Yep. And let us not forget. How does GPS help, if there's a major power blackout, so you have no recharge capability? Or worse, the scientists are right, and we get hit with another *Carrington Event,* and the blackout is actually a few *years* long?
@@dariusmcnair601 Typewriters (electric if you are lucky), a book of mathematical tables and slide rules. I used these in high school before calculators were available. (more Honorable Mentions)
Paper maps are still very useful. If you zoom out on your phone to see the whole route, you lose the details. A paper map enables you to see the whole route and the surrounding area in full detail.
Our lives in the 80's were a cultural revolution. The more rudimentary technology, Arcades, malls, and even MTV made us better people because they depended on our interaction with others. Today's technology has cut the human off from interrelations and have created an isolated world, where people seem just a little dumber, a lot more entitled an socially inept. We didn't need influencers to tell us what we were supposed to like or love, we did that by participating in the world. I miss the 80's like you couldn't imagine.
@@ChasingStarz-Ou812 I'm inclined to agree on a wide variety of topics. Music being one although the 60's were great also. I finished high school in December 1976 and the next 15 years was such a blur of changing trends. Electronic tech was almost hard to keep up with, not to mention trying to buy the latest techno toy destined for the landfill or Smithsonian in a few years.
Computers, cell phones, and more precisely, the interwebs, is what killed society as we knew it. It's a double-edged sword. We know about the world we live in now more than ever. But on the other hand, sometimes I'd rather not know what I know now and go back to being a blissfully ignorant fool. I feel the worst for kids growing up today who never knew any better. They're afraid to knock on doors and ask if Johnny can come out and play and will never know what it's like to physically own music on a record/cassette/CD and the joy that comes with it
It's not necessarily accurate. In the '80s, there were no influencers, but advertising on TV, in newspapers, on the streets, on the radio, and in cinemas had a much more devastating effect on the masses. Today, people are socially interconnected in real-time, not just with their neighbors, but with those living on the other side of the world. They can talk and exchange opinions without going through the hands of their country's (corrupt) journalists. Now, if people today get manipulated by influencers just like they were by movie stars in the '80s, that's another story. Personally, I wouldn't be too eager to go back to the '80s.
Watching this has made it easy to see how we have moved into a dystopian society. So many of the things in this video that were social hubs and encouraged interperson interaction are now gone. We're more connected than ever, yet more isolated in our own digital bubbles. The social impact of this is now becoming more evident, where even the work lunch room, which was where everyone used to talk and interact, I see people now mostly sitting silent, eating their food and doing something on their phones, ignoring the people three feet away from them.
@@jum5238so true. Just look at the crowds watching golf and tennis tournaments from the 80's to now and you can see how large and fat the general public has become. Go to a water park and you can really see how fat people have become as they are in their swim outfits and can't depend on clothes to hide the fat.
The walkman and videotapes.. people pretend they are obsolete... but you don't have studios clawing back your ability to use them. Got a streaming service, or 'bought' a game or song in the last 10 years, yeah, those can and often HAVE disappeared from owned collections because you don't OWN what you bought.
I don't stream or buy digital copies of movies. I still buy DVD's, because I own the movie and I won't lose it if streaming service goes bust, especially Amazon; I can't close my account because I have some digital movies which Amazon refuses to let me download a local file - bastards. Also I know DVDs of movies in the past which haven't be tampered with because something might offend someone woke.
Me too. But, I just got some black light posters, a black light and a lava lamp on E bay, plus I have a pole lamp, and remember this : the flairs in modern pants started out as bell bottoms, and the flair just got smaller and smaller, but it never went away. Class of '75.
Having Graduated High School in 1983 I now feel very old as I realize that with exception of the shoulder pads and Parachute Pants I had or used everything on your list, I still remember the excitement of when MTV first came on the air and the excitement of getting home from school to watch the latest music videos, and then going to the music store to purchase the Cassettes for my walkman or boombox And spending my weekends after doing my chores at the mall or the huge video arcade with a pocket full of quarters or suddenly remembering at 9:00 PM that I forgot to return the movies I rented and rushing to get them in to the dropbox so I wouldn’t be fined, as I sit here in July of 2024 I have come to realize that I’m so happy to have spent my high school years and early adulthood years in the 1980’s it was a wonderful time to be a teenager and young adult. And I wouldn’t trade those wonderful memories for anything.
Once got a ticket for going 80mph in to 55 zone while trying to return a video tape before midnight. Of course, the cop's estimate was totally off - I was really going 100 mph! BTW... Radar detectors were a cool thing kids probably don't know about which aren't showing up on these videos. Before cops got "instant on" and all the other anti-radar detector upgrades for their radar guns they really helped A LOT toward being able to speed without tickets and keeping life generally more interesting.
During the 80s, I was never cooler than when I was wearing my Members Only jacket, a skinny leather tie, Shuttle Series parachute pants, and my Puma hi-tops with bright Day-Glo laces. Good times.
I was a 60`s child. Recently, I read a story about the final closing of the International Market Place in Waikiki. The author would show up every Saturday morning in his Hang Ten shirt, bell bottom jeans, and tire tread sandals... It touched something deep inside me...
In my Junior and Senior year of high school, I had the PERFECT JOB. I worked at a video store. Not BB but a knock off and it was literally the best job on the planet in 1989-1990.
You forgot to include the calculator watches of the 1980s like the brand of CASIO watches that was made famous by Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in the Back To The Future trilogy series. This was the CASIO CA-53 WR that you can still purchase for $20 on Amazon but in the original BTF movie he wore the CA-50 model which among watch collectors can fetch some very high prices.
Digital LCD watches in general. LED watches came out a few years earlier but they were expensive ($80) and the LED parts didn't like getting lightly knocked. Mine was a Bulova and quite the fashion statement for late 1976.
@@LuvBorderCollies ... You had to push a little button on the watch for the LEDs to light up. They could not be on all the time like modern LCD watches because the battery would run out quickly.
Casio still makes calculator watches and dozens of LCD digital watches that still popular. In fact Casio is highly regarded by watch nerds around the world. BTW, some new Casio digital watches cost $5k-$6k. They are far from obsolete.
@@tomsaltner3011 ... big difference is that the old watches were not rechargeable. You had to buy a new, expensive battery each time they ran out. They would last about a year maybe if you did not light up the LEDs too often.
So I went to the video rental store and asked the bloke behind the counter if I could borrow Batman Forever. He said: No, you need to bring it back tomorrow.
Printed maps will never be obsolete, they require no batteries or external signal to provide their information, which is often more detailed on the paper option.
In the 1980s, map reading was a required skill. Now, councils are having to put up signs reading "Your SAT NAV is wrong" on some roads in an attempt to alert drivers that their 'map in a box' is sending them down a road that they'll regret travelling.
@@LuvBorderCollies ... we were taught map reading in a subject called Geography. It is interesting to compare Australia with the USA. Is this one of the reasons so many Americans are ignorant of the world outside the USA? (from a Google search) Geography is mandatory in Australian schools until Year 8, except for NSW and Victoria where it is mandated until Year 10. In the Australian Curriculum Geography aims to ensure that students develop a sense of wonder, curiosity and respect about places, people, cultures and environments throughout the world. It also provides a deep geographical knowledge of their own locality, Australia, the Asia region and the world. It gives students the ability to think geographically, using geographical concepts. Why is geography not taught in American schools? Well, there are several reasons including school funding, which is heavily dependent on standardized test scores. To secure funding, schools prioritize curriculums that cover subjects like math and reading, leaving no room for lessons focused on topics like geography or global studies.
LOL I have a freind who has a sign on his road saying “Google Maps is WRONG this is a dead end road. Even with that sign it’s amazing how many people end up driving in his feild looking for a road that isn’t there.
Oh, the days of VHS! "Be kind, rewind." That iconic sign was in every rental store. These places were great for meeting people and a perfect spot for some light-hearted flirting. Blockbuster was the ultimate destination for VHS rentals, offering a one-stop shop where you could grab popcorn, sweets, and soda along with your movie. Everyone hated rewinding tapes. Then came the rewinder-a clever but bulky device designed solely to rewind VHS tapes. It simplified the task, but that was all it did.
My dispatch office used dot matrix printers up until 2007, when I retired, and from what I've heard still do. Why? Because the forms they print on, are triplicate, and the dot matrix printer, can print the top layer, and transfer through all three layers. Something other printers just can't do. They also keep them in a sound proofing cabinet, to reduce the annoying noise they make, LOL!
Good list. I would also add: TV Guide - How else were you going to know when your favorite shows were on, and when to set the VCR to record? Newspapers - Not just for news, but used often to know when movie times were at your local theater. And, on a similar note... Drive-in theaters - A popular site for dates and family nights. They still exist, but are fairly rare now.
Newspapers are in the Internet now, they are not obsolete as a type of getting information. And paper newspapers are also still a thing. TV Guide - in the Internet or in the TV itself. Not obsolete, just change its form. Drive-in theaters if they exist, they are not obsolete = ) Also, you can just watch film in car on your smartphone or portable device. So watching something in a car is still a thing and not obsolete = )
Alternatively, you can buy a projector and "simulate" a drive-in experience. Maybe even get a few neighbors in on the experience. However, it might be difficult for apartment dwellers to get involved.
