I love this animated GIF from three frames.
It is from the movie, Playtime, which was released in 1967 in France. I love seeing all the old cars and buses moving around the traffic circle. That’s the beauty of old movies. They’re a glimpse of the gadgetry of days gone by.
This old Buick was parked in our neighborhood the other day, so I had to snap some photos of it because it looks so good!
You can see ALL the photos here:
I love the design of the Ericofon.
It was designed by a team working for Ericsson back in the 1940’s. The design is so beautiful and unique that it is featured in the Museum of Modern Art.
Links about the Ericofon:
It’s surprising to me that this phone was designed over sixty years ago. It is obvious that the “brick” cell phones were based on this design, so it was years ahead of its time.
I love this old advertisement comparing the old Volkswagen bug to the bus.
It reads:
That’s about the size of it.
That special paint job is to make it perfectly clear that our Station Wagon is only nine inches longer than our Sedan. Yet it carries almost 1 ton of anything you like. [About twice as much as you can get into wagons that are 4 feet longer.]
Or eight solid citizens with luggage.
Or countless kids with kids stuff.
The things you never think about are worth thinking about, too. You never worry about freezing or boiling; the rear engine is air-cooled. You can expect about 24 miles per gallon and about 30,000 miles on your tires. And you can forget about going out of style next year; next year’s model will look the same.
The most expensive VW Station Wagon costs $2,655. It comes in red and white or grey and white or green and white.
And you won’t ever have to go around painting sedans on it to show how small it is. Just Park.
Right now, I really wish a company would adopt the Volkswagen company model. The cars are the same every year for decades, allowing me to fix my 2009 car as easily as the 2020 car. They brag about their gas mileage, small size and practicality, not their luxury, massive size or status symbol.
I froze and boiled in my old VW bug. It failed me on numerous occasions, dropping parts on the road as easily as birds drop feathers. I was grateful to have a new car when I finally stopped driving my old beetle, but it was a twenty year old car by then. I want a car company like Volkswagen used to be, because the new VW isn’t like it at all.
Advert via: vintage_ads:
Update 08-14-09: Here is another VW Bus ad that was good.
I was looking through some of my old files the other day and I found this advertisement for the Yamaha DX100 Synthesizer.
It reads:
It has two wheels, two sources of power and can go from 0 to 192 in just one shift. But instead of riding it, you strap it over your shoulder. Because this machine is so powerful, it can take you places just standing still.
The DX100 synthesizer.
Anything’s possible.
Yamaha
This advertisement happened to be on the back of a Swatch ad that I have kept for the last twenty years. I always thought it was an advert for a motorcycle, considering the helmet and all. I never read the copy on the ad until a couple of days ago.
What in the $#*@ were they talking about?
They are talking about a synthesizer that looks like this:
The DX-100 is a small and portable budget DX synthesizer from Yamaha. Like all DX’s it uses (FM) Frequency Modulation synthesis. It’s not the easiest form of synthesis to program but can result in some excellent sounds. The DX100 is not as flexible nor powerful as a DX7, but it does have some cool sounds. It is most renowned for its great analog bass sound (Patch #01) that is awesome for techno, house, jungle, and acid music styles; it’s very gritty, the bass tone with gristle! However, any other preset sounds that you’ll find in the DX-100 are pretty bad and require editing for anything else useable.
The DX-100 has mini-keys and only 49 of them. No filters, arpeggiators, effects or programmable controllers are available either. Small pitch and mod wheels in the upper left and guitar strap pegs make this synth usable for live use if you’re feeling whimsical. If you mess around with the settings on Parameter 13, even if you don’t know anything about FM, you can get some seriously twisted sounds out of it. If you’re willing to spend a little time with it, it has a lot more potential than just that one bass sound that people will eventually get sick of. And at its currently low street price, it just might be worth getting. It is used by Orbital, Scanner, Jean-Michel Jarre, Autechre, Laurent Garnier, and countless other house and dance artists.
All the talk about wheels and power and shifting are “funny” double-entendres comparing music gear with motorcycles. Considering that this ad was run in Seventeen magazine, it was a complete waste of money for Yamaha.
For fun, here’s a video of a guy jamming on a Yamaha DX100:
The Yamaha DX100 is one of the more beloved of the old synthesizers from the Eighties and you can find them selling on eBay anywhere from $400 to $150 for working models. Even a broken DX100 will earn the owner fifty bucks. In fact, this ad itself is something of a collector’s item, so feel free to click on over to Flickr and download the full size if you want to print it up and put it on your wall with the rest of your Yamaha memorabilia.
