/minute.
I couldn't believe when the first pocket calculators came out, but my first job was selling Casio calculators and their brand new digital watches! We also had, in the back of the store, either the first or the second model Apple computer, which we could order for you. It was not kept in stock but it was available by order. We also carried some of the earliest video recorder, which I believed cost about $1,500 at the time.
I was hoping the slide rule would get a mention. When I was in high school, we weren't allowed to use those newfangled calculators, we used slide rules; you could tell who the nerds were by who had the slide rules!
Summer 1973 and I bought Texas Instruments SR-10. They just changed away from slide rules when I entered college. Friend there was a computer science and math wiz and had one of the HP's. Amazing. I was an architecture student, no math in H.S. Senior year and was bad in 11th year advanced algebra... and could not handle calculus. But had no problem in a couple of years into computer science while the mainframe there was a Univac and we still did key punch.
Yes, I was joking. At least things were repairable back then, especially televisions. On the other hand, electronics are ridiculously cheap today, and much more reliable - most unusable gear I have was finished off by software support ceasing. Do you hams still build anything, apart from antennas?
@@paulperry7091 mostly they build digital radio stuff, keyers, and code oscillators. I build computers (not like putting together PCs from parts) and miscellaneous stuff. My radios from the 30s have started to need serious repairs. I don't imagine anything electronic from 2035 working in 2120.
One thing about the TV shows was you got a chance to see them twice. The first half of the season and the rerun in the second half of the season. And the part about having to get up and change the TV? If you had children, you had remotes…My Parents had 3 of them.
Some kids got a car or a stereo for their 16th birthday, I got an HP-65, and I don't regret it for a second. Once you got used to RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), it was faster than anything out there at the time
Back in the 70's I bought for myself a Casio graphing scientific calculator (model ??-7000G, where ?? are eff and ex; writing it this way because when I previously posted using the direct model number, my post got deleted--go figure). I still have it today, and it still works. When my brother was ready for college, I wanted him to have a scientific calculator as well, but at that point I couldn't afford one of those for him, so I got him a Novus sci calc--same functions, but with a slower processor. ONLY MY BROTHER would discover this: If you ganged up a bunch of slow functions (log, sine, exponent, etc.) so that the answer would take several seconds to come back, AND you held the calculator up to a transistor radio that was on, you would get spooky outer-space noises out of the radio. Only my brother.
Back in the 70’s I took a brick sized calculator to class one day & my college professor thought I was cheating on the test because he had never seen a calculator like that before. He took it from me, looked it over VERY carefully and then allowed me to continue using it. 🤓🤓
I still have a TI59 and a TI programmer (with BIN-HEX-OCT-DEC direct conversion), modified to use 9v batteries as the rechargeable modules are dead, and also a Pulsar P3 and a Bulova Accutron Spaceview,, and all works fine after nearly 50 years
my father still has his HP-35 he used when doing his engineering degree, my grandfather had the Pulsar watch, it cost him a small fortune, and for the record, most Apple IIs shipped with 48KB RAM
A friend of mine had one of the later Magnavox Odyssey consuls and it put my Atari to shame, The baseball and Football games were especially fun to play
I got the Odyssey II and a voice synthesis module for it from Sears catalog. Loved that thing seemed easier to use than the later computer system versions
Apple? How about Atari? Founded in 1972, started the video game industry, Atari 2600 in 1977, the ubiquitous Atari 400/800 (and eventually XL and XE) 8-bit 6502 based home computers in 1979.
and now, all but the last have been replaced by a smartphone. and it's ironic that you referred to cleaning up with the dustbuster as "a breeze" because that is about how powerful its suction was. but we still don't have those flying cars we were promised.
Do remember my brothers and I had the walkie-talkies. Nothing like hiding about the neighborhood and being able to talk to each other like we were some James Bond or a military commando type. Never had the original Odyssey, but we sure did play the hell out of that Atari 2600 we had, though. All those hours playing "Adventure"! Do remember one of my uncles had that brick of a cellphone back in the day. Did thought how cool it was to be able to call or takes calls right from the car. One time, while he was taking some of us kids out to a Pizza Hut and a movie, he played a trick on the staff of the restaurant by calling to order a pizza. They asked where it was to be delivered and he said, to table #22. The person taking the call looked and saw us, with my uncle on that cellphone sitting there and just started busting out laughing! I do recall those plans for those things were pretty expensive, on top of the $4K for the device itself. If I recall, it was something like upwards of $6/minute or something ridiculous. Not only did you have to pay for the minutes if you made the call, but also if somebody called you as well! Also to add, that same uncle also had one of those little portable TVs. He was pretty wealthy at the time, running is own CPA firm. Remember this was back before all the TurboTax and the like where available, when people actually had to go to an actual accountant to get taxes done and filed if they had more than a simple 1040 with simple declarations, so being a CPA was pretty lucrative at the time. My father had one of those Texas Instrument calculators. It was the one with the printer that you see in the video. We could even play games on that thing. Was excited when I given my own "calculator" in the form of that "Little Professor" math game for Christmas. Do remember the digital watches and how cool they looked, but no way was I able to get one at the time. Also to add, I do remember getting to play on the Apple II in school as they had a couple of them. Fascinated me so much that I wanted to learn more about computers, and here I am now, nearly 50 years later, a senior software engineer.