@@jdway3542 I tried but that system never seemed to work correctly. Either it missed the show entirely or recorded a different show. That was a short lived experiment. It made sense but someone had keep those code numbers current. It could've caught on better but IMHO it was too hassle for networks and cable companies.
I slept on a queen sized waterbed from the age of 13 to 20. I had to get rid of it because they weren't allowed in the apartment I moved into. It's been 30 years and I still miss that thing. I always slept good on that thing.
The Sony Walkman was a status symbol among kids, much like an iPhone is now. Sony were the Apple of their day too. In the UK a Boom Box was often called a Ghetto Blaster.
Regarding phone books, a common "cool talk" phrase disappeared from movies. In 1970s and 1980s movies, characters would often say... "Look me up... I'm in the book!"
OMG! What a great trip down memory lane! And I still miss them all!! The 80's will always be the best, don't forget the great music we all got from that era also!
Boom boxes still rock!! At a garage, worksite, party, nothing better than a big bass boombox with an audio input for a phone. Also nothing better for a drive in movie (yes those still exist too). They also last decades.
The only one of all these I would contest is maps. Even though I do use navigation apps, they can sometimes be inaccurate. If you're stuck in a dead area or run out of battery power, maps will still work. They're also much more convenient for pre-planning whole trips. This applies to transit maps and schecules as well. Physical maps are also a look back into how cities and areas have developed and changed over the years.
I think you might be a bit optimistic about how long it'll be before we start looking back at ancient smartphones… 2044 is more likely if not 2034! Tech changes with an increasing rapidity. 😁
I don't think so. This would be like "look back at the legendary personal computers." People will still be using smartphones 20 or 40 years from now, and I doubt they will even be much different, except being more powerful and energy efficient, and the term "smartphone" probally will be seen as long in the tooth and archaic. At least the devices will more powerful and efficient in terms in raw hardware. Hopefully they won't be fully and aggressively locked down against the user. :-/
@@plateshutoverlock, remember the once ubiquitous Nokia 3210? That was released just before the millennium, a mere 25 years ago. Phone tech has advanced in leaps and bounds since then; there's no way people in 20 years, let alone 40, will still be using anything that resembles current smartphones.
@@GeoffRiley Why not? We still use computers and consoles etc that resemble their counterparts from half a century ago. The current smartphone is very convenient as it is. The bigger change i can see other that typical improvements of software and quality in video and photo etc are just making foldable screens or rolling screens so we can fold them or roll the screen inside to make it smaller or bigger etc. But in general we will still have a smartphone.
The 3.5" floppy-disks shown about 7-1/2 minutes into the video didn't become the norm until the 90s, not the 80s. 5.25" FDs were the norm throughout the bulk of the 1980s and early 90s.
Well, the 720k came out in '86 and the 1.44m came out in '87. But sure, it took a few years before they were the norm. But I know I had a 3.5" drive in '88 or so.
@@PaddyInf Yeah we still used them on the windows XP MCP course, back in 2004/5. I think by that point, the pentium 4 era, they had vanished from been installed in systems. The dual core stuff, didn't have the floppy controller on the motherboard. I read somewhere that Windows 10 didn't support floppy drives, out of the box, you had to download the patch for it, but i think that was later put back in on the updates.
@@CaseAgainstFaith1 True, but 5-1/4" were the norm for a long time. I got a 3.5" with my 1st PC in '92 (486DX that I "souped up" with a 4167 Weitek co-processor), and I still have drives those sizes today on a back-up system.
Whil 1.44“ floppies started officially in 1986 for a view devices, IMHO it was more a thing of the nineties for most people. The eighties saw more 5 1/4“ floppies…
That is right. I started using the single density 720k floppies in 1986, advancing to 1.44MB in 1989. The 3,5" floppy era is truly the 90's. Any real replacements for the floppy did't arrive before 1998 when zip-drives became available.
Those only went out 20 years ago, as i remember selling VCRs back in 2003 to early 2004. Then it all went DVD, also the CRT TV started to phase out two years later.
I still have a recordable DVD player! Still use it to record TV onto DVD. In Australia "Rage" the music video show is still on 37 years on with musicians programming their favourite videos. Just this month Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver", Sister Sledge "We are Family", Dire Straits "Romeo And Juliet", Echo And The Bunnymen "The Cutter", Prince special with rare clips like "Automatic", "Sexuality", "I Wish U Heaven", "Uptown", "Dirty Mind", "Paisley Park" etc
I lived in the eighties as a 22-32 young man and I loved it, just as I loved the 90, zeroes and so on. So cool to see these again. Don’t forget, what’s now normal started with all these 👍
My mate got a job by using the yellow pages. He went down every single line on the page, took him 4 days, He landed an interview on the Wednesday, and was working that following sunday. Been in the job for 18 years.
Actually Sony Walkmans and their variants can still be enjoyed today. It's a simple and inexpensive cassette adapter on eBay that actually has an MP3 player built into the shell. You simply add your music to an SD card, place the card in the cassette MP3 adapter, put the "cassette" into your Walkman and press play and you get digital music. Doesn't have all the features like text, rewind/ff or shuffle, but it does the job and gives the Walkman a new lease on life. That and often many Walkmans have an FM stereo that is still widely broadcasted nationwide. So you can at least get new life out of your old Walkman. Camcorders and VCRs are still widely desired, as they offer inexpensive entertainment (videocassettes free or very cheap) and have movies and other venues that are either unavailable on other formats, or not published on DVD/Blu ray. As for camcorders, some especially in the VHS C, 8mm, Hi8, ED Beta, SVHS, and other obsolete formats are prized as Network TV Broadcasts, Newsreels, and other important recordings ONLY exist on these formats. Due to cost constraints, TV Networks won't spend to transfer them to either optical disc, nor digital archival storage. And they are critical to preservation. Same for floppy disks. Many programs and games for PC/Commodore 64/Sinclair/Atar/Apple ONLY exist on these disks and people like me who are videogame collectors and archivists buy 5.25 and 3.5in disks to preserves these programs and games for posterity.
I'm surprised these MP3 cassette 'adapters' don''t have a way to sense the rewind/fast forward/play of the deck it's in. It already has the cut outs so the 'tape' can fit within the pins that make the tape move. Why not add faux tape reels and sensors that can tell how the tape reels are moving, and use this to control the MP3 playback? Very easily and cheaply done with infrared photodiode and reels with cutouts in them. Surely, there must be versions of the cassette adaptor' that do just that?
@@plateshutoverlock That's actually not a bad idea! It could potentially also have a Bluetooth connected display to show the rew/ff functions and even offer track information, metadata for artist and artwork, and a time clock display. It would be the "cassette portion" which has your sensors and detection, then the display (Attaches to a spot on the unit using it). That would bring new life to a wide variety of cassette players. Also, in a more advanced unit, the cassette "reals" could have a flywheel on one reel to generate power for the battery inside the shell, and to power the display. Great idea though!
Thomas Guides - For those of us that make our living on the road visiting or serving customers GPS was a game changer. Using Thomas Guides you lost so much time reviewing maps and writing down a route (and still sometimes missed a turn or got lost) and of course every few years you needed new books since the old ones would be both falling apart and obsolete. I still remember paying over $1000 for my dash mounted Magellan GPS on my own dime and it literally let me get in one extra service call every day, making me the most productive tech on the team for a few years until they become cheaper and far more common.
Well.... paper maps do still exist... but absolutely out of style, as in, out of common usage. I used to buy a key map of my city every few years. Haven't used one in years.
I was in a hospital bed, and a bedfellow let me to use his Walkman with Black Sabbath's Never Say Die in it. Just the right kind of music in a hospital bed when you get to your senses from next to dying.
Phone books were very handy. Everyone's number was listed. Now, only some land line numbers are available on the Internet, and more complete listings are at pay sites. More than half the phones are now cell phones, and they are not listed anywhere. To phone someone nowadays, you have to know someone who has their number. It's a terrible loss of information.
I remember a CD that I bought in the late 1990s or early 2000s. It was a reverse phone book database where you could enter a phone number and see who it belonged to along with their address. You would also search for a street name and it listed every phone number and name in that street. That CD did not last long because the phone book publishers claimed copyright on the information.
I am in a renaissance of physical media collecting now. Movies (on VHS and Beta) that used to be $100 each when I started collecting are now like 50 cents (for DVD and BluRay) at thrift stores. Same with music on CD or vinyl. Subscription tv services, digital cloud files, and downloads on to smartphones are actually very ephemeral and require payment to keep using. Sure you can say you "own" your favorite movie, but what happens when that company folds, or changes terms, or if you stop paying, even for just storage. Sure it is less convenient, but I like owning a copy of movies or music in hand. As long as I can find a working player, I have my media in my possession. I love GPS, digital nav, and real overhead or streetview photos, but, I will aways own physical printed maps (and compasses). Again, GPS is a system that could go down anytime. Also, they depend on connection (to satellites), a continued power source, and the app itself on the phone in order to function. Map and compass don't run out of battery, lose connection, and are arguably more rugged in the field. I have 40 year old maps, and a 120 year old brass compass, but all 5 of my very first GPS units are long gone.