Our old neighbor, Lisa, just remodeled her kitchen. When we heard about it, both NakedJen and I were wondering what happened to her beautiful old pink oven. Fortunately, Lisa was smart enough to keep it. While we looked at her lovely new kitchen, we also took the time to take some photos of her old Frigidaire. Here are the photos:
The cool thing about this oven is that it is meant to be built into the wall at body level. The doors open out like a refrigerator to reveal a fairly small oven.
I love how the dark color of the knobs contrast with the light pink color. This oven was made during that time when you coordinated your appliances with your color scheme. Instead of only a choice of white, black or stainless steel, you had a rainbow of colors to choose from.
This timer is PERFECT and I trust timers like this so much more than the digital ones on my current oven (mostly because they are easier to set).
Lisa plans on selling her oven on eBay, so, if you like it, keep an eye out there for it.
A few months ago, I talked about the Wham-O Fun Fountain. It had been one of our favorite toys of all time.
If you are unfamiliar with the toy, here is a commercial describing it:
With summer finally here, I’m wishing for a Fun Fountain, or something else to cool off my days.
In that entry, I had mentioned that we used the clown hat for every kind of dress up play. After months of searching, I finally found a picture of Stacey, my sister, with the Fun Fountain clown hat on. It was held on her head by some yarn passed through the holes on the sides of the hat where the water splashed out. We had a parade on our street that day, so I dressed up Stacey like a clown. She looks adorable, doesn’t she? (Click on the photo to see it full size)
It’s funny how versatile toys can be. I don’t think the Wham-O people ever thought that we would be using their toy all year round for sprinkler fun AND dress up play. The same toy can function in many different aspects of our play life, none of which were conceived of by the manufacturer.
We make our gadgets our own by the way that we use them, with or without the permission of the manufacturer.
As if talking teddy bears weren’t creepy enough, My Home 2.0 DIY has made a Teddy Ruxpin be able to speak the tweets of your friends. Here is a video showing how they did it:
This appears to be a viral marketing video for Verizon, but it doesn’t make it any less cool.
My favorite Palm I ever owned was the Tapwave Zodiac.
A full two years before the release of the Sony PSP, the Zodiac looked like it could be the perfect gaming platform. If only the game manufacturers wrote games for the Palm, the Zodiac would have had a HUGE jumpstart on both the PSP and the Nintendo DS. The only games I saw available for the Zodiac was Duke Nukem and Atari’s Adventure, but apparently there were a bunch of others: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4; Mototrax; Spyhunter; Madden NFL 2005; DOOM II; and Warfare Incorporated.
Not only was it a good gaming machine, it had EXCELLENT video conversion to play videos. Before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Job’s eye, I was watching bit torrented episodes of television on my Zodiac during my lunch break every day at work. I could also listen to MP3s using their media player. When my Zodiac finally had to be sold, I truly missed the media capabilities it had and was frustrated to no end that I couldn’t recreate that experience with my Palm Treo.
Of course, the Zodiac had all the normal Palm capabilities that any other Palm device had at the time, so there was a calendar, contact manager, notes and to-do list. I loved that I could do everything that my old Palm used to do AND watch videos on it. It wasn’t until I bought my iPhone four years later that I FINALLY was able to have the same capabilities as I had with the Zodiac.
Sadly, Tapwave had serious problems. Not only did they discontinue the Zodiac in 2005, but they also stopped supporting their warranties on their older models. I had severe problems with the directional pad on my first Zodiac. I sent it in to be repaired. It took several months to come back to me. We feared that we might never get it back because the company seemed to be going out of business. When it finally returned, we sold the returned model.
It came with all this stuff:
I loved my Zodiac and I wish Tapwave could have survived long enough to become a dominating company in the gaming market instead of a fond memory and a footnote.
NakedJen and I made an incredible find at The DI last March. It was the Halliwell Rapid-Aire Hair Dryer!
The best part was that it was in FULL working order. If you look closely, you can see that the bottom part folds out like a Lazy-Z-Boy lounger (the handle for it is on the right).
I LOVE the font on this.
NakedJen ended up buying this hair dryer and we lugged it home in the Prius (it easily fit, but it was HEAVY to put in there). She wrote about it here:
You can see all my photos here:
Powered by WordPress
(c) 2003-2017 Michael Moncur, Laura Moncur, Matthew Strebe, and The Gadgets Page