26 Obsolete Gadgets We Used to be Obsessed With

People have been trying to make the watch more than just a watch for decades. Before it was a phone, it was a calculator in the 1980s. It was a very popular device among tech savvy people. Even Marty McFly from “Back to the Future” wore one.

Until the DVD was created, people who had the money used a LaserDisc Player, or DiscoVision as it was named in 1978. It was an optical disc with a 12” diameter that contained analog audio and video. LaserDiscs were created with the intention to sell movies at a cheap price for people to watch at home.

Until digital recording format came along, sound professionals used reel-to-reel tapes. Audio was recorded on a magnetic tape held on a reel. There may be a revival in the works for both quality and nostalgic reasons. A German company introduced on a new reel-to-reel tape machine, but it costs about $12,000.

You could see them everywhere in the 1970s. People used transistor radios to listen to music and the radio on the go. As Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, had once said: “My first transistor radio… I loved what it could do, it brought me music, it opened my world up.”

Invented in the early 1960s by Ivan Sutherland, the Sketchpad was a revolutionary computer program that changed the way humans interacted with computers. The program used a graphical user interface, which was not common at the time. Sutherland is now referred to as the father of computer graphics.

The telegraph is the forerunner to fax machines. It was the first device of its kind that made long-distance communication possible. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire stretched between stations. The telegraph was the foundation of later communication inventions such as the telephone and even the internet.