I think that the most remarkable calculator in its day was the HP 35. It was the first full scientific model, although not programmable like the later HP 65. The 35 cost $395 when released. I was a sophomore in engineering school and yearned to have one, but well beyond my means at the time.
The first few times I used calculators, I couldn't help but make sure they worked right by entering simple addition and marvelling when they gave the correct answer.
yeah, i subscribed, before seeing the apple 2 i still have the monitor, in working condition in the early 2000s, i hooked my old Apple 2 monitor, to my 1990's Pc...as a dual monitor as an AV nerd, it was just a fun thing to do
My first computer was an Apple IIc in 1984, thank god IBM made real computers happen later. The horror of having owned an apple product is still unbearable.
@@MichaelBrandvold Thank you so much for your concern. I'm currently in a conundrum deciding between another Samsung Galaxy or a Google pixel for my next smartphone. My daughters iphones are always breaking and need replaced every two years while mine and my wife's Androids last at least 5 to 6 years with no problems. Any help would be appreciated.
MY dad was sort of a gadget geek. Back in the early 70's, the latest telephone technology was an auto-dialer. It was a paper-card index that you punched out the holes on the card to program a frequently called phone number. To operate it, you would "open" the card index to the desired phone number and push the dial number button. It seemed ideal, but the "device" would constantly misdial the wrong number and quickly fell from use. I have no idea what he paid for it at the time but it was a a waste of money.
Wow, I've never heard of that. You must have had to own a touch-tone phone to use it? 🤔 They weren't common around that time if I remember correctly, unless it used pulse mode rather than touch-tone.
The Motorola DynaTAC series of Portable Cellular radios did not have " pop-up" antennas. It wasn't until the Motorola MicroTAC series of radios did we see hidden antennas. Multiple factors negate the need for external antennas for mobiles today, but it is largely due to increased cell-site density, modulation schemes...
Wow, I totally had those exact same green walkie talkies from Sears. We would get all our Christmas presents as kids from the Sears Wish Book. As kids, me and my sister would get the book and make our list of each item we want, the price and the page number. Just me? I was working at Radio Shack in 1987 when that Motorola handheld cell phone hit the market and was like $1,298. I looked at Apple II for my first home computer in 1981 but decided on a with a TRS-80 Color Computer for about 1/3 the price of Apple II. It had flat keys, 16 colors, could display 40 columns of text and held 4K of RAM just like the first Apple II 4K? Can you even imagine? You had to store programs and files on cassette tape which barely worked. I used it to do a research paper in my junior year. I couldn't afford a printer so I bummed one at the RS computer store. My more math savvy friends in high school around the same time carried around a TI scientific calculator. I remember it did logarithmic functions. Back then the display was LED. Who knew that one day, LED would provide all the light in the house. Does anyone still buy incandescent bulbs? I hope not.
I learned to write basic code on an apple 2e back in high school. but this was in the early 80's. I yearned to own one, but they were too expensive, so my dad bought me a TI99-4A. I still like to write code in basic. but use a more modern interpreter that runs on windows now. called Liberty Basic. tho I want to eventually learn to code in some of the other newer programming languages .
Some one I knew back then had a 4 operation [add, subtract, multiply, divide] calculator he paid $375 and proudly displayed on his living room coffee table.
When they talk about saving up your pennies to buy a portable TV, it reminded me of the one me and my brother got. It was made by Sears and had a twelve inch screen and had the option to run on this battery about the size of a small book, regular plug, or car cigaret lighter. Whenever our parents got silver dollars and half dollars in their pay envelopes, they'd put it aside for us. When the TV went on sale, it was $72, but we only had $50, so my dad kicked in the difference so he could take it with him on his reserve weekends.
You can't believe the hilarity of my mother regularly falling off the couch playing River Raid on an Atari. It was too fast for her brain, and her balance was fatally influenced by the left or right movement of a single thumb. *disclaimer* she did not die playing River Raid.
Mobile phone, yeah it got cheaper like most thing do (except cars & houses), but ones like the Samsung Z fold... ouch. $1100 for my note 10+ to use for work, I wish the iPad mini could work as a phone. The dust buster is not extinct, I bought one new last month (blue) that reminds me of those clear coloured apple computers.
I still have the Magnavox Odessy my Dad bought in 1972 or 73. I recently set my computer to a full white screen using photoshop and had 2 of my kids stretch some of the overlays and took high res images with my Canon camera.
