Top 10 Modern Tech Inventions That Changed Everything

#10: Portable Audio Players [Walkman & Discman]

Walking down the street with one of these bad boys brought an instant feeling of cool. Looking back … weeell hindsight is 20/20! A Walkman or Discman is a portable audio player – with the former for cassettes and the latter for CDs - that would sometimes fit in your pocket. If we’re talking a Walkman, then we’d have to deal with turning over the cassette tapes once you reached the end of one side. When it comes to a Discman, it would seem that it always started skipping at the most inopportune times because... well, they sucked. In reality, these portable music players were usually bulky and inconvenient, AND there was no shuffle on a cassette, so you’d better have made a really good mixtape.

#9: Record Adapter

While the hipster revolution brought records and record players back into the pop culture scene, both those items are probably still somewhat unknown commodities to young kids these days. But even if records are popular again, record adapters are certainly odd looking things to most folks under a certain age. Throughout the history of the record there have been 78 rpm, 45 rpm and 33 rpm records available. But the holes in records made to be played at 45 rpm were larger than those of 78 or 33 rpm records. These adapters were necessary to play them on your standard record player. Now why the holes were different sizes in the first place is a whole other question.

#8: Wired Video Game Controllers

We’re fairly sure most kids can figure out what a video game controller is, even with a wire sticking out of it! But they definitely won’t know the pain of perpetually tangled wires! Modern video game controllers are gearing increasingly towards being wireless, in favor of relying on battery power and infrared or Bluetooth, as opposed to plugging directly into the game console. It honestly wouldn’t surprise us if game companies stopped making wired controllers altogether at some point. While retro consoles would likely still require them, there probably won’t be a lot of demand for them from kids growing up on modern gaming alone. Nostalgia is nice, but not having to untangle wires is nicer!

#7: Transistor Radio

These days the only connection most of us have with even the term transistor radio comes from listening to “Brown Eyed Girl” on the SiriusXM oldies station. Invented in the 1950s, transistor radios were revolutionary because they switched from the old vacuum tube technology. This allowed them to be made smaller, more portable, more durable and mass-marketable. The truth is that if you see a radio these days it’s probably a transistor radio. Although, a non-digital, stand alone radio in the wild would probably feel like a museum piece to the younger generation.

#6: PalmPilots [PDAs]

Personal Digital Assistants, or PDAs, were essentially the first smartphones… only you couldn’t call or text or surf the internet… Okay, let us explain. If you wanted to do “complex” computing on the go, Palm Pilots were where it was at! They allowed you to store contact info, plan calendars, send and receive emails, write up documents – you know, computer stuff! The most popular of these devices were PalmPilots, which pretty much dominated the market. They were absolutely everywhere in the late ‘90s! But with the advent of smartphones, PDAs generally fell by the wayside, and even their attempts at smartphone versions couldn’t compete with the likes of iPhones or Androids. Unless their parents are tech buffs, we doubt today’s kids have even heard of them.

#5: Cassette Tapes

While nostalgia – and some help from “Guardians of the Galaxy” – has promoted the recent revival of cassette tapes, there are many in the newer generation who didn’t get to experience them the first time around. Before CDs, cassette tapes were the go-to medium for playing audio. They work a lot like VHS tapes… which kids actually do know about. (At least that’s what they told us on our last list like this!) Cassette tapes play music and other recordings in a cassette player, and then need to be rewound, physically, to be played again. While they’ve largely been replaced by the modern smartphone, there’s still something special about a classic mixtape.

#4: Floppy Disks

Today, the floppy disk lives on as the icon you click on when you want to save your file. But few kids would actually be familiar with the object itself. In fact, one viral Tweet even wondered why the save icon is a “beverage dispenser.” Prevalent in the 80s, the floppy disk was the precursor to CDs, memory cards, and flash drives. There was the 8 inch, the 5¼-inch, and then the 3.5 inch disk, which could hold an astounding 1.44 MB of data! That’s pretty crazy considering there are thumb drives today that can hold terabytes of information. Maybe in a few years, we’ll be laughing at our measly terabyte flash drives… who knows?

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#3: Dial-Up Internet Access

Isn’t it amazing that you can watch this video in HD without having to suffer through buffering or having to make a sandwich while it loads? Yeah, this was absolutely not possible in the 1990s. Thanks, broadband! Back in the day though, we once had dial-up internet access, which would make an awful, mechanical noise while it connected to an internet service provider and would be painfully slow when you actually got online. And God forbid your mom needed the phone, because if she did, it was back to the TV for you. As of 2013, only 3% of internet users still use dial-up. We feel for you.

#2: Pagers [aka Beepers]

Until the early ‘90s, there were tons of different pagers on the market. But once cheap and reliable cell phones came along, these wireless telecommunication devices all went the way of the dinosaurs. Which, funnily enough, is what you’ll be called if you still use one. Alphanumeric pagers simply displayed a phone number that you had to call back, while more advanced ones like the two-way QWERTY pagers could send and receive early forms of text messages. This is nothing that a cell phone can’t do though, so pagers are now the butt of ridicule.

#1: Fax Machines/Telecopiers

Ask anyone born after 1990 if they’ve ever owned or even just used a fax machine, and the answer will probably be a resounding “no.” Faxes, short for facsimiles, and sometimes referred to as telecopying or telefax, are images transmitted through a phone line and then printed out. Prior to the rise of email, fax machines were the fastest way of transmitting printed information over long distances. Although fax machines still see some use in the business world, to a lot of kids today, they probably just look like a printer with a phone mysteriously attached.

Have you ever used any of these outdated pieces of tech? Let us know in the comments!

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