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1954, Regency TR-1 : The Regency took radio out of the parlor and put it in your pocket. Jointly produced by Texas Instruments and TV accessory manufacturer IDEA, the TR-1 was the first consumer device to employ transistors. The $50 item didn't sell well--Sony did much better with a similar product a couple of years later--but it inspired a host of imitators, which in turn helped popularize a then-obscure genre of music known as rock and roll. If not for transistor radio, nobody would have been dancin' in the streets. 
1956, Zenith Space Command: The first widely used TV remote control had four buttons (power, volume, channel up, channel down) but no batteries; press a button, and a tiny hammer inside the remote would strike an aluminum rod, transmitting an ultrahigh-frequency tone to control the set. The Space Command ruled the living room for more than 25 years before being replaced by remotes using infrared technology. And thus a nation of couch potatoes was born.
*1963, Kodak Instamatic 100: The marvel of this $15.95 camera was its easy loading system. Kodak wanted to eliminate amateur errors and make photography foolproof. To do this, the company put the film for this camera--and its successors--into a plastic cartridge. The user could pop the cartridge in and out, and not worry about exposing the film to light or misaligning it so that it wouldn't advance. To illuminate the subject, you placed a flashbulb in a little compartment on the camera's top that popped open. The 
camera was hugely popular: It is estimated that tens of millions of Instamatic-type cameras were sold.
1965, Learjet Stereo-8: They're the butt of jokes these days, but 8-track tapes and decks changed car audio forever. The Stereo 8, which first appeared as an option on Fords, had minimal controls and was often mounted under the dashboard with ugly U-brackets, but aesthetics weren't the point. With an 8-track in your car, you were no longer at the mercy of local radio station playlists. That was a very big deal at a time when only the largest cities had stations that played what was then known as "album rock." And the sound! In those days 8-tracks blew the doors off anything coming from a radio station. (I had an 8-track player, but not this one.)
1965, Polaroid Swinger: In the mid-1960s, no gift for teens and preteens was cooler than the $20 Polaroid Swinger instant camera. (Okay, it actually cost "nineteen dollars and ninety-five," as immortalized in one of the 
1969, Motorola Handie Talkie HT-220 Slimline: The first portable two-way radios introduced during World War II weighed up to 35 pounds apiece, but the HT-220 weighed just 22 ounces--in part because it was the first portable radio to use integrated circuits instead of discrete transistors. Back then it was a favorite of the Secret Service; today it enjoys a small but fiercely dedicated following of radio geeks.
PhoneMate introduced one of the first commercially viable answering machines, the Model 400. The $300 unit had a wooden case, weighed more than 8 pounds, and was larger than a major-city phone book. You could record about 20 short messages on an internal reel-to-reel tape. Users also could listen to messages in private, via an earphone akin to those supplied with transistor radios. Since people hated to talk into machines in the 1970s, Phonemate used to joke that only those who stood to make money from the phone call would buy the Model 400, mostly businesses.
or hands? In 1970, when venerable U.S. timepiece maker Hamilton announced the Pulsar, the first solid-state watch, the concept was so revolutionary that nobody seemed to care that its LED screen actually displayed the time only when you pressed a button. The first Pulsars were $2100, solid-gold jobs, but a steel model was eventually available for a thriftier $275; everyone from Gerald Ford to Roger Moore was a fan.
*1972, Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera: The SX-70 was a thing of beauty. Just point, shoot, and watch the image develop before your eyes. When you're done, fold up the 7-by-4-inch unit and stick it in your bag. It was the first Polaroid to automatically eject the snapshot and produce images, without making you wait 60 seconds and peel off the outer wrapper of the film. The SX-70 combined simplicity with immediacy, making it the direct forebear of today's low-end digital cameras. More than 30 years later, its design still turns heads.
after the introduction of TI's handheld calculators in the early 1970s. The $150 SR-10 debuted in 1973 and was the first affordable handheld to calculate reciprocals, square roots, and other slide-rule functions. The $170 SR-50 followed in 1974, adding trigonometric functions and a very cool 14-character LED display. The devices became so ubiquitous that math whizzes at the time were identified by the simple sobriquet "TIs." 
blinking lights and toggle switches, and you assembled it yourself from a $397 kit sold by an Albuquerque mail-order company that had formerly been in the model rocket business. The Altair was, in other words, a gadget, but it was also the first popular home computer. Not very useful at first, it soon inspired an entire industry of upgrades, peripherals, and software--and prompted computer geeks Bill Gates and Paul Allen to form a company to sell a version of the BASIC programming language. (They called their startup Micro-soft, later ditching the hyphen.)