@KRAFTWERK2K6 actually they came with 2 sizes of gels and mine ate all in great shape. Problem I'd modern flat panel TV's don't produce static electricity to hold them on even of I did feel like trying to hook it up to a modern TV.
![SahBabii - Viking [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/D37cL92JX0I/mqdefault.jpg)
The 4 kids in our family got walki-talkies for Christmas . This was in the mid 60’s. I don’t remember the brand. It was the portable cassette recorder I got in 1967 that changed my life. I was able to fix my speech impediment because it gave me immediate feedback. A true miracle.
Wow, that's great. Cassette recorders were a blast, too!
Awesome! I have a severe stutter so I get what you mean! I’ve learned techniques over the years and now I’m a teacher, and I talk for a living!
Oh, yeah, getting your first cassette recorder was a true gem. I was truly amazing to record sounds and play them back. I never used the small reel-to-reel my parents had much. I bought an old reel-to-reel a couple years ago because my only surviving radio productions for college are on reel-to-reel because in the 80's that's how professional audio was recorded.
The walkie-talkies may have come from Radio Shack/Tandy. The brand, is online(back) and maybe in physical form.
@@jackilynpyzocha662 Knowing my parents they either came from Radio Shack or Sears. Same with the cassette recorder. I checked out the Radio Shack site. I guess it's still under construction.
My grandfather (RIP) was a GM For Black and Decker back in the day and we were usually gifted a product of theirs from him, we had the original Dustbuster, Spotlighter, under the counter can opener, food processor, electric knife, etc. The only thing we still have is the mini food processor which still works beautifully, they sure don't make things like they used to.
Technology from the past were really meant to last! And so sorry to hear about your grandfather
Things today don’t work nearly as well or for as long! So much garbage!
@@MemoryManor thank you
Not since B & D started making their products in China 😕
I have my Grandfather's B&D Jig Saw which I still use.
I'm thankful to have experienced the 70s and 80s. Great days.
Me too! All four months of 89 I was privileged to have been born in 🤣
The 70s and 80s were the best times of my life. The freedom of being a kid and roaming around the neighborhood. Nowadays, most kids don’t know how to do outdoor stuff.
I have one of the first solar powered calculators from the late 70's. I got it for Christmas from radio shack. The thing still works.
Who needs a smartphone am i right?
@@MemoryManor Well personally I'd like to see a solar-powered smartphone. This battery thing has gotten out of hand, imo.
I used to love Radio Shack. But in their later years, they would get pushy about selling you a cell phone every time you went there. Probably why the stores are all gone now.
@@ronk9830nobody is smart enough to operate anything besides a phone. that's why radio shack is gone.
My mom did, too, 1975.
I was a young lad in the 70's and couldn't afford a Pulsar P1, but with my newspaper money, I bought a Texas Instruments digital LED watch, and I still have it.
Anything worked hard for is sweet am i right?
I don't remember getting rid of mine but I can't find it 😐
I have a p1 :)
My mom was a teacher and in 1980 through a Massachusetts program, she got to take an Apple II home for the first semester until Christmas. I had so much fun, and was amazed that something like that existed.
I'm guessing you must have loved its keyboard.? We had an A2 in hs comp science. It had the best feeling key action I'd ever known, even now.
What city or town?
Pong was fun for about 5 minutes. Still have a Dustbuster hanging on my wall.
Remember when GM made minivans that were nicknamed “Dustbusters” since they resembled the Dustbuster vacuum cleaners
I remember wanting many of those things :) I wonder if my old walkie talkies are still around. They were the fancy ones made by RCA, back when that name meant something. I bet they're still in the old console stereo cabinet. I've still got so many of Mom & Dad's old things in storage. Silly to keep those old things I suppose, but it's hard to think of getting rid of of them.
Omg, my mom bought my dad the Magnavox Odyssey when I was a kid. And guess what, we actually still have it. Still in the original box, some of the plastic covering and all of the games! I shit you not! It's in my closet now. Mom also bought another video game console for dad around that time that is still hard to believe and we have that one too till this day. So glad I found this channel. Subscribing today!
i'm a 90s kid and Walkie Talkies were a blast!!! i loved those and found them absolutely cool. The first pair my dad gave me was a very basic set like the sears model shown here, which ran on a 9 Volt Block, had just 1 channel, no squelch function and also had a nice little morse button. The TX/RX range wasn't very huge but for me as a kid it was big enough to talk with my sister when we played outside. It was a far cry from the modern PMR / FRS walkie talkies you can get these days, that have multiple channels. But as a kid i felt it was pure magic to talk with someone in a wireless manner and all 100% analog.
i re-tuned them, and could hear other channels.
you still want walkie talkies
Walkie-talkies were a blast, but there was no mention of cassette recorders. We had hours of fun with those!
When I was in the 2nd grade I saved enough money to buy a calculator. Someone stole it and buried it in the snow (because we live in Alaska). I did not see that device until that spring. Someone found it and brought it to me and I can't even remember if it still worked after that.
