Calculator watch
Remember when teachers told you that you needed to learn mental arithmetic because you wouldn’t always have a calculator with you? Well, some geniuses condensed that huge cumbersome block of digits and LCD screens into something you could wear on your wrist. The problem was, you needed a microscope to find the buttons and you needed fingers the width of cocktail sticks to press them. Then, at the beginning of the 1990s, they announced that you were allowed to take calculators into exams anyway, rendering the ten quid you’d spent on your watch, entirely redundant. I wish I’d bought that transformers watch instead now.
We’ve all had the last laugh on our old Maths teachers though haven’t we; now that we have calculators on our mobile phones. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it Mrs Atherton! Mind you, I’m still never sure I’m being given the correct change in shops without using my fingers so maybe she had a point.
Phone box
Ahh, the big red British phone box with its lovely resident aroma of urine (which I’m sure they’re all installed with as standard). The handset was definitely never sanitised and the graffiti on the glass was always of a questionable nature (the phone numbers weren't always for what they said they were for - ahem). They also doubled as shelters when it was raining, as long as you had no sense of smell. You’d have lost it anyway if you stayed in there longer than five minutes.
The payphone itself was a bit of a conundrum especially when they introduced that little button you had to press to connect your call. You had to dial the number, put your 10p coin into the slot and then when the person you were calling answered, you had to press the blue button to speak to them. However, when you were trapped in town with just 10p left, about to make a call to arrange someone to come and pick you up to take you home, this new blue button was a menace. You’d dial, put your 10p in, the other person would answer, you’d both say ‘hello’ eight times because you couldn’t hear each other, then you’d realise you had to press the blue button. Just as you pressed it, the other person would hang up and you’d lose your 10p.
When you finally managed to get through and talk for thirty seconds, a series of beeps would sound to let you know your money was about to run out and your call would end. This made you fit the next three minutes of conversation into the last 10 seconds. Then the dead-line noise would happen leaving both parties feeling a bit weird as you hadn’t said goodbye. Still better than Facebook in my opinion.
Polaroid
Polaroid made a camera which was a dark-room in your pocket (if you had massive cube-shaped pockets). Its primary purpose was to take ‘instant’ photographs. You’d point the camera, press the button and it would spit out a small square photograph of a grey wall. Then, as you watched and waited, the thing you’d taken the photograph of would appear. You were never sure whether it had finished developing because it always looked a little bit pale, grainy and like the photo was taken in the 70s regardless of the current decade. It was also a massive problem if you'd taken a photograph of a grey wall because you would never know when or even if it had developed.
Sony Discman
The idea of a portable CD player changed the world (a bit). However, the actual thing didn’t; because it was terrible. It did offer a brand-new level of clarity on the move, as well as the ability to choose tracks which the cassette-based Walkman couldn’t offer. The biggest issue with them was the fact they weren’t actually portable. Yes, you could carry them around but any hint of movement within two miles of the player would cause the CD to jump. You definitely couldn’t walk with it in your pocket and listen to seamless music. You had to carry it on flat palms as you walked as if it was a Fabergé egg, adjusting your arm height to compensate. This was of course impractical and defeated the object.
The newer models all boasted an anti-rolling mechanism which was meant to buffer the music so that any skips could be compensated for. However, two or three skips in the buffered period would be too much for it and it would jump all over the place meaning you could listen to ABBA's entire back catalogue in under eight seconds.
Most CDs wouldn’t even play unless the player was exactly parallel to the ground. The early Discmans only ever worked by letting you take them somewhere, plonk them on a table and listen to them there. It’s probably why they took the word ‘walk’ out of the ‘Walkman’. They should have called it a ‘Sitman’.
Whistling key rings
I quickly became the most unpopular person in my house the day I got a whistling key ring. At the time, I didn’t have any keys – I just got the thing because it was the height of technology and I had to have it. The concept was, if you’d lost your keys, you’d whistle and it would play a tune so you could locate them. In practice, any noise above a certain frequency would set it off. A whistle, a washing machine, the television, a sneeze or even breathing in and out would set it off. I was told in no uncertain terms to ‘get rid of that bloody thing’ before it was thrown out of an upstairs window.