have had a bigger impact than the first stand-alone video cassette recorder. Shortly after the Betamax appeared, Sony was sued by the movie studios; in 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Sony's favor, finding that beneficial uses of the new technology (time-shifting TV programs) outweighed potential harms (video piracy). (The version pictured here is the SL-6300 from 1975, in a high-end wooden case.) The Betamax changed our lives and helped spawn the $20 billion video rental industry, but it couldn't compete with JVC's cheaper VHS devices and eventually disappeared.
video games out of the arcade and into America's living rooms. It was a snap to set up: Just plug the clunky-looking box into your TV set and grab the joystick. The Atari 2600 was the first successful console to use game cartridges, which allowed consumers to play multiple games on the same system and created a huge market for crude-looking but addictive titles such as Space Invaders and Pac Man. The Atari's games may not have looked much like Grand Theft Auto, but its influence can be felt in today's Xboxes, PlayStations, and GameCubes.
Simon toy (not the BellSouth/IBM Simon Personal Communicator, #41) began flashing its lights in 1978, at the height of Saturday Night Fever disco-mania. Appropriately, Milton Bradley premiered its memory game at one of the most famous discotheques of all time, Studio 54 in New York. Trying to remember Simon's sequences of lights (and blips) was a lot of fun--and frustrating. The game has far outlasted the disco era: An updated version of Simon is still sold today. Happily, the polyester leisure suit remains an endangered species.
*1978, Speak & Spell: (In the early 80's my younger daughter was given a "hand-me-down" one of these and a Simon, thus starting a new generation of geekiness!) A whole generation of kids learned to spell on this cheery orange device with alphabet keys and a hardy handle. Speak & Spell contained a single-chip speech synthesizer--novel for the time--and a robotic voice that encouraged children to spell more than 200 common words. The $50 Speak & Spell effectively cut the cord on that era's pull-string and tape-recorder speaking toys. The game of Hangman was a boon for kids during long car trips--and the bane of at least some parents forced to listen to it.
or even the CD-ROM, there was the laserdisc--the first commercial optical video disc. Philips's Magnavox Magnavision Model 8000 DiscoVision Videodisc Player was the first consumer player for MCA's pioneering DiscoVision-format laserdiscs. Never mind that the Model 8000 cost $749, and that its failure rate was astronomical. However, public schools sure bought into it and I used one when I first started teaching. It really was an amazing teaching tool for the time, allowing one to choose sections, stop and start at will, and show it on a large TV. However, with all the money spent on these, the industry didn't keep up the discs to go with the textbooks, thus more money wasted in education. 
*Sony Walkman TPS-L2: When the blue and silver Walkman debuted in 1979, no one had ever seen anything quite like it. The $200 player virtually invented the concept of "personal electronics." The first Walkman (also branded as the Stowaway, the Soundabout, and the Freestyle before the current name stuck) featured a cassette player and the world's first lightweight headphones. Now, more than 25 years and some 330 million units later, nobody wonders why you're walking down the street with headphones on.
Posted on 01/23/2006 6:14:40 PM PST by GummyIII
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Thread's up!!!
me
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LOL....FIRST!!
Supporting our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen at more than 1,000 places across the U. S. and around the world.
Thankee!!!!!!!!!!!!
| January 24, 2006
A Bad Day?
Read:
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Dr. Cliff Arnall, a British psychologist, has developed a formula to determine the worst day of the year. One factor is the time elapsed since Christmas, when the holiday glow has given way to the reality of credit-card bills. Gloomy winter weather, short days, and the failure to keep New Year's resolutions are also a part of Dr. Arnall's calculations. Last year, January 24 received the dubious distinction of being "the most depressing day of the year."
Christians are not immune to the effects of weather and post-holiday letdown, but we do have a resource that can change our approach to any day. Psalm 118 recounts a list of difficulties including personal distress (v.5), national insecurity (v.10), and spiritual discipline (v.18), yet it goes on to declare, "This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it" (v.24).
The psalm is filled with a celebration of God's goodness and mercy in the midst of trouble and pain. Verse 14 comes as a shout of triumph: "The LORD is my strength and song, and He has become my salvation."
Even when circumstances hang a sign on our calendar saying "Bad Day!" the Creator enables us to thank Him for the gift of life and to receive each day with joy. —David McCasland
Welcome each day as a gift from God.
God bless our troops!
Their's a Dr. Seuss book in there somewhere:
Gidget has a gadget with a widget on a wocket; A wocket in a socket .....
LOL!! Me, too! And there are oodles of other gadgets, I'm sure, that folks have owned and can share!
Hey, I bet that's a collector's item!
Uh Oh! It's a gadget, not a gidget thread!
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