[Closed] What techno gadgets amazed you as a kid?

Hours and hours... 😀
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Me and my dad were terrified of its potential. As far as we were concerned we had invited this into the house.

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Oh ,and the gadgets advertised on bubble gum wrappers 🙂

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My Dad's dictaphone. He bought me one for Christmas eventually. Ace 😀

Witchcraft.

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We had these calculators

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Loved the games on them, game III was my favourite

I used to make my own gadgets 🙂

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Harry you youngster.

I won £100 on the premium bonds (this is when £100 was a lot of money), so bought one of these.
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First time i saw a digital watch it was one of those ones where the numbers light up red. It was integral to the plot on Columbo (How do you know it was precisely 7:28? sir- because of my new digital watch officer)
The next day at school [i]everyone[/i] was talking about it like it was special effects. By xmas everyone had one, by boxing day all the batteries had run out.

this was rather novel when I were a lad:

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Remember my father brining a comodore pet home to work on his mental science based stuff....tiny screen...huuuuge box....small green letters and it was like the future maan as long as the future involved big beige boxes!

Also had one of these

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Which was amzing as the screen was see through.

Peterfile, that's brings back some good childhood memories, I had the 200 in 1 kit and I spent weeks configuring various gadgets, I think my favourite was the AM transmitter which freaked out my sister.

My older brother bought one of these

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Age 6, I was awestruck. It had an asteroids cartridge (a brilliant version of asteroids, too), and joysticks, and made explosion noises come out the telly.

Several years later I spent all my earthly posessions on a spectrum.

I still work in computers...

Billy blast off
Action man with gripping hands, real hair & eagle eyes
Verti bird
Reynolds 531 tubing

Listen to one song after another after another... genius!

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My ol man was the first in our street to have one of these -
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(The mower not the pink trousered damsel)

We thought it was brilliant. Next door neighbour bought one a week later!

[img] http://www.casio-calculator.com/Museum/Calculator/ABCDE/BG- [/img]

My dad had a petrol Flymo - jeez - that was hard work.

Many of the items above.

Plus.

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TCR - Totally Crap Racing. If one car was a bit quicker you just held down the lane change button and you couldn't be beaten. Mate of mine had one. His older brother HAD to have the fast car and bored us to death with this tactic. Arsehole.

I used to help out on a farm, the farmer had one of these and even at the age of 12 it terrified me:

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*Fails to see 'techno gadget' in the above photograph*

TCR - Totally Crap Racing. If one car was a bit quicker you just held down the lane change button and you couldn't be beaten. Mate of mine had one. His older brother HAD to have the fast car and bored us to death with this tactic. Arsehole.

And we got busted that Christmas - our mum found us in her bedroom with it all out after we had found it in their wardrobe.

Sorry mum - I never did get to say sorry to you for that one x

*Fails to see 'techno gadget' in the above photograph*

You never know, globati might be 120 years old?

[i]And we got busted that Christmas - our mum found us in her bedroom with it all out after we had found it in their wardrobe.[/i]

I wish I'd read the rest of johndoh's post and not just that bit.

Not really a gadget but spent hours playing with one of these. Had it set up in the Garden with a really long approach, truth is it was crap but we seemed to live in simpler times then. Wanders off looking for specs with rose tinted lenses

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[img] [/img] (i never had davros though)

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Listen to one song after another after another... genius!

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this

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and one I can't find an image of. memory is hazy now, there was a steering wheel and a little 3d landscape in front of it with various roads, the landscape went round and you had to move the steering wheel which moved a car towards and away from you via magnets. This allowed you to 'navigate' the roads and junctions.

I think part of the magic was, they weren't mine. Goes on them were fleeting and I couldn't take them apart/get bored of them so they always seemed a bit mysterious and special.

Loved these too

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Is that like an updated version of the View Master awesome 3D viewing toy?

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The old Acorn computers. Used to love it when my dad brought it home from work (School teacher) playing lemmings on it was ace.

Our first Pentium powered pc, windows 95 and flight SIM 95 was ace fun.

Raleigh Streetwolf, never got one but Wow. had that TCR on previous page

Is that like an updated version of the View Master awesome 3D viewing toy?

This is an awesome Friday afternoon thread.

[i]No! Proper 3D gaming[/i]

Woah. *is impressed*

I *think* my brother still has two of the consoles too - in fact the two games shown there ^^^

No! Proper 3D gaming

Is that first screen shot from the 'Rush hour on the M25' 3D driving game?

[url= http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RETRO-Tomytronic-3D-Thundering-Turbo-1983-Boxed-/221333833888?pt=UK_Toys_Creative_Educational_RL&hash=item33888648a0 ]Available on Ebay...[/url]

great thread, we, friends or cousins had loads of this old junk in the early 80s!

This amazed me as a kid.

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You can still get this game so I bought it to see how it worked!