I was a co-op intern at the local electric utility in college when the company acquired an HP-65 calculator. None of the engineers knew how to use it; the reverse Polish notation totally confused them. So they gave it me to work with, figure out how to use it, and then teach the engineers.
For those of us that had a HP calculator it was always fun when someone wanted to borrow it ;)
That's so cool 😎
@@xlerb2286Until they dropped it...😡
@@ronk9830 Ha! True. Though those old HP machines were built so tough all that might have happened would be the floor would be dented. I wouldn't want to try it though, they were expensive machines in their time.
There was also the RCA Disk player that was about the size of an LP that you fed into the slot to watch movies! It didn't catch on as much as VHS or Beta but briefly existed. My brother had one a eventually gave it to my sister's family when he upgraded to another system.
There's an infomercial on RUclips about it featuring Leonard Nimoy.
do you mean a CED player? my friend and bought 3 from an add in the green sheet.
1 working and 2 for parts . it also came with about 50 movies. we got some enjoyment out of the working one, but you had to take the lid off and tweak something to get it to start playing. don't remember what we had to do to get it
started, it was back sometime in the mid 90's
Almost all of these gadgets were too expensive for our family but I do remember using a slide rule in college before the calculator era.
Oh wow i remember having those as well!
i did math with out computers, just a scientific calculator.
(now, i've got a W10 computer, 2tablets, a cell phone, and am still writing in notebooks.
When I was in high school back in the 1970s, I had a classmate who had a TI scientific calculator. It was like $500.00. I bought one that just did addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It was around $50.00 Today, I can buy a scientific calculator at Dollar Tree that does everything the $500.00 one did.
There was an Arthur Treacher Fish n’ Chips restaurant that had tiny coin operated televisions at the tables.
i had the casio calculator watch- did my math, and the teachers hated it. now, everyone has wearable tech, and can text, watch porn, YT, do math, and whatever.@@jamesszalla4274
I had a newspaper route in 1975 and 1976. The newspaper came out twice a week and I was paid a penny per newspaper for each paper that I delivered that month plus I got to keep half of whatever I was able to collect from my customer's subscription of $1 a month. Payment was voluntary and only about half of them paid. I earned about $60 a month from my paper route, plus I earned points that I could save to buy from the newspaper's catalog.
The first thing I bought with my points was a set of walkie talkies. Let me tell you, I was hot spit at school with my walkie talkies as my cousin and I walked around our elementary school chatting with each other. At the time, most Walkie Talkies operated on the same frequency as channel 14 of CB radios. Since I lived in a SoCal town where two interstates met, I could occasionally chat with motorists that happened to have a CB on channel 14.
The next thing I bought with my points was a calculator. It wasn't as exciting as my walkie talkies, but I was a 6th grader with a calculator, how cool was that?
Ah, the 1970s. Yeah, the music sucked but the gadgets were cool
Outside of Disco, the music was pretty great.
Yeah. This guy missed out on a lot I guess.@@ozzzy3z946
Walkie-talkies were cool, but did you have a cassette recorder? They were all the rage around that time. We had hours of fun with those. You could even check one out at school, like a library book, and they even gave you a brand new cassette tape.
@@ronk9830 I did! I used to record TV shows like Happy Days and then listen to it at night while I was in bed. Not sure what the point was since I had just seen it earlier that night. I would also record songs I liked as they played on the radio. I had a lot of fun with my little cassette recorder. I don’t remember where I got it either. I likely got it from my brother. He was quite a bit older and often gave me things that he was no longer using.
@@Randy.E.R In grade school, I did a read-aloud "book" report about TV shows. I recorded the TV show themes on my tape recorder, played them after I read my written report, and the class guessed the shows from the theme songs. Of course, everyone knew all of them. But it was a fun and entertaining "book" report. One of the show songs was, yes of course, Happy Days Rock around the Clock...😃
Some of these things I still own
I still own a Apple II. Maybe a museum would want it.
good job for taking care of them so well!
I owned a TI-58 programmable calculator and print cradle in the 70's. I spent a lot of time writing little programs on it.
@ 6:10 you read the same line twice. Great video, very nostalgic. Apple 2 always takes me back. Not nitpicking btw, I just noticed.
It's pretty narrow-minded to only mention the Apple II rather than personal computers as a whole. The TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were released the same year. The concept of a computer at home is what amazed people, not the Apple II by itself.
Less than half the kids in my class had calculators so we were only allowed to use them in class or for homework. They were banned from exams as they disadvantaged the kids who didn't have them. A hand-held scientific calculator back then was about $80.00 in 1970's money (equivalent to about $350.00 now). I still have mine and it still works. Three AA batteries lasted about an hour of continuous use so you had to ration its use (I did physics, chemistry and mathematics so I had to carry spare batteries). It did have the option of mains power for study at home.
calculators were definitely treated as treasure back in the day
I remember having a Texas Instrument LED calculator. Back in the early 70s. It cost over 100 dollars and it wouldn’t fit in my pocket.
