Hi-Fi Heaven

If I had the space I might collect vintage record players and music centres.

I was sorely tempted to get one of these second hand ones costing on average 15 Euros.

There was also this much more expensive Braun.

Would you buy one? 

The End of the Line

Preparing for painters coming to Moonbase I've stripped out some old cables.

I did it with a slight tear in my eye as these were telephone cables to the loft.

Back in 2004 when the attic was made into an Ebay office I installed a landline up there. Rather than get a twin phone set I decided to have as old a phone as I could have from my collection of old telephones.

I opted for a green GPO dial phone on my desk. It was fun seeing it alongside old toys for sale like Masters of the Universe or whatever I had in that day.

To do it I needed cables from the BT point two floors down! So up they went, those cables got tucked under skirting, hidden under carpets, tacked to stairs and walls and eventually ending up in the loft. 

I think I got the phone cables from Wilkos. Great fun installing them.

So it was with sadness that I ripped them all out. I no longer need a landline phone in the loft because I no longer Ebay full time. That ended in 2007. My Power Seller days were over.

Since then the attic has become the traditional family dump for everything needed but unimportant, the exceptions being the Christmas decs and my old toys!

It's always a moment when one technology boots out another. Now it's just a landline downstairs and the ubiquitous all-knowing mobile. Hardly any cables.

I do miss those days in the attic answering toy queries on my dial phone.

Did you have landline phone cables everywhere readers? Did you have an extension phone?

MOVING THE MATSUI

 

Late last year I had to get our old Matsui tape deck and speakers down from t'attic.

I still play tapes especially at Xmas and our current player conked out. Matsui came to the rescue.

I like old tech like tape decks. There's the romance of their heydays. CD players just don't have it for me.

We bought the Matsui unit in the 80's in Farnborough. It was a Curry's own brand I think.

We used to copy tapes off mates and make mix tapes back then and taping cassettes was second nature having been doing it since the early Seventies.

Did you enjoy taping and do you still possess any cassettes?

OLD SCHOOL TECH

Having just placed an announcement in a newspaper for an elderly relative's 90th birthday, it reminded me of some of the old school tech that's been and gone. I imagine placing announcements and messages in papers will be a thing of the past one day too.

Regarding messages, I do recall sending the odd telegram. You rang the GPO and later BT to tell them the message you wanted sending on nice paper to someone, maybe for a last minute wedding wish or exam congrats. I'm not sure how much notice you had to give the GPO/BT but the message arrived like a letter and probably went first class. You could choose different backgrounds in the paper and envelope too! How cool was that!

Someone once told me you could stick a stamp on anything and shove it in a post box. As long as it wasn't dangerous it would be sent in the post to the address shown. I think a banana was the example used as it has its own handy packaging. I've never tried it and I digress unless of course you have readers!

Fax was a thing I enjoyed doing. Faxing stuff. It was an essential business tool when I worked in a company in the 90's and 00's. You could also photocopy a single sheet really quickly which was very handy if the big office copier had run out of toner! The advent of email made faxing redundant but it was great fun. Did you like faxing?

Telex was and is a mystery to me and I've never telexed anything. Have you readers?

Electric typewriters were superb things I remember, especially with the typo-correct facility, a sort of machine tippex. I actually think the letter was lifted back off the paper rather than being painted over. The sound of the electric typewriter was pure magic. What do you think?

Carbon paper goes right back to my childhood and I really loved copying stuff via the blue sheets of waxy carbon. A carbon copy was a lovely thing, slightly foggy and smudgy. When I first started doing old toys mail-order sales lists to send out in the post in 1990 I used carbon paper to increase the stack and somewhere I still have one or two of those early lists when I was called Moon Zero Toys.

Last but not least on this mini-journey into long lost behaviour are those tasks you could ask the house phone to do. Most often was the speaking clock, which was sponsored by Accurist I seem to recall. You could also get a wake-up call anytime of the day or night, which I did now and then in the late 70's and 80's. My Missus even asked for a bedtime story for our daughter in the mid-80's! You could probably get the phone to do other things back then, sort of smart after all! What did you do on the landline readers?

What other old school tech was there?