The Gadgets Page

I love this little television set from Sharp. It looks so Space Age!

When I was a kid, we had a portable television. Sometimes Carol would take it with her in the car. I remember her picking me up from school when I had to stay late and she had the portable TV in the car, watching it while she waited for me to finish with my after school activities.

Now, we can watch a myriad of shows on our cell phones while we wait in line at the grocery store or take walks in the park. It all reminds me of this Benny Hill song so long ago:

I’d like to take her portable TV set and throw it in the deep blue sea.
Why I’m so jealous of her portable TV set because it takes her mind off me.

Being able to take technology with us wherever we go is very helpful. I no longer have to be at my computer in order to answer my email. I no longer have to be at the stereo to listen to music. And I no longer have to be in my living room in order to watch TV. With great power, comes great responsibility. Use your portable television set wisely.

The science fiction blog, io9 had a great entry:

• io9 – My First Microchip

They listed the computer embedded toys of the early Eighties, including: Speak & Spell, Simon and Teddy Ruxpin. They forgot MY first microchip, however.

Merlin The Electronic Wizard

Merlin was a handheld game that had six different games:

1. Tic Tac Toe
2. Music Machine: A rudimentary synthesizer. The first electronic music I ever made was on a Merlin.
3. Echo, a game similar to Simon
4. Blackjack 13
5. Magic Square, a pattern game similar to Lights Out
6. Mindbender, a game similar to Mastermind

I played with Merlin for hours. Here is a family photo of my dad playing with my Merlin. He loved that toy as much as I did. That was actually a very geeky holiday year. My sister got a Raggedy Ann radio that allowed you to talk into a microphone and broadcast your voice. God, I loved that toy. You can see all of us playing with those toys here:

• Merlin The Electronic Wizard – a set on Flickr

In fact, Merlin was the dawn of the casual gaming market. I could pick up Merlin, play a couple games of Mindbender and then put it down. It predated the GameBoy by almost a decade.

I still have my old Merlin in a box in the basement. Amazingly, it still works with fresh batteries and I can play all my old games just as well as I could back on New Year’s Day in 1980.

Here is an old commercial showing how Merlin was played:

Ward Jenkins scanned in this lovely and informative booklet about Kodak Ektachrome film from 1955.

• The Ward-O-Matic: Kodak Ektachrome booklet from 1955

After looking through the pages, I remembered how irritatingly difficult photography was for me before my first digital camera. The photos I took wouldn’t be seen for days or months after I shot them. That left me with such a delay of feedback that I never got any better at photography. It wasn’t until my first digital camera that I started to get better: no more cut off heads or meaty fingers over the lens.

Film was the biggest drawback to photography for me. I constantly had to decide whether each thing was film-worthy or not. Now that I’m on digital, I am a Photography Cowboy. I shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out. Okay, God doesn’t sort my oceans of files, but iPhoto is the next best thing.

I’m so grateful for the digital photography era. Reading through that Kodak booklet made that crystal clear for me again.

Someone scanned in this postcard from 1965:

It reads:

Manufacturer of the world’s finest personal telephone answering systems, designed to fit any of your personal or business needs.

Manufactured by Robosonics Incorporated.

The postcard was mailed to Tel-Tek Electronics at 2801 NW EXPY in Oklahoma City. The copyright date on the postcard is 1965. If you notice the touch tone phone doesn’t have pound (#) or asterisk (*) buttons, so it must have been one of the first touch tone phones.

When we were first married, Michael and I owned a Panasonic answering machine that used full sized cassette tapes for the outgoing and incoming messages. We could listen to our messages by calling our home number and punching in the secret code followed by the “splat” button (*).

It took us YEARS of not having a telephone land line to get out of the habit of checking messages. We would be at a hotel room in Vegas and I can remember Mike saying, “I just can’t get used to not having to check messages.” Sometimes our parents don’t even realize that we are out of town because they call us on our cell phones, we talk, answer questions and make plans for our next familial visit without mentioning that we don’t happen to be in Salt Lake City right now.

It’s amazing to me how much technology can change our lives. I went from having no answering machine in my childhood home to being a slave to one as a young adult to carrying my phone around with me wherever I go and with each change, I had to adapt to it.

In 1965, the answering machine was a new gadget that was rarely used and took up more space than the Los Angeles phone book on a table. Now, every single one of us have voice mail on our cell phones in our pockets. Hurray for progress!

When we visited my grandma in Wisconsin, Stacey and I were enthralled with her automatic card shuffler. We found it in the hall closet of her house. It was a gadget that she had bought long before and never used anymore. It looked exactly like the one in this video, right down the the gold foil and imprints of the card suits on the side.