And it probably took c or d cells. And not just one either. : )
@@keithbrown7685it seems to me that the calculator did use size C batteries. It has been a long while since I had the device though.
My father use to have some handheld games that he would not allow me to take home. One was a baseball game. It had a tiny stick as a bat and little dots that ran around the bases. It was fun at the time.
Wow, what memories! You just reminded me about a baseball game watch and a racing game watch. They were from the mid-80s, and had a color background display with a fixed image of the field or the road, and a super simple b&w lcd on top to display the “players” or the “cars” (all just little square dots on the screen lol). I also had a Michael Jackson’s that played Beat It with the distinctive single tone like Xmas cards, and it was way more fun when the battery was dying because of how weird the tune would sound hahaha 😂 thanks for the memories! 🥰
@@JoeOrber That and those hand-held football games, with that distinctive "brreeeep" sound it made at the end of each play. Every time somebody busted one of those out on the school bus, you immediately knew what they were playing, as it seemed we all had one of those at the time.
@@JoeOrber When I think of the song Beat It I think about walking down Clearwater Beach with tons of people we all knew and every radio was playing Beat It. It also reminds me of one of my best friends who died.
I thought my friend was rich because he had an Odyssey at home. It was the most incredible thing I had ever seen as a kid.
I bought one of the first top-loading VCRs in the late 70s. It was close to $700! Took all my saved paper route money. And the 2-hour recording time blank tapes were $20. Now, I don't think they even make VCRs anymore.
may cost about $700 still. if you can find one.
As a junior high school kid, my father had been assigned a HP-65 by his company and he brought it home to me. Many hours of making my own programs on that served me quite well when years later, I would major in computer science in college.
The TR001 sounds great. You could watch the news! We can't watch news anymore. We don't have news, it's gone too.
Walkie-talkies, pocket calculators, and dustbusters are still sold and used
GM had minivans that responded the Dustbuster. In fact some critics called them the “Dustbusters “
😌Ahhhhhh, so much innovation in my 51yrs of existence.
Dust Busters: Still in stores today & some are even made for cars too.
As an avid Gen X Gamer, I miss the good old days when consoles didn't need name profiles...just plug in, hook up, pick your game, play & HAVE FUN🕹.
what was your favorite game back then?
@@MemoryManor Pac-Man, & such remains as My Symbol of My loving of Gaming to this day at 51yrs old. It was my #1 scribble on everything, even my record collection of the time.
These days, I'm into Overwatch, Fallout, Ace Combat, Borderlands, Skyrim to name a few.
If you wanna see my gaming action, seek my page. Much to watch there.
And most games came in a console or PC version.
Except we didn’t know that the future would turn out to be not so nice. We now long for the past. Interesting!
53. I definitely do not yearn for the 'good ol days'
It's pretty safe to say digital calculators were no longer status symbols in the late 1970s. Maybe those algebra calculators, but not a basic one. Around 1977 our family bought a Casio Pocket LC-II, which was an LCD calculator that ran on one AA battery, and our family was poor. it was a rather basic calculator that you can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division and that's about it. I had ton of fun playing with it well into the 1980s. In 1982 my mother bought a TI-30 calculator, and it clearly was a 1970s calculator with that LED screen with numbers that lit up red. It was introduced in 1976. My mother was attending college at the time so that why she needed an algebra calculator.
The Motorola Dynatac was from the 1980's (1984) and not the 70's though there were portable phones in the 70's called Radio Phones.
I agree that the Motorola Dynatac cellular phone (series) is from the 1980s. The video includes picture and video clips of radio phones installed in automobiles and other handheld phones from various years. The anomaly is the Popular Science magazine cover. I don't know what model that phone is or its communications technology and band, but the magazine cover is dated 1973. I don't remember, because I was using the old CB radio for mobile communication then.
@@catreader9733 The Radio Phone I believe goes back to the 1950s. It's major drawback was that service was limited to major metropolitan areas such as NYC or Chicago, and the electronics took up most of the space in a car's trunk.
@@martykarr7058 Oh, I remember the radio phones in automobiles, but not within my own family.
@@catreader9733 Usually it was upper echelon business people, some doctors, and of course the idle rich who had them.
@@martykarr7058 Yes, I know that. The doctor who was a customer to my family's business, my first realtor, etc.
The large motorola mobile phone call quality was so clear is was like you were in the same room , even clearer than a wired phone. There was no garbled "auto-tune" voice , you could clearly hear music and conversations in the background and never disjointed breaking up
In engineering school my Ti 76 could be programmed, do conversions of polar to rectangular coordinate systems, all the trig and log functions. Prior to that Sears scientific calculator sufficed. They were great calculators. I was able to buy expensive slide rules for a few bucks as they were obsolete.
