Olds go nostalgic for the good old days of tech

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Kind of hard to see something like that being sold today. Also kind of hard to believe it was ever considered a good idea. Definitely a clever design, though.

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Just found out that my youngest has to bring a portable CD player for her SAT subject test in a language. Canā€™t be plugged in, and Iā€™m a little worried that the ones with a built-in chargeable battery allow for no Plan B if something goes wrong.

Of all the devices for me to have long ago recycled/donated instead of hanging onto ā€œjust in caseā€!

Iā€™m asking around my local friends, but donā€™t have high hopes. Apparently Iā€™m going to have to buy one, and theyā€™re not as cheap as they should be. Hmmm. Maybe Target or Costco?

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I think you can slip a 80 mm disc into a shirt pocket, though the thicker player might have stretched the limits. I donā€™t own more than a few CD singles, and they all use the 120mm disc. I might have a miniCDRom with drivers, though.

Didnā€™t the gamecube use a similarly diminutive disc?

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Jensen is a crap brand, but it might work just fine for SATs.

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Exceptionally expensive for something that looks better than it sounds.

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You guys have me chuckling! I had to drive (through torrential rains) to the north side anyway this evening, so I stopped in to a Best Buy and got their choice-of-one. Itā€™s good enough, and now Iā€™ll know to offer it to friends when their children take this test.

Iā€™m a little confused, because sheā€™s not the first of my kids to take the SAT subject test in a language, but sheā€™s the first one to alert me to the need for this CD player. Either the testing company has made changes recently, or now Iā€™m wondering what happened before!

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It seems like theyā€™ve found new ways to advance income discrimination. Always a high priority with the SATs.

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I think thatā€™s a bingo!

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The only thing this really benefits is the family that hordes things for decades after they were last relevant.

And when they were relevant? They cost as much as the fancy graphing calculators.

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I have one from when I could still listen to music.

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I swear the ASR 33 is the most complicated machine ever devised by man.

This whole series has been a mind-boggling puzzle of minuscule parts.

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Yup, it used proprietary 80mm DVD-like discs.

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Everything was new onceā€¦

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Iā€™m in a printmaking class at a local art center with my daughter. Today, one of the other older (like me) students showed us a poster she had worked on during the week, which featured an old-fashioned phone handset, and we were talking about whether or not my daughterā€™s generation would even know what they were looking at. Then the other student mentioned that someone else pointed out that the wire connected to the handset wasnā€™t right, because it wasnā€™t a tight coil. I reminded her that before phones had that tight coil, they had the woven-wrapped straight cords. She and I ended up having a fun little conversation about, well, olds going nostalgic for the good old days of tech!

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I wore my Energy Dome for Halloween and my youngest employee thought I was a Lego man.

Kids these days.

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Here I am remembering visiting the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia at the age of 7, seeing a display of coming technology that included a pushbutton phone, and thinking that was so neat.

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Elevator just donā€™t go to the top floor, bless his heart.

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