Now I know it has sort of taken the magic bit away. 🙁

I was recently reminscing about "DRAW" on the Acorn - if windows a graphics editor like this instead of of Paint / Drawing things badly in Word who knows where the world would be right now.

I grew up before they invented techno-gadgets.

When Action Man started getting hands like this;

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it was a major leap forward in toy technology.

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ricardo - I had that exact electronics kit.The crystal radio worked a treat. I remember scraping pain off my bedroom radiator to get a good ground for the antenna wire!

I see the 9V PP3 battery isn't connected in that shot!

I think I bought it from Tandy??

globalti, is that a two stroke tractor?

I was never particularly amazed by gadgets because by the time I got to play with them they had been out for years and were old hat.

However you reminded me.. my neighbour had a game called Vortex Raider on his C64 which did blow me away. It was 3D - a whole virtual world inside a computer... magic. Needless to say, he never wanted to play it little arsehole that he was. I'm sure it was because I did want to.

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Seeing that on Pg1, just instantly transported me back to such a happy place!

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and this

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and this

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This:

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Our parents got it because they had been told "your kids can program it just like the computers they have at school (BBC micros)

Needless to say, that never happened, and we spend all our time round our next door neighbours playing 'Booty' on their Spectrum:
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😉

Note for younger reader: Back then, 'booty' reffered to the treasure that pirates collected, rather than a prodigious female bottom!

my old man bought one of these home from work.

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Digital photography! mental.

my mums mate (mobile hair dresser) used to turn up with this huge phone.

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We had one of those floppy disk digital cameras, it could take something like 5 photos per disk. ****ing useless.

Also,
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I think the only thing that was vaguely a "techno-gadget" when I was young was my Spirograph.

ricardo666 - I also had one of those its - spent loads of time building various electronic devices. Not sure I ever learnt anything about electronics though - just followed the instructions.

As for other gadgets, the Vic20 was the real one for me (predecessor to the Commodore 64). Used to spend ages playing on that, and programming in basic as well.

As for the calculators - my Dad's first job after leaving the RAF (early 60s I guess) was trainign engineers to fix desktop calculators... how things have changed!

SCANMAN PLUS!

I remember getting one of them at work. What a useless ball of shite it was too!

That speak and spell thing or that computer game that was shaped like a futuristic set of binoculars. I think the game had WW1 bi-planes or something...anyone know what its called?

Edit Doh...somebody already posted a pic of it

I loved my Oric-1 home computer as they were called in the early 80s.

I ordered it as I'd heard of terrible delays affecting Spectrum supplies.
I ordered the Oric in September 1983 and received it in February 1984.
So that didn't go to plan. I loved it though and got into 6502 machine code.
Programs written in MC were sooooo much quicker than those written in BASIC.
Even though the 6502 ambled along at 3mHz...

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Blackpool, early 1980's.

Not just PacMan though, a variety of look down table screened games with controls on the side of the table.

I loved my Oric-1 home computer as they were called in the early 80s.

I had one of those, in fact still got one in the loft. Not my original though. It had a 2MHz CPU though not 3

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it was a step up from log tables

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My grandparents had a Betamax with a cabled remote control and I remember when they upgraded to a video player with a wireless remote control. That was top of the range! Even if the video player did still weigh a quarter of a ton.

The fact that their TV didn't have a remote and you had to get up and turn the volume down was clearly wasted on them. 😉

Toys bloody luxury,

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Molgrips - I stand corrected. It was a 6502A [s]running [/s] crawling at 1mHz.

Blimey I think our combi boiler has a faster processor!

My dad was an engineer so had a few colleagues that built interesting things. One of them had built a life size Tardis in the lounge for his kids! I think I was about 6 at the time so it was genuinely amazing when it made noises and lights flashed etc.

Also remember my older brother programming games on the BBC B and them being reasonably good!

Have a distinct memory of early (for me) days on the web. Remember you could go into a website set up like a graphical gig with a blocky avatar, then walk up to people to chat and they would respond in different languages. That was a bit of an eye opener.

Derek - it was my birthday present from dad when I was about 10, kept me quiet for hours. And yes it came from Tandy, which I followed it up with a short wave radio the following year.

Not electronic but I used to be amazed and love these things

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I remember having 6 channels on the TV. Only 4 of them had anything on, but there was 6 buttons. Which meant it was a fully future proof and super posh TV - in my mind anyway.

I remember having 6 channels on the TV. Only 4 of them had anything on, but there was 6 buttons. Which meant it was a fully future proof and super posh TV - in my mind anyway.

😯 I remember having 4 buttons on our tele but only 3 worked!

Bregante > that's a 3V29, that is... slightly disturbing that I still remember that but would have to think seriously about what I had for tea.

Not strictly gadgets... but

Wot no Astrowars ?

Also I'll sort out a pic of the box for 'Elite' Acorn Electron cassette version as i have it in the house somewhere...

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Bregante - we had the same VHS player!

ricardo666 - I've still got one of those 75 in 1 electronics kits in my loft!