Apple IIc came out in 1984. The cell phone was the 80's as well.
II and II+ are from the 70’s
The thing about Odyssey was that it was before video recording equipment was available in the home. No VCR's or anything of the sort. This was the FIRST thing you could use to actually control what happened on your TV screen. Before that you just turned on the TV and whatever happened to be on, that was what you watched. Suddenly you were the god who controlled what you saw.
It was a mass consumer period where so many thousands of gadgets were flooding the markets and people would buy ,buy, and buy. Anything like lava lamps, fiber-optic lamps,tape recorders cb radios stereo components and everything from Radio Shack. We would buy anything to keep up with everyone else who had everything.
I build my own Ham Radio in 1968. 180 watts PEP output SSB.
Covered the World! Heath Kit HW-12 80 meters.
I have it right beside me. I started with a set of 'President' Walkie Talkies.
What fun! I was into walkie-talkies, intercoms, and cassette recorders. CB radios were popular, but I don't remember wanting one.
I still have a DustBuster.
Excellent video 😊 !
I had a Motorola Dynatac that I got as a hand me down from my uncle. In 1989 the service plan was $50 a month for 10 minutes and $2/minute after that, which for inflation is $125/month + $5/minute.
Oh my gosh! So expensive! To think $1,000 phones seem high now!
I couldn't believe when the first pocket calculators came out, but my first job was selling Casio calculators and their brand new digital watches! We also had, in the back of the store, either the first or the second model Apple computer, which we could order for you. It was not kept in stock but it was available by order. We also carried some of the earliest video recorder, which I believed cost about $1,500 at the time.
I was hoping the slide rule would get a mention. When I was in high school, we weren't allowed to use those newfangled calculators, we used slide rules; you could tell who the nerds were by who had the slide rules!
More important than the IC's were the transistors that preceded them....
Summer 1973 and I bought Texas Instruments SR-10. They just changed away from slide rules when I entered college. Friend there was a computer science and math wiz and had one of the HP's. Amazing.
I was an architecture student, no math in H.S. Senior year and was bad in 11th year advanced algebra... and could not handle calculus. But had no problem in a couple of years into computer science while the mainframe there was a Univac and we still did key punch.
I don't remember the Magnavox Odyssey. Did it come out after Pong and before Atari 2600 I'm guessing?
If you can't wait for tubes to heat up, you have a very anxious life.
It wasn't the wait, it was the fear that they wouldn't light up at all.
@@paulperry7091 false fear, if anything. Today there's more reason to worry about things failing,
Yes, I was joking. At least things were repairable back then, especially televisions. On the other hand,
electronics are ridiculously cheap today, and much more reliable - most unusable gear I have was finished off
by software support ceasing. Do you hams still build anything, apart from antennas?
@@paulperry7091 mostly they build digital radio stuff, keyers, and code oscillators. I build computers (not like putting together PCs from parts) and miscellaneous stuff.
My radios from the 30s have started to need serious repairs. I don't imagine anything electronic from 2035 working in 2120.
Back when drug stores had tube testers and sometimes a supply of tubes.
One thing about the TV shows was you got a chance to see them twice. The first half of the season and the rerun in the second half of the season. And the part about having to get up and change the TV? If you had children, you had remotes…My Parents had 3 of them.
Just when I start forgetting everything that happened in the 70s... you drag me back (kicking & screaming) in! /s
I remember my friend Jody had the Magnavox and it was all the rage. Having parties playing Pong!
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was introduced in 1983.
Some kids got a car or a stereo for their 16th birthday, I got an HP-65, and I don't regret it for a second.
Once you got used to RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), it was faster than anything out there at the time
Back in the 70's I bought for myself a Casio graphing scientific calculator (model ??-7000G, where ?? are eff and ex; writing it this way because when I previously posted using the direct model number, my post got deleted--go figure). I still have it today, and it still works. When my brother was ready for college, I wanted him to have a scientific calculator as well, but at that point I couldn't afford one of those for him, so I got him a Novus sci calc--same functions, but with a slower processor. ONLY MY BROTHER would discover this: If you ganged up a bunch of slow functions (log, sine, exponent, etc.) so that the answer would take several seconds to come back, AND you held the calculator up to a transistor radio that was on, you would get spooky outer-space noises out of the radio. Only my brother.
Texas Instruments calculators were the thing. I don't recall HP calculators, much. They were more expensive.
I remember the Texas Instruments calculators *only* being about $300...🤪
You should record how you look while making the voice-over. I bet it's hillarious. The expressions you must be able to do. Man......
