Self-Service Tube Tester
Household electronics have become as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper in recent years. If your flat screen television stops working, it’s usually just as cheap to buy a new one as to have the old one repaired. But 30-plus years ago when a TV went on the fritz you called the TV Repair Man. He was so ubiquitous that he made house calls, but his services were expensive. Since a good percentage of the TV malfunctions back then were due to malfunctioning vacuum tubes, DIY Dads started diagnosing and replacing the tubes on their own, saving both time and money. Almost every drugstore, hardware store, and even grocery store had a self-service tube testing machine stashed among the gumball and cigarette machines. I remember well my own Dad taking whichever tubes he thought suspect and testing them on the machine to see whether they were functional. If the tube in question was kaput, there was a wide selection of brand new tubes stocked in the cabinet underneath the machine available for purchase, the TV was soon back in service without need of the repairman.
45 RPM Adapters
Seven-inch singles produced in the US had a large half-dollar size hole in the center, unlike the tiny hole punched in LPs that fit conveniently onto a turntable spindle. This large hole tradition was originally instituted in order to accommodate the mechanism inside a jukebox. Rather than making a separate version for home use, the simple solution was to sell adapters that popped into the center of a 45, making it playable on a standard record player. These gadgets were usually found in a bin near the checkout at every record store, a dozen or so for a dollar.
Skate Key
Those good old-fashioned metal roller skates that strapped onto your shoes were useless if you didn’t have a skate key on hand to adjust them. The hexagonal loop on top was used to turn the bolt that adjusted the length of the skate and the tubular end fit on the pin that tightened the toe grips. The long narrow hole in the middle? Why, that was for stringing a shoelace through so you could wear the key around your neck while skating.
Fotomat Booth
Many of the abandoned huts still frequent the parking lots of older shopping malls across the country. Some of them have been re-purposed, but let’s face it, there’s not much you can do with a form-fitting booth situated miles from the nearest bathroom. Back when cameras still used actual film, and before drugstores offered one hour photo developing, Fotomat was the convenient method of getting your pictures back within 24 hours. You didn’t even have to get out of your car.
Church Key
Many a barbecue and tailgate party was ruined in the pre-pop top days when it was discovered that no one had remembered to bring a church key to the proceedings. The pointy end punctured beer (and soda pop) cans open – one hole for pouring, one for a vent. The rounded end was used to remove bottle caps – twist-
off crown caps weren’t invented until the 1960s, and even then it took some years for breweries to start using them on their products. But then again, most veteran party animals of that era knew how to open a beer bottle on a car bumper or table edge in an emergency.
Pull Tabs
In between cans requiring a church key and today’s pop tops there were pull tab soda and beer cans. The convenience of not requiring an opener was revolutionary, but the innovation came with a downfall: a new type of litter. Instead of disposing of their pull tabs responsibly, many folks simply discarded them on the ground before chugging away. Walking barefoot on the beach in the 1960s and ’70s was often something of an obstacle course; those tabs weren’t always immediately visible, but they were razor-sharp, and savvy sunbathers included Band-Aids in their picnic baskets for the inevitable sliced toe.
Car Window Wings
At one time this small triangular window was standard equipment
on every American automobile. Some folks called it the “no-draft” (its official name), some called it the “vent,” and others called it the “wing.” Whatever the name, the purpose was the same: in those days when air conditioning was a very expensive option and opening the main driver side and passenger windows caused too much turbulence (not to mention noise) the no-draft provided quiet yet efficient air circulation while driving during warm weather.
S&H Greenstamps
Trading stamps were once, all the rage, and S&H Green Stamps led the pack. Pasting Green Stamps into books was how families spent their evenings before scratch-off lottery tickets were invented, and unlike the lottery, Green Stamp premiums were within reach if you purchased enough groceries or gasoline. The “We Give Green Stamps” enticement was a major boon for merchants; there were many
consumers who decided “where to buy” solely on the basis of Green Stamp giveaway. And the rewards were great. Your average Green Stamp redemption center had everything from home appliances to musical instruments to furniture available if you’d filled out the right amount of books of stamps.
Typewriter Erasers
Once a major piece of equipment in the arsenal of office supplies, the typewriter eraser is now as obsolete as the typewriter itself. No matter how accomplished a typist one was, mistakes and typos still happened, and the eraser that would remove the error and brush away its evidence was a necessity to every office employee, college term paper typist, or whatever.
Slide Rule
I remember too well the once ubiquitous slide rule. The aid to, or bane of, every high school higher math student. This pre-calculator purveyor of mathematic computation was cumbersome to use, difficult to use, and so cool in its pastiche that it was often carried about just to let other know how cool we were who knew how to use one. I’m not even sure if they teach how to use one anymore, and with all of the cheap, accurate, and dedicated scientific calculators available, I can’t think of a reason why anyone would still want one. But my old slide rule still resides in a drawer in my den, untouched and unused for 45 years, and there it will undoubtedly remain.
Eight Track Tape
Stereo 8, commonly known as the eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, or simply eight-track, is a magnetic tape sound recording technology. It was popular in the United States from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, but was relatively unknown in many European countries. Stereo 8 was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear of Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records (RCA). It was a further development of the similar Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge created by Earl “Madman” Muntz. A later quadraphonic version of the format was announced by RCA in April 1970 and first known as Quad-8, then later changed to just Q8. In the U.S., eight-track cartridges were phased out of retail stores by late 1982. Some titles were still available as eight-track tapes through Columbia House and RCA (BMG) Music Service Record Clubs until late 1988.
Floppy Disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles. They are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch media and later in 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch sizes, were an ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s well into the first decade of the 21st century. By 2010, computer motherboards were rarely manufactured with floppy drive support. While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been rendered largely obsolete by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, portable external hard disk drives, optical discs, memory cards, and computer networks.
Slide Projector
A slide projector is an opto-mechanical device to view photographic slides. Slide projectors were common in the 1950s to the 1970s as a form of entertainment; family members and friends would gather to view slide shows. In-home photographic slides and slide projectors have largely been replaced by low cost paper prints, digital cameras, DVD media, video display monitors, and video projectors.
It is also increasingly difficult in some countries to locate photo processors who will process slide film. Several manufacturers have stopped production of slide projectors, as well as slide film.
Rotary Dial Phone
The rotary dial is a device mounted on or in a telephone or switchboard that is designed to send electrical pulses, known as pulse dialing, corresponding to the number dialed. The early form of the rotary dial used lugs on a finger plate instead of holes. Almon Brown Strowger filed the first patent for a rotary dial, U.S. patent#486,909, on December 21, 1891 that was later issued to him on November 29, 1892. The modern version of the rotary dial with holes was first introduced in 1904 but did not enter service in the Bell System until 1919. The rotary dial was gradually replaced by Dual-tone multi-frequency pushbutton dialing, introduced at the 1962 World’s Fair, which used a keypad instead of a dial. Some telephone systems in the US no longer recognize rotary dialing by default, but will only support push-button phones.
spydersden 