What is missing from this video is the sound of two girls laughing hysterically each time it shuffled the cards. I think Stacey was three years old that trip and I would put the cards in machine and let her push the button. She would squeal and laugh, which would make me laugh.

We were a family that played ALOT of pinochle, so Stacey and I were able to shuffle cards by hand from the age of five, so the idea of a machine to shuffle cards was funny to us. It was so much easier for me to shuffle the cards WITHOUT the machine, that it seemed like such a fantastical gadget to even exist.

Card shufflers are still made and sold today and look remarkably similar. Here is one made by Bicycle:

• Bicycle Automatic Card Shuffler at Amazon.com

For a little over ten dollars, you can get a machine that doesn’t actually shuffle cards any better than you could do yourself by hand. In fact, the shuffler was so exact that it just took one card from each side of the machine. The randomness of hand shuffling is actually BETTER for mixing up the cards, and my hands don’t require batteries.

If you need to entertain two young girls, however, the automatic card shuffler just might be the trick.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike and I went on a trip to Yellowstone. We stayed in West Yellowstone, and some of the hotels there were quite old. I snapped a photo of an old motel sign, advertising that every room had a color television by RCA.

This is not a unique sign. If you do a simple search on Flickr, you’ll find hundreds of hotel signs with the same RCA advertisement.

• Flickr Search: Color TV by RCA

These signs must have subsidized hotels somehow. Did RCA provide free or discounted television sets to motels that proudly displayed these signs? Maybe the hotel owners actually had to PAY to advertise for RCA just to compete. In the Fifties and Sixties, families saw the U.S.A. in their Chevrolets and they all had to sleep somewhere. Holiday Inn had first dibs, but I’m sure a hotel with the sign, “Color TV by RCA” was a good second choice.

Now, hotels and motels are quick to announce that they have free wi-fi or free high speed Internet. They are doing the same thing as they did fifty years ago to compete, just using a different gadget. When you plan your summer trip this year, remember the Color TV by RCA sign and laugh at the hotels that won’t give you Internet access without charging you ten bucks a day.

I love this photo from Darth Bengal.

I can just imagine what was said before the photograph was taken.

Dick and Baby Judy, go over and stand by the new refrigerator. I want to get a picture!

Imagine being so proud of your new fridge that you want to take a photo of it. That’s how it used to be. Maybe they had some old ice box from way back when and when that photo was taken, they were FINALLY able to have a REAL fridge.

A few weeks ago, I retweeted a message in Twitter about unboxing photos. I have never really understood unboxing photos. They are just pictures of someone opening the box to their new toy. What’s the fun in that?

The fun in that is GRATITUDE. When people are so excited about their gadget that they take photos of it while they are taking it out of the box, they are GRATEFUL for the toy they just got. It’s the same reason people take pictures of themselves next to their cars.

This HotPoint Refrigerator was a LOVED gadget. So valued that it was included in the family photos. THAT’S gratitude.

The ever-exuberant NakedJen gave me this awesome retro Vibramassager for my birthday this year!

I sometimes forget how OLD vibrator technology is. This item doesn’t have a date on it, but the font alone just screams early sixties.

For more information on the history of vibrators:

• A history of the vibrator. – By Teresa Riordan – Slate Magazine

I found an ad for a top-loading portable dishwasher from Kitchen Aid on Flickr. You can see the full ad here:

• Kitchen Aid Dishwasher Ad on Flickr

I understand the appeal of top-loading because there is no way that water can leak and spill all over your kitchen floor. Anyone who has had a dishwasher with that problem understands the desire to contain that potential mess.

The CAPACITY, however is so low! Imagine only being able to wash ten plates and six glasses! No pots or pans, just service for six (or so).

I’m sure that front loading dishwashers came into existence so they could be installed under counters, not because of their limited dish capacity. They must have been around for only a short amount of time, because I’ve never seen a top-loading dishwasher in my life. Honestly, I’ve only ever seen two portable dishwashers, period.

What was once a “fashion” or a luxury, has now become a housing staple. My first apartment didn’t have a dishwasher, but I’m sure it does now. It surprises me how quickly gadgets advance within one lifetime.

Mom needed a heating pad, so she went downstairs to borrow Carol’s. When I saw what was in her hands, I attacked her so I could take photos of it.

Based on the illustrated sun on the box, it looks like it was bought in the 60’s or 70’s. Back then, it only cost $4.95 at Grand Central.

Heating pads haven’t changed over the years. This design is very similar to the one I have under my bed right now.

It’s surprising to me how some gadgets can last so long while others become obsolete and unusable after a short amount of time. Long after we die, our heating pads can still warm the backs of our children.

You can see all the photos here:

• Carol’s Retro Heating Pad – a set on Flickr