That made me a little bit wistful. At least some of these things are making a comeback though... people are releasing music on vinyl again, and the local repair place said they've been doing a roaring trade fixing tape decks lately. And hairspray still has its uses.
The only ones who calls you today from an unknown number using the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) is the fraudsters. The normal ones use WhatsApp, or any other Internet-based service.
Gas stations still sell Rand McNally road maps. You can buy one of that town or city for a $1. I still know how to read a road map and fold it back up. GPS has failed in the past, and there still are blackout spots in the U.S. that don't even get a radio signal.
In the uk many of the phones inside the kiosk have been replaced with defibrillators and some are used as a very small library or tourist information centre with local attraction leaflets etc available. The iconic “phone boxes” can be seen in private gardens as storage sheds but are still very common in small villages despite. Being up to 60 years old.
Once Police Boxes were Allover the place in UK but now very rare. There is a replica without doors in a seaside town called Scarborough and I saw one once after a wartime charity festival. I think it as only there for that though.
I was surprised to see the 1988 Peterborough Yellow Pages shown, my first ever advert was in that directory. Paper maps essential for navigation in rural areas where there's no mobile phone service. Map reading and navigation skills are important, especially when things go wrong. You can't jam a compass or prevent the downloading of a map. I have paper maps of the area I live and surroundings but I also have the OS App. I can view and print maps for the whole of the UK and some other countries such as the US, it is excellent value for money.
I still have .... - A walkman and its earbuds - A collection of audio cassettes - Yellow Pages 2009 - White Pages 2009 - VHS VCR - Collection of VHS tapes - My Blockbuster membership card - 3.5" floppy disk drive on the shelf - A collection of 3.5" floppy disks (don't copy that floppy!) - A smaller collection of 5.25" floppy disks - A box of unused 8" floppy disks - A Motorola pager in my memorabilia drawer - A pile of dot matrix printer paper (printer is long gone) - There is a payphone just down my street, all calls are free - a huge collection of paper maps and street directories - a couple of smaller "boom boxes" one in my kitchen still used - A newer 8mm digital camcorder in my cupboard - Still visit the shopping malls when I am in Bangkok
@@chrisnalina1755 ... In 2021 Telstra, our national Australian phone carrier, made all calls to fixed line and mobile numbers as well as Wi-Fi hotspots at phone booths free. They pay the cost as a national service. From their website in 2023.... "Since mobiles became nearly universal, a lot of Australians might not give them much thought. Until there’s a natural disaster. Until you’re in vulnerable circumstances, homeless or fleeing domestic violence. That’s why two years ago, we made all local and national calls to standard fixed line numbers and calls to standard Australian mobiles on our public payphones free and followed this with free Wi-Fi across select enabled payphones. Fast forward 24 months, and Australia’s payphones have become an essential lifeline for those in need. Since the introduction of free calls, there have been a staggering over 40 million calls made, seeing demand more than double. Across critical helplines is where we’ve seen some of the sharpest rises in calls, with key increases over the past 12-months. Payphones are more than just a way to make a call. For Australians experiencing vulnerable circumstances, they are a lifeline. They provide a link to critical services, as well as essential connections with family and friends. We are seeing the importance of payphones grow more and more each year, and we're glad that we can provide this important lifeline during times it is needed most. In addition to free payphone calls and texts, we now also have 3,300 payphones with free Wi-Fi access and are in works to make this service available across even more of our payphones. We’re committed to helping keep one million Australians in vulnerable circumstances stay connected every year. For anyone seeking support, we offer a range of assistance options like our Top Up program in partnership with Infoxchange, flexible payment terms and long-term account holds to provide help when it’s needed most."
Fax machines are still used. I've had to send a few faxs about a year ago. It's easier than scanning it into the computer, attaching it to an email, send it, then they have to print them out.
I like the fact that I own my cassette collection and vinal records. I paid for them and no one has the right to take them away from my home. And by the way with all the specialized tape formulations and versions of Dolby including HX Pro Cassette tapes played back on a great machine still sound darn good! And I mean really good! It's interesting to actually contrast todays technology, sound, with the best available in the 1970's & 80's. No digital compression and removal of sounds they think you do not hear! I have a Carver known as "The Receiver" and their is none better or even close today!
In the early 80's, corporations had copy centers. Copy machines were deemed too expensive and complicated for the average employee to use. You had to fill out a request form and drop off your originals and pick up later. Word processors. They bridged the gap between electric typewriters and PC based editors. In industry, it amazed me how quickly old fashioned drafting centers disappeared. Once AutoCAD came along, a few CAD guys could do the work of a room full of draftsmen. That was fun to watch. I kind of forgot about water beds.
I remember turning in a college english report that was to be typed or written in ink. I submitted a dot-matrix printout to the instructor and she gave me an F for not following instructions. I appealed it, saying I did type it, but she wouldn't back down. I had to hand write it in ink. Sheesh. Still causes some heartburn to think of people with such limited thinking.
Word processing was a specialist job requiring specialist crew in the early 80s. Wang is to word processing as IBM is to computing. We knowledge workers do it by hand or by using a typewriter.
On the floppy disc section - the one shown in this video are actually high density discs that were less “floppy” than the earlier generation of true floppy discs. The earliest gen floppy disc were 5.25 inches in size and were truly floppy as they can bend. They were only 360 kb…that’s right “kb”. There was a small notch on one side to indicate which side to insert the floppy disc into the drive. To double the storage, we would use a paper hole puncher and notch the opposite side which allows you to flip the disc to other side and data can be written to other side, doubling the capacity of that disc to 720 kb!
Actually the first floppy disks were 8 inches in size and introduced in the 1970s. They looked for the most part like 5.25" floppies but larger. I never got the reason for "single sided" floppies when the disc has magnetic coating on both sides, other than maybe one side being program storage from the software house, and the other side being writable storage for the user to save on (this side having the write notch). But blank "single sided" floppies never made any real sense.
@@plateshutoverlock I think it was to save money on the drives, as only one read/write head was needed. Also, although single sided floppies had magnetic coatings on both sides only one was certified to record data reliably - I think they may have been rejects from the double-sided testing process.
@@plateshutoverlockI have only seen those large floppies in a mainframe installation inside a computer center. Never handled one. By the time PC/XT came along, all are in 5.25in format.
I extensively used Walkmans, stereo cassette players, in 90s. My maternal uncle owned a VCP and I occasionally visited his house for a movie. It was a fantasy to watch a movie from a cassette tape! Today my day begins with a smartphone and it ends with a smartphone. Indeed we have come a long way!
It's pointed out to you on EVERY single one of these types of video that pagers and fax machines still exist to this day in certain very situational environments. (not just hobby historians which you could argue everything here is still used by someone if that were the case.) I've no idea why it's taking so long to get the message through that these things are still in use in actual workplaces. [edit] oh go on then. I've got to the end of your bit on fax's now. and you DO point out that they are still used situationally these days. So props for that.
@@roberthenry9319 Nope, not at all actually. I've not worked in 21 years and it takes me a 2 day run up to even go to the village shop for bread or milk. Your point?
Not used in the 80's, but Blackberry phones are also deemed obsolete these days. It was astonishing to notice how quickly they fell out of favor around 2012.😮
Depends on the mall and the area. I recently read, to my surprise, that, upscale malls are still hot real estate, despite the fact that average malls are dying.
@@sureshmukhi2316 That explain everything. In the US many closed down and other are dying but in my country they are building new ones instead so bare in mind the video is made by someone referencing the US. In my country we also never had water beds as a thing or the parachute pants.
@@kylekurtz6630Looking at yellow pages you immediately saw all rhe plumbers in yiur area. Searching online you run in circles of the 3 names that paid most to be on top
The Walkman didn't have "speed regulation" on the electric motor that pulled the magnetic tape past the "read" head. When the song you were listening to played a LOUD moment, the power devoted to the speaker would be "robbed" from the electric motor, so the motor would slow down (and so would the tempo of the recorded song.)
I never owned a walkman, nor desired one. I listen to music at home...if I want to hear it outdoors then back in the day I'd have taken along a transistor radio, not something I'd need headphones for. Later (after 1980) I'd take along a boombox. Just never wanted to be encumbered with headphones. We still get sent a phone book every year, but I'd be hard pressed to remember the last time I used one.
Home computers (as in non-x86 computers not made by apple), such as Tandys, Commodores, ZX Spectrum. IBM PC compatibles were pretty expensive and these provided a cheap alternative that was good enough back then
@@vitorsousa8172PC/XT without a hard drive uses a dual disk system. Drive A for the OS e.g. DOS 2.1 and Drive B for data working within a RAM of 512-640k. Yes, there is a noise as the OS loads.
@@GS-zv3qn I know. That's the problem. I was born in 1992 and I still believe in social interaction being the best option. I am what you call "Old School" but maybe evolution isn't everything and maybe we were at our technological peak in the 1990s. Who knows 🤨🤔🧐
I disagree. Streaming services brought us extreme high quality television series like for example Sopranos and game of thrones. TV series now have feature film quality only because of the streaming services. But while I say this it also pops in my head that movies have become the worst ever the last 10 years. I guess that might also be influenced by streaming services because movie companies take no creative risks anymore. All playing it safe. Oh well it are all just phases :)
My 80's JVC ghetto blaster was so big I had to attach a guitar strap to it when taking it up town at night, also I had a stand up programmable record player at home. Ps, the 'hard drive' of my ZX81 computer was a cassette tape lol.