Agreed 👍 would like to see that for shits&giggles 😊
Good old days of Pong loved the watches back then👍😊
Back in the 70’s I took a brick sized calculator to class one day & my college professor thought I was cheating on the test because he had never seen a calculator like that before. He took it from me, looked it over VERY carefully and then allowed me to continue using it. 🤓🤓
I still have a TI59 and a TI programmer (with BIN-HEX-OCT-DEC direct conversion), modified to use 9v batteries as the rechargeable modules are dead, and also a Pulsar P3 and a Bulova Accutron Spaceview,, and all works fine after nearly 50 years
Hewlett Packard calculators used Reverse Polish Notation, which took some getting used to, but a great way to work equations.
my father still has his HP-35 he used when doing his engineering degree, my grandfather had the Pulsar watch, it cost him a small fortune, and for the record, most Apple IIs shipped with 48KB RAM
because 48k was all you needed.
A friend of mine had one of the later Magnavox Odyssey consuls and it put my Atari to shame, The baseball and Football games were especially fun to play
I got the Odyssey II and a voice synthesis module for it from Sears catalog. Loved that thing seemed easier to use than the later computer system versions
Apple? How about Atari? Founded in 1972, started the video game industry, Atari 2600 in 1977, the ubiquitous Atari 400/800 (and eventually XL and XE) 8-bit 6502 based home computers in 1979.
Yeah. I spent a fortune on Atari and wrote thousands of amazing programs over 10 years.
and now, all but the last have been replaced by a smartphone. and it's ironic that you referred to cleaning up with the dustbuster as "a breeze" because that is about how powerful its suction was.
but we still don't have those flying cars we were promised.
such a shame isn't it? elon has to step it up!
That Pulsar watch is dope.
I lived through the 1970s but never heard of many of these products.
Love that the Dustbuster made it into Back to the Future II.
Ah the talkie talkies were awesome. My friends and I loved using them while playing army. Good times.
Do remember my brothers and I had the walkie-talkies. Nothing like hiding about the neighborhood and being able to talk to each other like we were some James Bond or a military commando type. Never had the original Odyssey, but we sure did play the hell out of that Atari 2600 we had, though. All those hours playing "Adventure"! Do remember one of my uncles had that brick of a cellphone back in the day. Did thought how cool it was to be able to call or takes calls right from the car. One time, while he was taking some of us kids out to a Pizza Hut and a movie, he played a trick on the staff of the restaurant by calling to order a pizza. They asked where it was to be delivered and he said, to table #22. The person taking the call looked and saw us, with my uncle on that cellphone sitting there and just started busting out laughing! I do recall those plans for those things were pretty expensive, on top of the $4K for the device itself. If I recall, it was something like upwards of $6/minute or something ridiculous. Not only did you have to pay for the minutes if you made the call, but also if somebody called you as well! Also to add, that same uncle also had one of those little portable TVs. He was pretty wealthy at the time, running is own CPA firm. Remember this was back before all the TurboTax and the like where available, when people actually had to go to an actual accountant to get taxes done and filed if they had more than a simple 1040 with simple declarations, so being a CPA was pretty lucrative at the time.
My father had one of those Texas Instrument calculators. It was the one with the printer that you see in the video. We could even play games on that thing. Was excited when I given my own "calculator" in the form of that "Little Professor" math game for Christmas. Do remember the digital watches and how cool they looked, but no way was I able to get one at the time. Also to add, I do remember getting to play on the Apple II in school as they had a couple of them. Fascinated me so much that I wanted to learn more about computers, and here I am now, nearly 50 years later, a senior software engineer.
as an engineer now, i never heard of a HP65 but did the TI 58-59 - this should have been included
I remember a lot of those products
I think that the most remarkable calculator in its day was the HP 35. It was the first full scientific model, although not programmable like the later HP 65. The 35 cost $395 when released. I was a sophomore in engineering school and yearned to have one, but well beyond my means at the time.
my first computer was a trash 80..radioshack trs80...
then a commodore
The first few times I used calculators, I couldn't help but make sure they worked right by entering simple addition and marvelling when they gave the correct answer.
yeah, i subscribed, before seeing the apple 2
i still have the monitor, in working condition
in the early 2000s, i hooked my old Apple 2 monitor, to my 1990's Pc...as a dual monitor
as an AV nerd, it was just a fun thing to do
My first computer was an Apple IIc in 1984, thank god IBM made real computers happen later. The horror of having owned an apple product is still unbearable.
lmao
You poor thing, your life must have been terrible.
@@MichaelBrandvold
Thank you, it was a nightmare living in the Apple ecosystem of no fun and no freewill.
@@ZepG how incredibly horrible your life must be… then and now.
@@MichaelBrandvold
Thank you so much for your concern. I'm currently in a conundrum deciding between another Samsung Galaxy or a Google pixel for my next smartphone. My daughters iphones are always breaking and need replaced every two years while mine and my wife's Androids last at least 5 to 6 years with no problems. Any help would be appreciated.
Casio was the great calculator maker.
I still have a Casio fx-260 pocket scientific calculator solar powered. It still works .
