Old Tech thread

I thought the father was pointing a pistol at his son, "You will have this aeroplane toy and you will like it!" but then I realised it was a tobacco pipe. Those were the days, when you could tell husbands were relaxed because, although they were still wearing their work suit, they had their pipe out, and everyone used Macassar hair oil.

Note also, the extendable speaker phone to talk to the TV man.
 
Someday we’ll be able to watch our favorite radio program:
630C983B-EBED-442C-AEAE-1C092D67FA77.jpeg
 
Is that a voice controlled television with a microphone sticking out of the front?

And you must not watch TV at home unless you are wearing a suit and tie.
 
"What's wrong with this picture?"

The clock on the TV screen and the grandfather clock show different times. The grandfather is 12 o'clock. (No TV during the daytime or that late at night.) The other clock says a quarter past seven. TV was live. (Nothing to record it on until metal discs in 1927 but that was prohibitively expensive until magnetic tape came along.)

Am I right?
 
What's wrong with this picture?

the picture on the wall is seen through the screen. Am I right?
 
Parson said:
Am I right?
Click to expand...
I couldn't help but hear this as asked by the Memory Man who appeared at the beginning and end of the film of The 39 Steps.
Members of the audience would ask him questions and he would reel of the answers ending each answer with "Am I right sir?"

At the end of the film Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) asks him "What are the 39 steps" to which he starts to reply "The 39 Steps is a secret organisation dedicated to the overthrow of" when he gets shot. And as Hannay rushes to help him, with his dying breath he says "Am I right sir?"

So as Hannay, I think, replies, "You were right in every particular."
 
farntfar said:
I couldn't help but hear this as asked by the Memory Man who appeared at the beginning and end of the film of The 39 Steps.
Members of the audience would ask him questions and he would reel of the answers ending each answer with "Am I right sir?"

At the end of the film Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) asks him "What are the 39 steps" to which he starts to reply "The 39 Steps is a secret organisation dedicated to the overthrow of" when he gets shot. And as Hannay rushes to help him, with his dying breath he says "Am I right sir?"

So as Hannay, I think, replies, "You were right in every particular."
Click to expand...
 
Indeed.
The conversation was slightly more complicated than I remembered, but the "Am I right, sir?", and his intonation, is as I remember. :)
 
I caught a really interesting programme on BBC R4 last week about old recordings. It had a piece on the Blattnerphone which used an astonishing amount of tape for fairly short recordings. One was used to record Neville Chamberlain when Britain declared war in 1939.
 
Not really old tech* but I found a flatscreen TV with built in DVD player (with the remote taped to it ) in a skip (dumpster) a few months ago - it took about 5 minutes to figure out that all that was wrong with it was that there was a bit of corrosion on one of the battery terminals in the remote. I gave it to my daughter and she had it out in her shed out in the garden where she does mysterious art stuff. The other day she mentioned that it had stopped working. So we bought it inside, plonked it on the kitchen table switched it on and off a few times and it started working again.
I said that I reckoned she just needed to give it time to warm up. I'm old.
She looked at me like I was an idiot.

She took it back out again.
Next time she tried to use it it didn't work....


...then it did.

Vindicated.

* Though DVDs are now so 'old' that I heard someone in a shop sneeringly wondering who still had a DVD player - she seemed quite shocked when I said I had at least four... and three VHS players... and a Betamax.
 
We've got DVD and VHS players. I've got practically every Disney animation up to 1990 on VHS (and the original and best Star Wars). I recently had to get a DVD player for my laptop - I don't think any of them come with a DVD player any longer, but I still buy local history resources than are published in that way. We have a large selection of CDs which the kids turn up their noses at and ask, 'why don't you use Spotify, it's only **** per month'. Because you will never "own" the recordings, you need Wi-Fi, and they can remove artists from their catalogue for political reasons with zero notice, that's why. I also have an old car with an audio cassette player. It was really hard to get any tapes for it. Car Boot sales were the only source. Sadly, it's now broken (both tape tangled inside and the connector at the back is faulty.) I thought about replacing it with a new or second-hand CD player, but that would probably cost more than the car is worth itself.

And my usual method of listening to music is via an iPod (circa 1998) which I plug into the car, an iPod Dock, or computer I have about 4000 songs on it, more than anyone ever needs really. Also, it came in very useful when in a camper van around New Zealand, South Island, because most of the places we went to didn't have Wi-Fi, or even radio reception.
 
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