VHS & VCRs? VHS, was one of two formats of VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). The other was Betamax. Yes, there were others, like VHS-C & Hi8, etc... But those were made for camcorders, not VCRs...
A lot of this stuff was part of my life as a kid. I remember not wanting to move onto cds due to the paranoia of something new figured they would scratch easily. Saw the cassette section get smaller and smaller til I didn’t have a choice to upgrade
Radio Shack! The go-to place for anything even remotely electronic. Originally they were staffed by electronics nerds who could help you with anything. I loved the place. My first computer was a TRS-80.
7:15 THOSE weren't floppy discs! Actual floppies were a pain: 8" or 5" discs as sturdy as old Polaroids & had gaps in the case exposing the actual magnetic discs you had to avoid putting fingers on or risk ruining the data. The later ones with small hard cases & metal tab-covers were properly "disk cartridges".
They were 5 and 1/4 in:-) but people still called the three and a half inch discs floppy disks just as a carryover term from the original 5 1/4 inch discs
Some people still collect TV's with the cathode ray tube. VCR's are still useful so you have something to watch on those collectable TV's. As for Cassette tape it is still one of the best recording/sharing mediums to get your music out if you are a new or young musician. Some of the so called obsolete technologies may yet make a comeback. Especially sound recording and playback technologies so I suggest being careful when using the word obsolete.
And pranks like what happened at Pepperdine: a clever dan taped together several cases of edge spooled continuous feed perfed paper and let the printer/computer rip all weekend... trying to calculate pi. I don't recall how many decimal points it went to before it got shut down.
Yep. Conrad’s Total Car Care, a Cleveland based auto care company with over 30 locations, still use dot matrix printers for their invoices. Love that sound. It’s very useful for carbon copying the invoice so that the customer’s signature is on both the customer’s and store’s copies of the same exact invoice.
I remember going to Blockbuster on a Tuesday night to take advantage of the weekly deal … two overnight and five weekly rentals for $10 … those were the days my friend!
Our huge flight simulator facility had 12-inch floppies. It also had a disk drive that had about a dozen disks on a common shaft and it was so heavy it took both hands to pull it out of its reader. The keyboards weren't electric, they used puffs of air. They had to be cleaned because the operators smoked and the passages would get blocked. You can imagine how the operators' lungs looked like.
dont agree with the VCR... i still have mine and still use it, most films that where first available on VCR but then went to DVD sometimes lost parts from being edited, if you want to see a film as originally intended then have the VCR version
I recommend that you have a paper map traveling through Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Electronic mapping media will send you down wrong routes, inappropriate routes, and 2/3 of the area has no access to cell service.
Me watching this and remember experiencing all of this growing up. What a wild time.
I hear you.
Yep.
And let us not forget.
How does GPS help, if there's a major power blackout, so you have no recharge capability?
Or worse, the scientists are right, and we get hit with another *Carrington Event,* and the blackout is actually a few *years* long?
Photo Albums, Newspapers, TV Guides & Answering Machines (Honorable Mentions) 😂😂
@@dariusmcnair601 Typewriters (electric if you are lucky), a book of mathematical tables and slide rules. I used these in high school before calculators were available. (more Honorable Mentions)
@@NewmanOnGaming I remember NOT recycling anything. How many landfills did we all fill between us ?!!
The 80's felt like something new and exciting was coming out every week! It was a great time to be alive!
and people were nice. working was fun.
And now it's all in the landfill. Yay!
@@SnootchieBootchies27 Everything is made to end up in a landfill. That's how they keep you buying!
@@KabukeeJo *consooming*
@@markganus1085 Don't forget to get excited for new product!
Paper maps are still very useful. If you zoom out on your phone to see the whole route, you lose the details. A paper map enables you to see the whole route and the surrounding area in full detail.
Correct they are an excellent backup and still useful
I'd rather have a paper map. Miss them.
@@richland1980Also, a paper map and compass are a must have if you are out in the wilderness and your phone or gps loses signal or battery.
That's like exactly what the narrator in the video says.
thats the reason I still use paper maps. relying on your phone for everything is a pain in the ass
Our lives in the 80's were a cultural revolution. The more rudimentary technology, Arcades, malls, and even MTV made us better people because they depended on our interaction with others. Today's technology has cut the human off from interrelations and have created an isolated world, where people seem just a little dumber, a lot more entitled an socially inept. We didn't need influencers to tell us what we were supposed to like or love, we did that by participating in the world. I miss the 80's like you couldn't imagine.
I'm calling the 80s the best Era of all-time
@@ChasingStarz-Ou812 I'm inclined to agree on a wide variety of topics. Music being one although the 60's were great also. I finished high school in December 1976 and the next 15 years was such a blur of changing trends. Electronic tech was almost hard to keep up with, not to mention trying to buy the latest techno toy destined for the landfill or Smithsonian in a few years.
Computers, cell phones, and more precisely, the interwebs, is what killed society as we knew it. It's a double-edged sword. We know about the world we live in now more than ever. But on the other hand, sometimes I'd rather not know what I know now and go back to being a blissfully ignorant fool. I feel the worst for kids growing up today who never knew any better. They're afraid to knock on doors and ask if Johnny can come out and play and will never know what it's like to physically own music on a record/cassette/CD and the joy that comes with it
trapper keeper and phone books todays day and age are not the same i miss the 80’s such rad times
It's not necessarily accurate. In the '80s, there were no influencers, but advertising on TV, in newspapers, on the streets, on the radio, and in cinemas had a much more devastating effect on the masses. Today, people are socially interconnected in real-time, not just with their neighbors, but with those living on the other side of the world. They can talk and exchange opinions without going through the hands of their country's (corrupt) journalists. Now, if people today get manipulated by influencers just like they were by movie stars in the '80s, that's another story. Personally, I wouldn't be too eager to go back to the '80s.
Watching this has made it easy to see how we have moved into a dystopian society. So many of the things in this video that were social hubs and encouraged interperson interaction are now gone. We're more connected than ever, yet more isolated in our own digital bubbles. The social impact of this is now becoming more evident, where even the work lunch room, which was where everyone used to talk and interact, I see people now mostly sitting silent, eating their food and doing something on their phones, ignoring the people three feet away from them.
Watching people walking without a phone in their hands was priceless.
And people were so THIN back then!
That's how "pocket pool" was invented. 😊
Back in the day, if someone was talking to themselves while walking in the street people would stare and wonder which lunatic asylum he escaped from.
remeber the first time I saw a guy doing hands free.. thought he was a loony
@@jum5238so true. Just look at the crowds watching golf and tennis tournaments from the 80's to now and you can see how large and fat the general public has become. Go to a water park and you can really see how fat people have become as they are in their swim outfits and can't depend on clothes to hide the fat.
The 80's were one of the best decades in history... so much better than now.
The walkman and videotapes.. people pretend they are obsolete... but you don't have studios clawing back your ability to use them. Got a streaming service, or 'bought' a game or song in the last 10 years, yeah, those can and often HAVE disappeared from owned collections because you don't OWN what you bought.
...and this my folks is why thepiratebay is still relevant.
If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
I don't stream or buy digital copies of movies. I still buy DVD's, because I own the movie and I won't lose it if streaming service goes bust, especially Amazon; I can't close my account because I have some digital movies which Amazon refuses to let me download a local file - bastards.
Also I know DVDs of movies in the past which haven't be tampered with because something might offend someone woke.
Is that you, Louis?
Never heard of t0rrents eh
I'm so old, as I remember all of these like it was yesterday.
Me too!
Me too. But, I just got some black light posters, a black light and a lava lamp on E bay, plus I have a pole lamp, and remember this : the flairs in modern pants started out as bell bottoms, and the flair just got smaller and smaller, but it never went away. Class of '75.
We're not old, we just have great memories!
Me too..
Me as well!! Gen X was the best generation!!
Having Graduated High School in 1983 I now feel very old as I realize that with exception of the shoulder pads and Parachute Pants I had or used everything on your list, I still remember the excitement of when MTV first came on the air and the excitement of getting home from school to watch the latest music videos, and then going to the music store to purchase the Cassettes for my walkman or boombox
And spending my weekends after doing my chores at the mall or the huge video arcade with a pocket full of quarters or suddenly remembering at 9:00 PM that I forgot to return the movies I rented and rushing to get them in to the dropbox so I wouldn’t be fined, as I sit here in July of 2024 I have come to realize that I’m so happy to have spent my high school years and early adulthood years in the 1980’s it was a wonderful time to be a teenager and young adult. And I wouldn’t trade those wonderful memories for anything.
Don't feel bad, I graduated in 81...
Once got a ticket for going 80mph in to 55 zone while trying to return a video tape before midnight. Of course, the cop's estimate was totally off - I was really going 100 mph!
