There are few technological flops as memorable as Betamax. As notorious as the format was, I didn’t manage to pick up a Beta unit until about two years ago, and it ended up being broken anyway. For some reason, Beta holds a strange but prominent place in my collection of antiquated tech. All of the  [ Read More ]

Unless you’re relatively young, you probably remember VHS. Even if you are so young to never have used the format, odds are you’ve seen tapes appear in film, or have seen a VCR or two for sale at a thrift store. VHS tapes were the standard for how you saw recorded media. Whether you’re watching  [ Read More ]

If you were a movie fan in the 1980′s you probably had a VCR; whether it was ßetamax or VHS doesn’t matter too much for the purpose of this article. If you happened to live back in those days, you may be able to recall the prices of tapes were incredible. Prices were around $60  [ Read More ]

Now, if you’ve seen my Psion Series 3a article and you actually lusted after such machines, you might well have salivated enough over this beast to drown a small elephant. If you’ve never seen one before, I’ll run through a few of its vitals… It’s an HP Jornada 728, born in the year 2002 AD,  [ Read More ]

The Commodore 64: the legendary personal computer from the 1980′s. This beast had a 1.023 MHz processor in the NTSC model (0.985 MHz on the PAL model), and a whopping 64 kB ram. To go along with all this “processing power,” Commodore gave it the graphics chip from the VIC-II and the SID 6581 chip  [ Read More ]

Most people have heard of Commodore. This company was responsible for some of our favorite 1980′s computers such as the C64, VIC-20, and all the members of the Amiga family. Commodore also made it’s own accessories. There were joysticks, floppy drives, tape drives, printers, and even monitors. Now remember, back at this time, personal computers  [ Read More ]

Remember those terrible little digital personal organisers you recieved as gifts in the 90s? You know, the ones that had the memory capacity of a goldfish and less functions than your average digital watch? Had your friends and family opened their wallets and purses a little wider, you may well have been the happy recipient  [ Read More ]

Ah, the Helix HX-4635 (Also known as the Conion C-100FL and Clairitone 7980 ). Talk about your classic ghetto blaster! This beast was released to the public in 1984, and holds a spot as one of the most iconic boomboxes of the age. Featuring large speakers, dual cassette decks, and all of your favorite radio  [ Read More ]