Pager, Walkman and Pegasus. Here are the forgotten gadgets that everyone once wanted to have

There is no doubt that the device that led to the “death” of the largest number of technological gadgets was… the smartphone. Modern smartphones are also computers, telephones, faxes, pagers, digital cameras, compasses, watches, alarm clocks, MP3 and video players, and game consoles.

Before the advent of smartphones, the world of technology was more colorful and diverse. And although probably no one today would like to replace their phone with a dozen or so devices, we look at some of the retro gadgets with great sentiment.

Pager Shutterstock

Pager

In Poland, this device did not gain much popularity, which was due to the post-transformation technological backwardness compared to Western countries. The United States is different. Here, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, a pager was a piece of equipment that many people couldn’t imagine life without. In fact, this gadget has become an integral part of mass culture – pagers appeared in music videos of famous rappers, popular TV series, as well as in Hollywood productions.

In many respects, the pager was the ancestor of the cell phone and SMS, popularized in the 1990s. The device enabled communication via short messages displayed on its small screen. The difference was in the method of transmission. Initially, pagers could only receive information – without the ability to send it.

The pattern of using such a pager was as follows: The user received a message with the number of the person who wanted to contact him, and then called the number back, but from the telephone. Of course, in later years the functions of pagers were expanded – e.g. pagers with LCD screens with the ability to display text and icons, pagers with a transmitter enabling confirmation of receipt of messages and two-way pagers with built-in QWERTY keyboards appeared.

In some industries, pagers are still used today – for example in the catering industry. Popular – also in Poland – “paging machines”, which inform customers through vibrations and a sound signal that their meal is ready, is also a type of pager that is very simple to use.

Floppy disks Photo Franciszek Mazur / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

3.5″ floppy disk

Before the advent of CDs and, later, USB flash drives, the main data carrier for computers were floppy disks, i.e. small magnetic disks placed in a plastic casing. They allowed both reading and writing of information.

The first to appear in 1971 were 8-inch floppy disks, which initially had a capacity of 79.75 kB. At the end of the 1970s, however, they were replaced by 5.25″ floppy disks. Here, the capacity was 360 or 800 kB. However, the most popular became the 3.5-inch floppy disk with a capacity of 1.44 MB. At the turn of the 1980s, . and 90. 3.5″ floppy drives were installed in most PC computers.

The decline of this format occurred somewhere in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. In 2009, Hitachi Maxell and Mitsubishi Kagaku Media ended the production of these devices, and a year later Sony joined them.

However, in some industries the transition away from floppy disks has been quite a slow process. In Poland, in 2008, controversy was caused by the decision of the president of ZUS, who announced a tender for the supply of 130,000. 3.5-inch floppy disks with a capacity of 1.44MB. The institution’s spokesman then explained to journalists that it was cheaper to buy 130,000 diskettes than to replace 10,000. computers. It was also cheaper to use floppy disks than to have employees burn everything on CDs. And the old ZUS computers did not have recorders anyway – so they would have to be modernized at additional cost.

Until 2019, floppy disks were still in the service of the American military. In fact, they even ensured safety when it comes to the nuclear arsenal. The command center in Wyoming and several other American military centers still had computers from the 1960s and 1970s that operated old eight-inch floppy disks.

Sony Walkman WM A602 photo: Pter de Wit/Wikimedia Commons/CC

Walkman

The idea for a Walkman was born out of need. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka often went on business trips, during which he listened to his beloved opera arias. Ibuka wasn’t happy with having to carry around a bulky and large cassette player. So he asked his colleagues to design a lighter and compact device.

On July 1, 1979, the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 was released on the Japanese market. The device cost PLN 39,000. yen, or about $150. Taking into account inflation, today it would be about $500. Where did the idea for the name come from? It is a derivative of the Pressman – a portable voice recorder that Sony released two years earlier.

In the 1980s, the Walkman set out to conquer the world. Everyone wanted to have it. It quickly became a symbol of modernity, rebellion and youth lifestyle. It was also thanks to him that in 1983, the sales of cassette tapes exceeded the sales of vinyls for the first time in history.