BTW... Radar detectors were a cool thing kids probably don't know about which aren't showing up on these videos. Before cops got "instant on" and all the other anti-radar detector upgrades for their radar guns they really helped A LOT toward being able to speed without tickets and keeping life generally more interesting.
During the 80s, I was never cooler than when I was wearing my Members Only jacket, a skinny leather tie, Shuttle Series parachute pants, and my Puma hi-tops with bright Day-Glo laces. Good times.
I knew a skinny leather tie guy back in the 1980s. I made a joke about it and it offended him.
What to you wear now?
I was a 60`s child. Recently, I read a story about the final closing of the International Market Place in Waikiki. The author would show up every Saturday morning in his Hang Ten shirt, bell bottom jeans, and tire tread sandals... It touched something deep inside me...
Hahaha hell yeah! Parachute pants almost made a comeback.
In my Junior and Senior year of high school, I had the PERFECT JOB. I worked at a video store. Not BB but a knock off and it was literally the best job on the planet in 1989-1990.
You forgot to include the calculator watches of the 1980s like the brand of CASIO watches that was made famous by Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in the Back To The Future trilogy series. This was the CASIO CA-53 WR that you can still purchase for $20 on Amazon but in the original BTF movie he wore the CA-50 model which among watch collectors can fetch some very high prices.
Digital LCD watches in general. LED watches came out a few years earlier but they were expensive ($80) and the LED parts didn't like getting lightly knocked. Mine was a Bulova and quite the fashion statement for late 1976.
@@LuvBorderCollies ... You had to push a little button on the watch for the LEDs to light up. They could not be on all the time like modern LCD watches because the battery would run out quickly.
Casio still makes calculator watches and dozens of LCD digital watches that still popular. In fact Casio is highly regarded by watch nerds around the world. BTW, some new Casio digital watches cost $5k-$6k. They are far from obsolete.
@@sbalogh53 Not so far away from modern smart watches, battery-wise ;)
@@tomsaltner3011 ... big difference is that the old watches were not rechargeable. You had to buy a new, expensive battery each time they ran out. They would last about a year maybe if you did not light up the LEDs too often.
So I went to the video rental store and asked the bloke behind the counter if I could borrow Batman Forever. He said: No, you need to bring it back tomorrow.
I had a similar experience On the counter fellow said Batman returns.
I use a captain's bed frame with a conventional mattress. It still has the nice big drawers.
Lol good pun.
Why nipples on his suit?! Eeesh.
I had a girlfriend that worked in a video store. One day a guy came in and asked "Do you have SPACEBALLS?" She answered, "No, but we have NUTS."
I was shocked to discover that MTV still existed. Hadn't watched them for decades.
Rocketed to everyday fame then crashed & burned. Yeh, I didn't know it was still here.
And they don't play music! Go figure!
They are not "Music" television anymore.
Printed maps will never be obsolete, they require no batteries or external signal to provide their information, which is often more detailed on the paper option.
Pilots still use them although I'm not sure about the big airlines.
We still use it when we were deployed overseas in CAR.
99% of todays people don’t even know how to use a paper map )
Music of the 80s still the best ever!
In the 1980s, map reading was a required skill. Now, councils are having to put up signs reading "Your SAT NAV is wrong" on some roads in an attempt to alert drivers that their 'map in a box' is sending them down a road that they'll regret travelling.
We were taught map reading for sure by 6th grade, probably 5th grade but I still remember some small details from that learning.
@@LuvBorderCollies ... we were taught map reading in a subject called Geography. It is interesting to compare Australia with the USA. Is this one of the reasons so many Americans are ignorant of the world outside the USA? (from a Google search)
Geography is mandatory in Australian schools until Year 8, except for NSW and Victoria where it is mandated until Year 10. In the Australian Curriculum Geography aims to ensure that students develop a sense of wonder, curiosity and respect about places, people, cultures and environments throughout the world. It also provides a deep geographical knowledge of their own locality, Australia, the Asia region and the world. It gives students the ability to think geographically, using geographical concepts.
Why is geography not taught in American schools? Well, there are several reasons including school funding, which is heavily dependent on standardized test scores. To secure funding, schools prioritize curriculums that cover subjects like math and reading, leaving no room for lessons focused on topics like geography or global studies.
LOL I have a freind who has a sign on his road saying “Google Maps is WRONG this is a dead end road. Even with that sign it’s amazing how many people end up driving in his feild looking for a road that isn’t there.
@@TimDyck I have a friend who did just that… the AA refused to 'recover' him!
Oh, the days of VHS! "Be kind, rewind." That iconic sign was in every rental store. These places were great for meeting people and a perfect spot for some light-hearted flirting. Blockbuster was the ultimate destination for VHS rentals, offering a one-stop shop where you could grab popcorn, sweets, and soda along with your movie.
Everyone hated rewinding tapes. Then came the rewinder-a clever but bulky device designed solely to rewind VHS tapes. It simplified the task, but that was all it did.
I got laid a lot at blockbuster. Met all kinds of girls there.
Infernal late fees... I am so glad netflix buried vhs rental stores.
And whenever there was any kind of sex scene the tape would glitch from people watching it over and over.
@@teejay3272 That was solved when they became DVD rental stores along with the rewind issue.
My dispatch office used dot matrix printers up until 2007, when I retired, and from what I've heard still do.
Why? Because the forms they print on, are triplicate, and the dot matrix printer, can print the top layer, and transfer through all three layers.
Something other printers just can't do.
They also keep them in a sound proofing cabinet, to reduce the annoying noise they make, LOL!
modern printers are still 'dot matrix', they print with an, er, matrix of dots, what you and the video means is more correctly 'impact printers'
@@andygozzo72 OK...
My town has two dead malls in it. One is now a business park and the other was bulldozed and replaced by a big box hardware store.
Good list. I would also add:
TV Guide - How else were you going to know when your favorite shows were on, and when to set the VCR to record?
Newspapers - Not just for news, but used often to know when movie times were at your local theater.
And, on a similar note...
Drive-in theaters - A popular site for dates and family nights. They still exist, but are fairly rare now.
Newspapers are in the Internet now, they are not obsolete as a type of getting information. And paper newspapers are also still a thing.
TV Guide - in the Internet or in the TV itself. Not obsolete, just change its form.
Drive-in theaters if they exist, they are not obsolete = ) Also, you can just watch film in car on your smartphone or portable device. So watching something in a car is still a thing and not obsolete = )
Alternatively, you can buy a projector and "simulate" a drive-in experience.
Maybe even get a few neighbors in on the experience.
However, it might be difficult for apartment dwellers to get involved.
Ya about that VCR recording thing. Did anyone, or anyone you know ever use the VCR Plus codes, or even how to use them?
@@jdway3542 I tried but that system never seemed to work correctly. Either it missed the show entirely or recorded a different show. That was a short lived experiment. It made sense but someone had keep those code numbers current. It could've caught on better but IMHO it was too hassle for networks and cable companies.
I slept on a queen sized waterbed from the age of 13 to 20. I had to get rid of it because they weren't allowed in the apartment I moved into. It's been 30 years and I still miss that thing. I always slept good on that thing.
Water is life
13 to 20 i slept well on concrete floor
@@dmitripogosian5084Same here, I owned a thin Japanese Futon mattress and loved it 😊
Was it heated?
It was groovy to have that Ocean Motion. hehe.
The Sony Walkman was a status symbol among kids, much like an iPhone is now. Sony were the Apple of their day too. In the UK a Boom Box was often called a Ghetto Blaster.
Regarding phone books, a common "cool talk" phrase disappeared from movies. In 1970s and 1980s movies, characters would often say...
"Look me up... I'm in the book!"
Star Lord begs to differ about Walkman being obsolete.
He switched to a Zune though.
@@GrackAlaciN Not by choice.
@@speedmaster001 ... who?
@@undrhil reference to Guardians of the Galaxy who’s signature accessory is a Sony Walkman. Google it.
@@undrhil Main character from Guardians of the Galaxy.
The vcr was just the best thing to come out of the 80s!
It came out of the 1970s.
@simonbone for rich folks. My parents could only afford 1 in the early 80s.
I had a vcr in 1977 cost me an absolute fortune, 3 hour tapes cost £15
My folks couldn't afford 1 until 1984. What an awesome day that was.
My wife and I traded a chest freezer for a used Panasonic VCR player/recorder. Wooowee....we've arrived at the Big Time in 1985. 🤣
OMG! What a great trip down memory lane! And I still miss them all!! The 80's will always be the best, don't forget the great music we all got from that era also!
I live in Jamaica many of these things were not available till the 90s like the Walkman but I really enjoyed the trip down memory lane thanks
Boom boxes still rock!!
At a garage, worksite, party, nothing better than a big bass boombox with an audio input for a phone.
Also nothing better for a drive in movie (yes those still exist too). They also last decades.
In the 1970's Spencer gifts used to be a Head shop. If you know, you know!!!
You could find it in any mall, just follow the strawberry incense smell and Pier 1 by the sandalwood…
@@drachenfeuer5042
YES!! And the glow of black lights in the store.
Forgot all about them. They carried some "unique" items for sure.
