It is no hidden secret that the last 50 years have seen phenomenal technology developments. Back in the 70s entertainment meant watching movies or listening to music. People carried multiple gadgets just to get through the day, where you needed one device for music, another to stay connected and an extra one for gaming. For every need or interest, there was a separate gadget and together these shaped daily life for all age groups. Fast forward to today, and all has got consolidated to a single piece of machine, called a smartphone.
The first iPhone was launched in 2007, but the decades before that, like the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a generation of gadgets ruled everyday life, each one solving exactly one problem, and doing it brilliantly.
These were the devices that defined how people listened to music, played video games, communicated, and remembered moments. They were not primitive; they were extraordinary for their time. Here are a few of those iconic gadgets that were both a style statement and an essential back in those days.
1. Sony Walkman (1979)
Before the Walkman, music was something you listened to at home, on a stereo system in the living room, shared with whoever was in the room. The Sony Walkman changed all of that on July 1, 1979, when it went on sale in Japan for $150 at the time.
The concept was simple: a small cassette player with headphones that you could carry in your pocket. It sounds obvious now, but at the time, even Sony’s own executives were unconvinced.
The first 30,000 units sold out before the end of August 1979. Over the following decade, Sony sold more than 50 million Walkmans. By the time the cassette version was discontinued, total Walkman sales across all formats had crossed 400 million units worldwide. In the later years, it was replaced by portable CD players which eventually gave way to MP3 players with more storage options from a single device.
2. Nintendo Game Boy
Before the Game Boy, video games meant sitting in front of a TV or feeding coins into an arcade machine. Gaming was fixed to a location. Nintendo changed that on April 21, 1989, when the Game Boy launched in Japan, and 300,000 units sold out within two weeks.
The Game Boy was not the most technically powerful handheld of its era. The Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx both had colour screens and more advanced hardware. The Game Boy had a small monochrome green-tinted display and ran on four AA batteries.
What it had was exceptional battery life, which was up to 30 hours, and a price point of $89.99 that its competitors could not match. Towards the later half of 90s, Sony PlayStation garnered more interest amongst users, followed by Microsoft Xbox that started gaining more popularity.
3. Discman (Sony CD Player)
Sony launched the first portable Compact Disc player, officially the CDP-5, in 1984, and the world called it the Discman. Where the Walkman played cassette tapes, the Discman played Compact Discs known in short as CDs, which offered significantly clearer, crisper audio. It was the next step up in portable sound quality, and it found a huge audience through the late 1980s and 1990s.
CDs are spinning discs, and if one moved too sharply or hit a bump, the laser reading the disc would skip. Running with a Discman in your bag was a minor act of commitment. Manufacturers spent years developing anti-skip technology to fix the problem, with varying success. In the later years, they paved way for MP3 players with advantage of more options in terms of music and storage space both. Eventually both CD players and MP3 players got replaced by the smartphone.
4. Pager
Pagers, which are also called beepers, were not glamorous. They were small, rectangular devices that received short numeric or text messages sent from another phone. When a message arrived, the device would beep, buzz, or vibrate and display the message on a tiny screen.
They were widely used through the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by doctors, business professionals, and emergency services. At their peak in 1994, there were over 61 million pagers in use in the United States alone. Pagers faded away with the advent of Short Message Servicing (SMS) and later with smartphones offering multiple options of keeping users connected on a real-times basis.
5. PalmPilot
The PalmPilot was launched in 1996, and it was the great-grandparent of the smartphone. It was a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which means a palm-sized device that stored your contacts, calendar, notes, and to-do lists digitally. You could synchronize it with your computer using a dock.
It sounds basic now, but in 1996, the idea of carrying your entire address book, diary, and personal notes in your shirt pocket was remarkable.
The original PalmPilot 1000 and 5000 sold one million units in their first 18 months.
6. VHS Camcorder
Home video cameras existed before the Video Home System (VHS) camcorder era. But they were expensive, heavy, and required professional knowledge to operate. The consumer VHS camcorder, introduced by the Japanese brand JVC in the year 1976, changed all of that. Throughout the 1980s it became widely available.
These were large, shoulder-mounted cameras that recorded directly to VHS tapes.
For the first time, ordinary families could record birthdays, holidays, school plays, and more, and then immediately play the tape back on their television. The VHS camcorder created the home video as a cultural institution. The footage was not of broadcast quality, and the cameras were not well-lit, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that those moments now stood preserved. Like other prominent gadgets, these too lost popularity with the advent of digital cameras which were more portable, light weight, easy to carry and much simple to operate. Point and shoot cameras from companies like Japanese giants Sony, Panasonic and Canon became the obvious choice with advanced photography features and storage space included. Eventually, smartphones replaced them as well.
7. Dial-Up Modem
Before high-speed internet or broadband, DSL services and Wi-Fi, or in other words, the idea of being permanently connected to the internet, there was something called a dial-up internet connection. Connecting to the internet in the 1990s required a piece of hardware called a modem. The modem would be installed in the personal computers (PC), and the home telephone line would be plugged into it.
In order for the modem to function, a separate software provided by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) had to be installed in the computer. AOL or America Online was a prominent service provider from the 1990s, offering dial-up internet access back then.
The modem would dial a number, make a series of electronic sounds, and after 30 to 60 seconds of that noise, get you connected to the internet.
While you were connected, no one could call the landline. Internet speeds were measured in kilobits, not megabits. Loading a single image could take several minutes, and downloading a song could take up to 45 minutes.
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