The Walkman has also become a sociological phenomenon. In 1984, Japanese professor Shuhei Hosokawa coined the term “The Walkman Effect”. In an article published in Popular Music magazine, the scientist suggested that the Sony device cuts off listeners from the outside world, creating a safe comfort zone for them. Two years later, the term “Walkman” entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

The era of the Walkman ended with the end of the era of cassette tapes. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, digital players began to become more and more popular. CDs pushed cassette tapes out of the market, just as cassettes pushed vinyl records out of the market. Sony followed this trend, and the cassette walkman was replaced by a disc player.

This brand’s VCR was once the pinnacle of home luxury Photo Jonas/Flickr

VCR and VHS tape

The history of VCRs is almost 70 years old. The first such equipment saw the light of day in 1956 thanks to the VRX-1000 player presented by the Californian company Ampex. Due to the high price and large dimensions, for a long time only the largest television stations could afford VCRs. It was only in the mid-1970s that they became more accessible to the average consumer. It was then that the first battle of video formats began – Beta and VHS.

When Sony presented the prototype of the BETAMAX player in 1974, it seemed that the Japanese had an ace up their sleeve that would allow them to dominate the video industry for decades. The Sony standard allowed for recording images in a higher quality than the VHS format created by JVC. Betamax cassettes were also more durable and allowed for much more convenient rewinding of the tape.

However, Betamax lost to VHS, and it did so badly. Reason? Higher prices of players (300 dollars on the one hand, 1000 dollars on the other), smaller capacity of the cassettes themselves, Sony’s entanglement in a war with film studios, and a terrible marketing strategy.

The porn industry has contributed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, almost half of video tapes sold in the United States contained adult content. The creators of these films chose cheaper VHS, which also contributed to JVC’s later success.

We learned one very valuable thing from the war we fought with JVC – it’s not just the hardware that counts

– Eric Kingdon, who worked at Sony during the famous format war, recalled years later.

Pegasus Shutterstock.com

Pegasus

While the Japanese and Americans spent long hours playing Nintendo and Sega consoles, Pegasus divided and ruled in Poland. It was a clone of the 8-bit Famicon console. The device was brought to the Vistula River in the early 1990s thanks to two businessmen – Dariusz Wojdyga and Marek Jutkiewicz.

Initially, the new console was advertised as Family Video Game, and later under the name Pegasus, along with the registered trademark of the tool. The first model was the MT-777DX, sold with two controllers and a 168 in 1 cartridge. A joystick and a gun could be purchased for the device.

The console immediately became a sales hit, and cartridges with pirated Pegasus games could be bought at almost every market. The success of Pegasus can be proven by the fact that this console clone later had its own counterfeits, which were often much cheaper than it.

Pegasus’ problems began in 1994, when the Copyright Act came into force in Poland. It was then that the Bobmark company acquired the rights to games from Western publishers, and pirate cartridges began to be withdrawn from sale. As a result, the number of Pegasus games dropped from 400 to just 40. Later, Nintendo entered the Polish market, which led to the start of a fight – although not very effective – against clones of the Japanese manufacturer’s devices.

Creative MuVo TX FM 512 MB player fir0002/Wikimedia Commons/GFDL 1.2

Mp3 player

In 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod to the world. The portable MP3 player, advertised with the slogan “1000 songs in your pocket”, not only started a new era for the Cupertino company’s products, but also had a major impact on the shape of the entire music industry.

After the premiere of the iPod, the “empetro” craze broke out all over the world. This fashion also reached Poland. The problem is that buying an iPod on the Vistula River was almost a miracle. A lucky few managed to import Apple devices from overseas, for which they paid like wheat. However, other producers, such as Iriver and Creative, took advantage of the market vacuum.

However, the era of MP3 players did not last long, thanks to the smartphones mentioned at the beginning. Why buy an additional portable device when we can listen to our favorite music on our phone?

Tamagotchi photo: Shutterstock

Tamagotchi

Finally, a real phenomenon, the tamagotchi. In the second half of the 1990s, this electronic gadget was in the pockets of teenagers around the world. The Tamagotchi is a plastic egg-shaped device with a display and several buttons.

It went on sale in 1996 and was manufactured by the Japanese company Bandai. The game involved taking care of a virtual pet. We had to feed them, wash them and even take them for a walk. If we neglected our duties, our creature would get sick and, in the worst case, even die.

Of course, the tamagotchi trend also affected Poland, although our country was dominated mainly by Chinese counterfeits of this gadget, which we could buy at the bazaars for next to nothing.