The only one of all these I would contest is maps. Even though I do use navigation apps, they can sometimes be inaccurate. If you're stuck in a dead area or run out of battery power, maps will still work. They're also much more convenient for pre-planning whole trips. This applies to transit maps and schecules as well. Physical maps are also a look back into how cities and areas have developed and changed over the years.
2064: "Remember these legendary smart phones..."
I think you might be a bit optimistic about how long it'll be before we start looking back at ancient smartphones… 2044 is more likely if not 2034! Tech changes with an increasing rapidity. 😁
I don't think so. This would be like "look back at the legendary personal computers." People will still be using smartphones 20 or 40 years from now, and I doubt they will even be much different, except being more powerful and energy efficient, and the term "smartphone" probally will be seen as long in the tooth and archaic. At least the devices will more powerful and efficient in terms in raw hardware. Hopefully they won't be fully and aggressively locked down against the user. :-/
@@plateshutoverlock, remember the once ubiquitous Nokia 3210? That was released just before the millennium, a mere 25 years ago. Phone tech has advanced in leaps and bounds since then; there's no way people in 20 years, let alone 40, will still be using anything that resembles current smartphones.
@@GeoffRiley Why not? We still use computers and consoles etc that resemble their counterparts from half a century ago.
The current smartphone is very convenient as it is. The bigger change i can see other that typical improvements of software and quality in video and photo etc are just making foldable screens or rolling screens so we can fold them or roll the screen inside to make it smaller or bigger etc.
But in general we will still have a smartphone.
I think we will be using some form of brain implants in 20 years. 🧠
The 3.5" floppy-disks shown about 7-1/2 minutes into the video didn't become the norm until the 90s, not the 80s. 5.25" FDs were the norm throughout the bulk of the 1980s and early 90s.
Well, the 720k came out in '86 and the 1.44m came out in '87. But sure, it took a few years before they were the norm. But I know I had a 3.5" drive in '88 or so.
I was using floppy discs when doing my first degree in the early 2000s. They were well on their way out, but they were still available.
i vividly remember everybody had the 3.5" floppys in the late 80's early 90's, they were everywhere.
@@PaddyInf Yeah we still used them on the windows XP MCP course, back in 2004/5. I think by that point, the pentium 4 era, they had vanished from been installed in systems. The dual core stuff, didn't have the floppy controller on the motherboard. I read somewhere that Windows 10 didn't support floppy drives, out of the box, you had to download the patch for it, but i think that was later put back in on the updates.
@@CaseAgainstFaith1 True, but 5-1/4" were the norm for a long time. I got a 3.5" with my 1st PC in '92 (486DX that I "souped up" with a 4167 Weitek co-processor), and I still have drives those sizes today on a back-up system.
Whil 1.44“ floppies started officially in 1986 for a view devices, IMHO it was more a thing of the nineties for most people. The eighties saw more 5 1/4“ floppies…
That is right. I started using the single density 720k floppies in 1986, advancing to 1.44MB in 1989. The 3,5" floppy era is truly the 90's. Any real replacements for the floppy did't arrive before 1998 when zip-drives became available.
I have VHS tapes and a VCR that works perfectly
Those only went out 20 years ago, as i remember selling VCRs back in 2003 to early 2004. Then it all went DVD, also the CRT TV started to phase out two years later.
It’s crazy how expensive VCRs are now. I remember paying $40 for one in 2007 to watch an old home video, but now they’re hundreds of dollars.
As do I. I plan to keep on with them for as long as possible.
@@Bargle5i have loads of tapes with stuff i recorded off the tv, and a few spare machines to play them on
Because they were built to last.
Still own a VCR
I still have a recordable DVD player! Still use it to record TV onto DVD. In Australia "Rage" the music video show is still on 37 years on with musicians programming their favourite videos. Just this month Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver", Sister Sledge "We are Family", Dire Straits "Romeo And Juliet", Echo And The Bunnymen "The Cutter", Prince special with rare clips like "Automatic", "Sexuality", "I Wish U Heaven", "Uptown", "Dirty Mind", "Paisley Park" etc
Have one of those 70's floor console units with an 8 track in it.
I still have one but almost never use it!
Same. Just used it recently too._
I lived in the eighties as a 22-32 young man and I loved it, just as I loved the 90, zeroes and so on. So cool to see these again. Don’t forget, what’s now normal started with all these 👍
My mate got a job by using the yellow pages. He went down every single line on the page, took him 4 days, He landed an interview on the Wednesday, and was working that following sunday. Been in the job for 18 years.
Oh.
I did something similar. I started at 'A' and got through to 'R' before I got an interview. That job lasted 22 years before I was redundant.
@@RonTodd-gb1eo ... I hope your copy of the Yellow Pages was not from a major city.
Actually Sony Walkmans and their variants can still be enjoyed today. It's a simple and inexpensive cassette adapter on eBay that actually has an MP3 player built into the shell. You simply add your music to an SD card, place the card in the cassette MP3 adapter, put the "cassette" into your Walkman and press play and you get digital music. Doesn't have all the features like text, rewind/ff or shuffle, but it does the job and gives the Walkman a new lease on life. That and often many Walkmans have an FM stereo that is still widely broadcasted nationwide. So you can at least get new life out of your old Walkman.
Camcorders and VCRs are still widely desired, as they offer inexpensive entertainment (videocassettes free or very cheap) and have movies and other venues that are either unavailable on other formats, or not published on DVD/Blu ray. As for camcorders, some especially in the VHS C, 8mm, Hi8, ED Beta, SVHS, and other obsolete formats are prized as Network TV Broadcasts, Newsreels, and other important recordings ONLY exist on these formats. Due to cost constraints, TV Networks won't spend to transfer them to either optical disc, nor digital archival storage. And they are critical to preservation. Same for floppy disks. Many programs and games for PC/Commodore 64/Sinclair/Atar/Apple ONLY exist on these disks and people like me who are videogame collectors and archivists buy 5.25 and 3.5in disks to preserves these programs and games for posterity.
I'm surprised these MP3 cassette 'adapters' don''t have a way to sense the rewind/fast forward/play of the deck it's in. It already has the cut outs so the 'tape' can fit within the pins that make the tape move. Why not add faux tape reels and sensors that can tell how the tape reels are moving, and use this to control the MP3 playback? Very easily and cheaply done with infrared photodiode and reels with cutouts in them. Surely, there must be versions of the cassette adaptor' that do just that?
@@plateshutoverlock That's actually not a bad idea! It could potentially also have a Bluetooth connected display to show the rew/ff functions and even offer track information, metadata for artist and artwork, and a time clock display. It would be the "cassette portion" which has your sensors and detection, then the display (Attaches to a spot on the unit using it). That would bring new life to a wide variety of cassette players. Also, in a more advanced unit, the cassette "reals" could have a flywheel on one reel to generate power for the battery inside the shell, and to power the display.
Great idea though!
I have hundreds of commander 64 games
Paper maps will never go out of style.
Thomas Guides - For those of us that make our living on the road visiting or serving customers GPS was a game changer. Using Thomas Guides you lost so much time reviewing maps and writing down a route (and still sometimes missed a turn or got lost) and of course every few years you needed new books since the old ones would be both falling apart and obsolete. I still remember paying over $1000 for my dash mounted Magellan GPS on my own dime and it literally let me get in one extra service call every day, making me the most productive tech on the team for a few years until they become cheaper and far more common.
Well.... paper maps do still exist... but absolutely out of style, as in, out of common usage. I used to buy a key map of my city every few years. Haven't used one in years.
1:30 I had a waterbed in the early 80’s.
I couldn’t sleep as a child, except on them.
I was in a hospital bed, and a bedfellow let me to use his Walkman with Black Sabbath's Never Say Die in it. Just the right kind of music in a hospital bed when you get to your senses from next to dying.
I had all of it being 71 years old
I even had a voice-activated beeper
All of it?
Phone books were very handy. Everyone's number was listed. Now, only some land line numbers are available on the Internet, and more complete listings are at pay sites. More than half the phones are now cell phones, and they are not listed anywhere. To phone someone nowadays, you have to know someone who has their number. It's a terrible loss of information.
The creepy callers and stalkers probably miss them. I know I don't.
I remember a CD that I bought in the late 1990s or early 2000s. It was a reverse phone book database where you could enter a phone number and see who it belonged to along with their address. You would also search for a street name and it listed every phone number and name in that street. That CD did not last long because the phone book publishers claimed copyright on the information.
The first scenes of Terminator are unrecognizable now... :-S
I used them for phone pranks. Today they would be illegal
ya todays mtv has no business being called mtv
Think of it as just three random letters with no meaning behind them.
@@CaseAgainstFaith1 My Tibia Vibrates
@@CaseAgainstFaith1, I disagree. MTV is shortened EmpTV, since there is nothing worth watching on the channel any longer
Misleading TV
I am in a renaissance of physical media collecting now.
Movies (on VHS and Beta) that used to be $100 each when I started collecting are now like 50 cents (for DVD and BluRay) at thrift stores. Same with music on CD or vinyl.
Subscription tv services, digital cloud files, and downloads on to smartphones are actually very ephemeral and require payment to keep using. Sure you can say you "own" your favorite movie, but what happens when that company folds, or changes terms, or if you stop paying, even for just storage. Sure it is less convenient, but I like owning a copy of movies or music in hand. As long as I can find a working player, I have my media in my possession.