They also made digital keyboards similar to Yamaha keyboards.
MY dad was sort of a gadget geek. Back in the early 70's, the latest telephone technology was an auto-dialer. It was a paper-card index that you punched out the holes on the card to program a frequently called phone number. To operate it, you would "open" the card index to the desired phone number and push the dial number button. It seemed ideal, but the "device" would constantly misdial the wrong number and quickly fell from use. I have no idea what he paid for it at the time but it was a a waste of money.
Wow, I've never heard of that. You must have had to own a touch-tone phone to use it? 🤔
They weren't common around that time if I remember correctly, unless it used pulse mode rather than touch-tone.
The Motorola DynaTAC series of Portable Cellular radios did not have " pop-up" antennas. It wasn't until the Motorola MicroTAC series of radios did we see hidden antennas.
Multiple factors negate the need for external antennas for mobiles today, but it is largely due to increased cell-site density, modulation schemes...
Wow, I totally had those exact same green walkie talkies from Sears. We would get all our Christmas presents as kids from the Sears Wish Book. As kids, me and my sister would get the book and make our list of each item we want, the price and the page number. Just me? I was working at Radio Shack in 1987 when that Motorola handheld cell phone hit the market and was like $1,298. I looked at Apple II for my first home computer in 1981 but decided on a with a TRS-80 Color Computer for about 1/3 the price of Apple II. It had flat keys, 16 colors, could display 40 columns of text and held 4K of RAM just like the first Apple II 4K? Can you even imagine? You had to store programs and files on cassette tape which barely worked. I used it to do a research paper in my junior year. I couldn't afford a printer so I bummed one at the RS computer store. My more math savvy friends in high school around the same time carried around a TI scientific calculator. I remember it did logarithmic functions. Back then the display was LED. Who knew that one day, LED would provide all the light in the house. Does anyone still buy incandescent bulbs? I hope not.
I was born in 1969. I don't remember as much giggling going on as you portray.
Looks like the screen of the TR001 was used for the personal communicator in Space 1999
I learned to write basic code on an apple 2e back in high school.
but this was in the early 80's. I yearned to own one, but they were too
expensive, so my dad bought me a TI99-4A. I still like to write code in basic.
but use a more modern interpreter that runs on windows now. called Liberty Basic.
tho I want to eventually learn to code in some of the other newer programming languages .
Some one I knew back then had a 4 operation [add, subtract, multiply, divide] calculator he paid $375 and proudly displayed on his living room coffee table.
Now not only is the Magnavox Odyssey gone, but so is Magnavox...
You should add the Apollo Moon Missions.
I had a Sony TV-112, a portable with a 10-inch B&W screen. I watched Richard Nixon announce his resignation on it. I was 16.
When they talk about saving up your pennies to buy a portable TV, it reminded me of the one me and my brother got. It was made by Sears and had a twelve inch screen and had the option to run on this battery about the size of a small book, regular plug, or car cigaret lighter. Whenever our parents got silver dollars and half dollars in their pay envelopes, they'd put it aside for us. When the TV went on sale, it was $72, but we only had $50, so my dad kicked in the difference so he could take it with him on his reserve weekends.
I’m glad batteries got better! The Dustbuster did not work long and now we have powerful cordless big vacuums that work much, much longer!
I remember that, too. They never worked when you wanted to use it because the battery wouldn't work. I've always hated battery operated things...
You can't believe the hilarity of my mother regularly falling off the couch playing River Raid on an Atari. It was too fast for her brain, and her balance was fatally influenced by the left or right movement of a single thumb. *disclaimer* she did not die playing River Raid.
Mobile phone, yeah it got cheaper like most thing do (except cars & houses), but ones like the Samsung Z fold... ouch. $1100 for my note 10+ to use for work, I wish the iPad mini could work as a phone.
The dust buster is not extinct, I bought one new last month (blue) that reminds me of those clear coloured apple computers.
I still have and use Citezen Band radio
The odisey came out at a time when Pong was the only home console game available as this was before Atari and Collecovision.
My mum had a Dust Buster, she loved it.
Drop me off in the Summer of 75 please.
😁😁😁GR001,pocket TV ! ! !but what size of pocket ????
You can still buy Dustbusters..
I still have the Magnavox Odessy my Dad bought in 1972 or 73. I recently set my computer to a full white screen using photoshop and had 2 of my kids stretch some of the overlays and took high res images with my Canon camera.
yeah i was wondering how bad these old TV gels shrunk and warped over the years?
@KRAFTWERK2K6 actually they came with 2 sizes of gels and mine ate all in great shape. Problem I'd modern flat panel TV's don't produce static electricity to hold them on even of I did feel like trying to hook it up to a modern TV.
Shell oil : 11011345 turn your calculator upside down! 😅
I love the Beatles, then Wings Over America!
I had a oddessy still remember my favorite game pick ax Pete
I had GE branded walkey talkies.