You know how sometimes, you stumble upon something quite unexpectedly and it suddenly brings back a whole bunch of memories?
That happened to me recently.
As I was browsing social media content on Flipboard, I chanced upon a write-up about the Tandy TRS-80. In case you don’t know what that is, it was a computer introduced by Radio Shack in the late ’70s.
Hmm..
One thing led to another, and I started thinking about all those things I once owned that are no longer in use.
Let’s see what I have got..
Radio Shack Computer
My very first computer - the Tandy TRS-80.
The external storage was a cassette recorder. The programs were stored on a cassette tape.
I remembered playing a game called “Taipan” on the computer. Before I started the game, I had to rewind the cassette tape to the beginning and then press the start button.
Should the tape get jammed halfway, the game was terminated and I had to restart the whole process again.
Imagine that!
Such were the tedious ways of using external storage.
Tee-Square
Ah.. geometrical drawing..
A3-sized paper on a drawing board, armed with a Tee-square to draw horizontal lines and a pair of set squares to draw angled lines.
That was how we did technical drawing.
Slide Rule
In the mid-’70s, calculators were becoming available, but I was still using a slide rule for calculations in tertiary institution.
Come to think of it, the slide rule was an amazing instrument. It could perform multiplication and division, and a whole lot more.
Walkman
In my teenage days, music came off from Rediffusion, radio and phonographs.
Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to have your music whenever you want, wherever you are?
Yea! Out came the Sony Walkman.
Cool stuff - a predecessor of Spotify. 😀
Palm Top
In 1996, Palm came out with a small device that could fit into the palm of the hand.
They called it - PalmPilot.
No color - just monochrome.
It came with a calendar, calculator and notepad.
With a stylus, one could write and it would auto-translate the handwriting into text.
One catch, though - you had to conform to a certain style of writing in order for the Palm to recognize it.
I owned many iterations of Palm devices over the years.
Pager
How many of us carried this little device?
I did.
Whenever a message came in, the pager would emit a sound to alert you.
For those who preferred silent mode, the pager would vibrate.
Oh sure! There are many other stuffs that have come and gone..
IBM-compatible computers - yup, I ever owned “Pineapple” and “Orange” computers..
5" floppy disks, laser discs and then VCDs (video CDs).
Ah.. these are the gizmos of yesterday.
They may be obsolete today, but they certainly haven’t been erased from my memory.
Hmm.. perhaps that’s what nostalgia is all about.
Old stuff, old memories… but they still have their place in my story. 😀