I love GPS, digital nav, and real overhead or streetview photos, but, I will aways own physical printed maps (and compasses). Again, GPS is a system that could go down anytime. Also, they depend on connection (to satellites), a continued power source, and the app itself on the phone in order to function. Map and compass don't run out of battery, lose connection, and are arguably more rugged in the field. I have 40 year old maps, and a 120 year old brass compass, but all 5 of my very first GPS units are long gone.
That made me a little bit wistful. At least some of these things are making a comeback though... people are releasing music on vinyl again, and the local repair place said they've been doing a roaring trade fixing tape decks lately. And hairspray still has its uses.
Hairspray makes a good flame thrower.
You live in Soddy Daisy, Tennessee, don't you?
I miss phone books. Why? I hate having to pay for info when I get an unknown number. Phone books were free.
The only ones who calls you today from an unknown number using the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) is the fraudsters. The normal ones use WhatsApp, or any other Internet-based service.
What info do you pay when you get an unknown number???
Gas stations still sell Rand McNally road maps. You can buy one of that town or city for a $1. I still know how to read a road map and fold it back up. GPS has failed in the past, and there still are blackout spots in the U.S. that don't even get a radio signal.
I still have a working VHS 📼 player and dozens of pre recorded movies which still play back really well.
Loved my water bed and heater.
In the uk many of the phones inside the kiosk have been replaced with defibrillators and some are used as a very small library or tourist information centre with local attraction leaflets etc available. The iconic “phone boxes” can be seen in private gardens as storage sheds but are still very common in small villages despite. Being up to 60 years old.
And some of the police boxes can even travel in time.
Once Police Boxes were Allover the place in UK but now very rare. There is a replica without doors in a seaside town called Scarborough and I saw one once after a wartime charity festival. I think it as only there for that though.
@@richardanderson5424theres quite a few in Glasgow stil, most notably on Buchanan Street.
Calculators, tennis shoe skates, bmx bicycles, action figures, the Game Keeper, Farell’s, roller rinks, STP, Smitty’s, Evil Knieval, Saturday Morning Cartoons…
Action figures? Stone Temple Pilots? Roller rinks? Wait, what? What year are you in? Are you from the future? Lol
I miss funny comic books like The Pink Panther, Beetle Bailey, Heckle And Jeckle, Mad magazine with Al Jaffee, Sergio Argones and Mort Drucker etc.
@@TitaniumTurbine STP is a fuel additive. It was marketed everywhere on TV. Let’s not forget beer and cigarette commercials.
I was surprised to see the 1988 Peterborough Yellow Pages shown, my first ever advert was in that directory. Paper maps essential for navigation in rural areas where there's no mobile phone service. Map reading and navigation skills are important, especially when things go wrong. You can't jam a compass or prevent the downloading of a map. I have paper maps of the area I live and surroundings but I also have the OS App. I can view and print maps for the whole of the UK and some other countries such as the US, it is excellent value for money.
I still have ....
- A walkman and its earbuds
- A collection of audio cassettes
- Yellow Pages 2009
- White Pages 2009
- VHS VCR
- Collection of VHS tapes
- My Blockbuster membership card
- 3.5" floppy disk drive on the shelf
- A collection of 3.5" floppy disks
(don't copy that floppy!)
- A smaller collection of 5.25" floppy disks
- A box of unused 8" floppy disks
- A Motorola pager in my memorabilia drawer
- A pile of dot matrix printer paper
(printer is long gone)
- There is a payphone just down my street, all calls are free
- a huge collection of paper maps and street directories
- a couple of smaller "boom boxes" one in my kitchen still used
- A newer 8mm digital camcorder in my cupboard
- Still visit the shopping malls when I am in Bangkok
You are an outdated grandpa
I have a De Lorean
Who pays for the "Free phone calls"?
@@chrisnalina1755 ... In 2021 Telstra, our national Australian phone carrier, made all calls to fixed line and mobile numbers as well as Wi-Fi hotspots at phone booths free. They pay the cost as a national service. From their website in 2023....
"Since mobiles became nearly universal, a lot of Australians might not give them much thought. Until there’s a natural disaster. Until you’re in vulnerable circumstances, homeless or fleeing domestic violence. That’s why two years ago, we made all local and national calls to standard fixed line numbers and calls to standard Australian mobiles on our public payphones free and followed this with free Wi-Fi across select enabled payphones.
Fast forward 24 months, and Australia’s payphones have become an essential lifeline for those in need.
Since the introduction of free calls, there have been a staggering over 40 million calls made, seeing demand more than double.
Across critical helplines is where we’ve seen some of the sharpest rises in calls, with key increases over the past 12-months.
Payphones are more than just a way to make a call. For Australians experiencing vulnerable circumstances, they are a lifeline. They provide a link to critical services, as well as essential connections with family and friends. We are seeing the importance of payphones grow more and more each year, and we're glad that we can provide this important lifeline during times it is needed most.
In addition to free payphone calls and texts, we now also have 3,300 payphones with free Wi-Fi access and are in works to make this service available across even more of our payphones.
We’re committed to helping keep one million Australians in vulnerable circumstances stay connected every year. For anyone seeking support, we offer a range of assistance options like our Top Up program in partnership with Infoxchange, flexible payment terms and long-term account holds to provide help when it’s needed most."
@@treatseaweed not being ghey doesn't make you outdated
Fax machines are still used. I've had to send a few faxs about a year ago. It's easier than scanning it into the computer, attaching it to an email, send it, then they have to print them out.
I want my MTV!
I like the fact that I own my cassette collection and vinal records. I paid for them and no one has the right to take them away from my home. And by the way with all the specialized tape formulations and versions of Dolby including HX Pro Cassette tapes played back on a great machine still sound darn good! And I mean really good! It's interesting to actually contrast todays technology, sound, with the best available in the 1970's & 80's. No digital compression and removal of sounds they think you do not hear! I have a Carver known as "The Receiver" and their is none better or even close today!
Nakamichi Dragon was one of the greats but to obtain the same standard in reliability & sound is very very expensive in the digital realm.
I have a walkman from the 1990s and it still works perfectly and is brilliant quality still 😎🤟
80s music was like a giant party every day. Awsome times.❤
In the early 80's, corporations had copy centers. Copy machines were deemed too expensive and complicated for the average employee to use. You had to fill out a request form and drop off your originals and pick up later.
Word processors. They bridged the gap between electric typewriters and PC based editors.
In industry, it amazed me how quickly old fashioned drafting centers disappeared. Once AutoCAD came along, a few CAD guys could do the work of a room full of draftsmen.
That was fun to watch. I kind of forgot about water beds.
Copy centers are still a thing
I remember turning in a college english report that was to be typed or written in ink. I submitted a dot-matrix printout to the instructor and she gave me an F for not following instructions. I appealed it, saying I did type it, but she wouldn't back down. I had to hand write it in ink. Sheesh. Still causes some heartburn to think of people with such limited thinking.
Word processing was a specialist job requiring specialist crew in the early 80s. Wang is to word processing as IBM is to computing. We knowledge workers do it by hand or by using a typewriter.
3:52 that's the EXACT Trapper Keeper I had!
On the floppy disc section - the one shown in this video are actually high density discs that were less “floppy” than the earlier generation of true floppy discs. The earliest gen floppy disc were 5.25 inches in size and were truly floppy as they can bend. They were only 360 kb…that’s right “kb”. There was a small notch on one side to indicate which side to insert the floppy disc into the drive. To double the storage, we would use a paper hole puncher and notch the opposite side which allows you to flip the disc to other side and data can be written to other side, doubling the capacity of that disc to 720 kb!
Actually the first floppy disks were 8 inches in size and introduced in the 1970s. They looked for the most part like 5.25" floppies but larger. I never got the reason for "single sided" floppies when the disc has magnetic coating on both sides, other than maybe one side being program storage from the software house, and the other side being writable storage for the user to save on (this side having the write notch). But blank "single sided" floppies never made any real sense.
@@plateshutoverlock I think it was to save money on the drives, as only one read/write head was needed. Also, although single sided floppies had magnetic coatings on both sides only one was certified to record data reliably - I think they may have been rejects from the double-sided testing process.
@@plateshutoverlockI have only seen those large floppies in a mainframe installation inside a computer center. Never handled one. By the time PC/XT came along, all are in 5.25in format.
I extensively used Walkmans, stereo cassette players, in 90s. My maternal uncle owned a VCP and I occasionally visited his house for a movie. It was a fantasy to watch a movie from a cassette tape! Today my day begins with a smartphone and it ends with a smartphone. Indeed we have come a long way!
It's pointed out to you on EVERY single one of these types of video that pagers and fax machines still exist to this day in certain very situational environments. (not just hobby historians which you could argue everything here is still used by someone if that were the case.)
I've no idea why it's taking so long to get the message through that these things are still in use in actual workplaces.
[edit] oh go on then. I've got to the end of your bit on fax's now. and you DO point out that they are still used situationally these days. So props for that.
Our library has a fax machine and they get many requests to use it.
You may be over thinking this whole thing a bit. Do you get outside very much?
