I was chatting to a fellow collegue about the old days when my dad brought home a top loading ferguson videostar Video recorder in the late seventys.
It was £800 and had a wired remote control and 1 free 1hr video tape in the box! (which cost about £15.00 then)
My mate had a Grundig video 2000 machine and a Grundig TV with a ULTRA SONIC remote. My niegbour had a tv with feather touch channel change but no remote.

The reason for this nostalgia was my mate wants a VHS video i told him i could get him a Panasonic NV-HV60EBS With NICAM stereo SP/LP/EP 4 head,external link ,videoplus ,PDC, OSD, NTSC playback on PAL TV ,35X jet search ,60 sec rewind of 3HR tape,Twin Scart sockets etc For £89.95 his reply was i didnt want to spend that much!!
anyone got any nostalgic stories?

i remember (early 70's) when my brother bought his first calculator, +-×÷, no memory, the size of a paperback, cost him well over $200. two years later i bought one with four functions plus memory, size of a deck of cards, for about $75. less than a year later i bought my girlfriend one for about $15.

today this basic type of calc is given away as a promo, can be found the size and thickness of a credit card (or smaller & thinner...even flexible/roll-up), as part of watches, pens, phones, clipboards, bookmarks & etc, ad naseum.

any weird places you've seen a calculator?

How about in a pack of matches?

I loved the look of the red display digital watches of the seventys that only lit up when you pressed a button otherwise the battery would be dead in five minutes (hey that sounds like a pronto NG on ordinary batts ;)!).The build quality of those early calculators was brill.

i had a pocket watch like that in high school. you'd push the button to open it up to a shiny black face, push it again and the red numbers would glow for about 15 seconds..........but, you're right....they sucked down batteries big time!!!

Talking of calculators, only last night I was talking to a young fellow at work, relating the tale of my old electronics tutor.

Yep, back in the early 70's*, when I were a wee lad at college, he would spatter the board with equations/formulas and then get out his 6" slide rule to solve them. He was convinced they would never be able to produce a calculator that would replicate all it's functions.

Amazing to think that today there's as much, if not more, computing power in your average scientific calculator, than was available to man on the moon.

*Bibble, Bobble. I was there when Hereford United beat Newcastle.

About 30 years ago, I was rumaging through the basement of the company that I worked for and came across one of their original electric adding machines. Now this was a "machine". We plugged it in, and it actually worked, and printed out a tape, it was probably circia 1930 or something. It took two people to lift and came with its own stand because it had a half horsepower electric motor hanging underneith it, so it would not fit on a table. A real monster but it could only add and subtract.

I also remember in the 1960's, going to a lumber yard where they used Frieden (sp) calculators. These were facinating machines to watch. They could add, subtract, multiply and divide using a motor and an all mechanical movement. They did not print a tape but displayed numbers on wheels on a moving carriage not unlike a typewriter carriage. To do a multiplication or division the machine would whir and the carriage would move back and forward untill it completed the calculation, then the operator would write down the result.

Question: Does anyone remember the "Comptometer" and what it does?

What about Intellivision: http://www.intellivisionlives.com/ and my father tells me tales of these things call 8-tracks, he said that they can be found in the Smithsonian now.

LET ME AT HIM, I'LL HIT'EM WITH MY CANE!!

.........i got a rock!!!!

"Rock on Tommy!"

If you don't like the way I drive, KEEP OFF THE SIDEWALK!

I remember when I was like 7, my father bought a new fangled device called a VCR, it was top loading and had a 20ft wired remote control, we thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then he got a camcorder where he actually had to "wear" the VCR over his shoulder that was seperate from the actual camera. I also remember back in 88 I got a portable CD player, I remember that my grandmother thought that the CD's were actually some kind of wierd mirror, as a matter of fact I think she still does. These are my earliest memories of "state-of-the-art" electronics.

The first portable CD player i sold was a Technics metal cased unit with inline volume it sold for £449.99! Anyone remember DCC ?