Retro 90s Gadgets No One Uses Anymore

Invented in the mid 1900s, DVD players actually outsold video recorders for the first time in 2002. Almost 20 years later, it’s all about online streaming. Some people still have a DVD or Blu-ray player because they bought it a long time ago. Why throw it out if it’s still working? But it likely won’t be repaired or upgraded.

CD album sales in the United States peaked between 1997 and 2001. As music streaming services slowly took over, CD sales declined, and have been on a steady downward trend since 2004. You can still find CDs in some music and tech stores, but they are no longer the norm. Even giants such as BestBuy started pulling them from their stores.

Portable CD players were first invented in 1984 by Sony, and really took off in the mid-1990s. The Discman was even renamed the CD Walkman. By 1998, Sony had sold about  50 million of the devices. If you liked to listen to music on the go you had one of them. Compared to what’s available today, some may think Discman players were too limited because you had to know what music you wanted to listen to and carry that CD. What if suddenly you felt like listening to something else?

The first flip phone, Motorola’s StarTAC, came out in 1996. This kind of cell phone became a hit with consumers until the smartphone came along, and offered a lot more features. But there seems to be a revival of the old trend. People tired of being swamped with all kinds of information all the time are going old school and getting flip phones again.

Who can forget Super Mario. Tetris, the Pokemon series, and other popular games? The Game Boy allowed users to switch between games. How great was that?  Even though it wasn’t the original device to allow people to change cartridges, it was the most popular one. Game Boy and its update, Game Boy Color, sold more than 118 million units until they were discontinued in the 2000s.