@@roberthenry9319 Nope, not at all actually. I've not worked in 21 years and it takes me a 2 day run up to even go to the village shop for bread or milk. Your point?
Not used in the 80's, but Blackberry phones are also deemed obsolete these days.
It was astonishing to notice how quickly they fell out of favor around 2012.😮
A couple months ago, had to fax things to a government department, they do not take emails or mail, but fax only.
I still own a dual cassette tape stereo and a Sony Walkman and I still listen to some of my cassettes today
I used to think water beds were SOOO much fun. Then I slept over a friends that had one and that cured that desire for one lol.
I still use my VCR and watch my favorite old movies. It's also a DVD combo player. I also have a backup in case this one stops working.
I still have and use a VCR plus I still have and use my boombox not to mention my walkman.
Actually, VHS tapes and cassettes are making a comeback big time. I have never stopped using either.
no, they aren't.
I live right next to a mall. It certainly is not obsolete. Gets very crowded on weekends.
Depends on the mall and the area. I recently read, to my surprise, that, upscale malls are still hot real estate, despite the fact that average malls are dying.
@@CaseAgainstFaith1 maybe in US but certainly not in The Philippines where I live.
@@sureshmukhi2316 That explain everything. In the US many closed down and other are dying but in my country they are building new ones instead so bare in mind the video is made by someone referencing the US.
In my country we also never had water beds as a thing or the parachute pants.
@@SIPEROTH which country?
The challenge or problem faced by many malls is their anchor stores that closed up. Like Sears and such. No new huge companies to fill the space.
I use my VCR every day and the boombox, every Sunday when I listen to polka music and I search goodwill for used tapes
Since Google algorithms make it nearly impossible to find local businesses the Yellow Pages have become more useful.
Ahem, you better google for " next to ".
Well then youre old and can't adapt.....what are you talking about
@@kylekurtz6630Looking at yellow pages you immediately saw all rhe plumbers in yiur area. Searching online you run in circles of the 3 names that paid most to be on top
@@kylekurtz6630 when you're young and have no idea what you're talking about.
Uh huh.
The Walkman didn't have "speed regulation" on the electric motor that pulled the magnetic tape past the "read" head. When the song you were listening to played a LOUD moment, the power devoted to the speaker would be "robbed" from the electric motor, so the motor would slow down (and so would the tempo of the recorded song.)
I never owned a walkman, nor desired one. I listen to music at home...if I want to hear it outdoors then back in the day I'd have taken along a transistor radio, not something I'd need headphones for. Later (after 1980) I'd take along a boombox. Just never wanted to be encumbered with headphones. We still get sent a phone book every year, but I'd be hard pressed to remember the last time I used one.
I kept mine for starting fires - when I used to camp.
And we all really do care about what your needs are, Rebel.
@@roberthenry9319 Why, I'm doing quite well, thank you for asking and I hope you have a lovely day today :)
Loved the 80s. Miss the 80s. Give me a time machine I'd go back today...
Home computers (as in non-x86 computers not made by apple), such as Tandys, Commodores, ZX Spectrum. IBM PC compatibles were pretty expensive and these provided a cheap alternative that was good enough back then
Amstrad 464cpc
That screaming loading noise 😊
And then sometimes at the end the screen would go blank 😂
@@vitorsousa8172 in the case of the zx spectrum, it'd show 'R tape loading error' ..aaarrghh 😜
@@vitorsousa8172PC/XT without a hard drive uses a dual disk system. Drive A for the OS e.g. DOS 2.1 and Drive B for data working within a RAM of 512-640k. Yes, there is a noise as the OS loads.
They should ditch streaming services altogether and bring back rental stores so people can get out and socialize
All the tech has made people less social because we can use phones for everything
@@GS-zv3qn I know. That's the problem. I was born in 1992 and I still believe in social interaction being the best option. I am what you call "Old School" but maybe evolution isn't everything and maybe we were at our technological peak in the 1990s. Who knows 🤨🤔🧐
They don't want that, you will own nothing and be happy remember?
I disagree. Streaming services brought us extreme high quality television series like for example Sopranos and game of thrones. TV series now have feature film quality only because of the streaming services. But while I say this it also pops in my head that movies have become the worst ever the last 10 years. I guess that might also be influenced by streaming services because movie companies take no creative risks anymore. All playing it safe. Oh well it are all just phases :)
@@computerjantje I've seen the stuff the streaming services have made and they're absolutely appalling
I miss going to find movies to watch at the video rental place.
Is it just me or was some of this more 1990s.
It's just you! I experienced everything in this video in the 80's!
My 80's JVC ghetto blaster was so big I had to attach a guitar strap to it when taking it up town at night, also I had a stand up programmable record player at home. Ps, the 'hard drive' of my ZX81 computer was a cassette tape lol.
VHS & VCRs?
VHS, was one of two formats of VCR (Video Cassette Recorder).
The other was Betamax.
Yes, there were others, like VHS-C & Hi8, etc... But those were made for camcorders, not VCRs...
one other, at least in europe was the philips/grundig video 2000s, it had a flip over tape like audio cassettes
MS-DOS was a true 80's phenomenon. Every PC ran MS-DOS and we just started running Windows on top of MS-DOS very late in the 80's.
Walmart had Trapper Keepers out last year for the school stuff.
A lot of this stuff was part of my life as a kid. I remember not wanting to move onto cds due to the paranoia of something new figured they would scratch easily. Saw the cassette section get smaller and smaller til I didn’t have a choice to upgrade
I remember when I used to laugh at Daisy Wheel printers. Like the one included with the Coleco Adam.
I still have and use my AM/FM portable radio, Technics turntable, cassette deck and Radio Shack Mixer.
Radio Shack! The go-to place for anything even remotely electronic. Originally they were staffed by electronics nerds who could help you with anything. I loved the place. My first computer was a TRS-80.
But there is no more Radio Shack.
7:15 THOSE weren't floppy discs! Actual floppies were a pain: 8" or 5" discs as sturdy as old Polaroids & had gaps in the case exposing the actual magnetic discs you had to avoid putting fingers on or risk ruining the data. The later ones with small hard cases & metal tab-covers were properly "disk cartridges".
They were 5 and 1/4 in:-) but people still called the three and a half inch discs floppy disks just as a carryover term from the original 5 1/4 inch discs
Everyone just called the floppy disc though so it doesn't matter what the official name was.
Anyone in the industry back then referred to them as diskettes.
Some people still collect TV's with the cathode ray tube. VCR's are still useful so you have something to watch on those collectable TV's. As for Cassette tape it is still one of the best recording/sharing mediums to get your music out if you are a new or young musician. Some of the so called obsolete technologies may yet make a comeback. Especially sound recording and playback technologies so I suggest being careful when using the word obsolete.
I have a lot of cassettes and a way to play them. I wish I knew where my CD Walkman went to.
That would be a Discman.
I miss movie drive-ins. 😢
Dot matrix printers still exist. Usefull for multi-part papers.
Where I work, all our invoices are printed on dot matrix printers.
And pranks like what happened at Pepperdine: a clever dan taped together several cases of edge spooled continuous feed perfed paper and let the printer/computer rip all weekend... trying to calculate pi. I don't recall how many decimal points it went to before it got shut down.
Yep. Conrad’s Total Car Care, a Cleveland based auto care company with over 30 locations, still use dot matrix printers for their invoices. Love that sound. It’s very useful for carbon copying the invoice so that the customer’s signature is on both the customer’s and store’s copies of the same exact invoice.
@@hendie3rd many still use dot matrix so it's not going to be obsolete for at least 10 more years.
@@sureshmukhi2316 all modern printers are still dot matrix, they print an, er , 'matrix' of dots, what the video means is 'impact printers',
I remember going to Blockbuster on a Tuesday night to take advantage of the weekly deal … two overnight and five weekly rentals for $10 … those were the days my friend!
up till 2019 the military was still using the 5.25" floppy.
They prob still use windows ‘95 😂
Our huge flight simulator facility had 12-inch floppies. It also had a disk drive that had about a dozen disks on a common shaft and it was so heavy it took both hands to pull it out of its reader. The keyboards weren't electric, they used puffs of air. They had to be cleaned because the operators smoked and the passages would get blocked. You can imagine how the operators' lungs looked like.
@@tpike32Microsoft finally got Windows '95 to work?
Our military?
Probably in ICBM sites, prevent hacker access.
dont agree with the VCR... i still have mine and still use it, most films that where first available on VCR but then went to DVD sometimes lost parts from being edited, if you want to see a film as originally intended then have the VCR version
I have a king size water bed in my house.
I've got a California King. I've had waterbeds for over 40 years. Can't sleep on anything else.
20 years a water bed owner. Love it.
I have a queen in my guest suite. It was my bed before I moved put of parents house.
@@KreemieNewgatt
I have 2 cats. Get a thicker blanket or a comforter. 👍
As a teen I had a queen. Bought a king but wouldn't fitt. I loved it.
I recommend that you have a paper map traveling through Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Electronic mapping media will send you down wrong routes, inappropriate routes, and 2/3 of the area has no access to cell service.
I don't see how paper maps are considered an 80s thing; there's no contemporary tech involved. They've been around since, uh... Magellan??