Octopembriclox

[rain_gryphon]

The other day I decided that I needed a proper transistor radio with a speaker, not one of the little headphone radios that seem to be about all you can get anymore. Today I bought an AM/FM transistor radio at the thrift store. It's some Sears model, I'm guessing from the mid 70s, since they're obviously no longer trying to make it as small as possible. It's of a size a bit above what I'd call a shirt pocket model. The case design isn't at all playful or 'space age' - just a rather military-looking square black case with a linear tuning scale. It wouldn't have meritted a second glance when I was in high school - these were common as dirt.

You pop the case back off by sliding a penny into the slot on the bottom. I'd forgotten about that :) It uses a big old 9V (and they're careful to specify it correctly as a "dry battery 006P", another bit of periodica that I'd forgotten).

Once the back is off, all of the components are on display. I especially like that the seven trimmer pots are each carefully painted a different colour. This was made to be fixed if it broke, not just tossed and replaced. I'm sure that somewhere there's a manual for it.

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I got a "Tintin" book for 50 cents as well :)

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Flying Bomb brand batteries. These would so go in everything I owned!

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Toshiba seems to stand for "Tokyo Shibaura Electric".

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Oh my... In some part of my mind still, when I look at beautifully designed space age stuff, I can see this overlay of the bright plastic lying half melted in the ruins, or standing in the corner of a crowded fallout shelter, trying to carry calming voices through the storms of static. It's like an alternate reality that came so close that memories from that would-have-been time sometimes intrude.

It amazes me, all of the 20-somethings who want to return to the 60s. If Iran's not stopped soon, they're going to get their wish, I'd imagine. The ending may not be so happy the second time around.

Comments

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about it, but it's true: it's surprisingly hard to get a basic radio these days. This one (http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/5003820.htm) and this one (http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=4501&productId=220888) were the only ones even remotely fitting the bill I could find on the Argos website. Admittedly they take AA batteries rather than PP3s (what twe call those 9V ones here).

Flying Bomb brand batteries

A whole new area of collecting I'd never even thought of! It would require some legwork, though - at least in the UK, it's illegal to send batteries through the post (except brand new, wrapped ones) because of their explosive potential. I imagine people go to fairs or conventions to get them. =:)

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'd not realized how uncommon they'd become until I went looking for one. Nobody has anything except little headphone radios anymore, and about half of those don't have real tuners. They're made so you push a button, and it hops to the next strong station. That strikes me as a clever design for a toy, but rather worthless for an actual radio.

Radio Shack is supposed to carry one similar to that first Sony, but none of their stores here actually have it. It's apparently a website-only item, which tells one where the demand lies.

People just don't use radios anymore like they used to. When I was little, my grandmother's radio was a very central element to her life. She had a largish 'portable' transistor radio (with nice speakers) and she'd haul that around the house and yard as she worked. When she and her friends went picnicking, daytripping, etc., someone usually brought a radio. Even when I was in high school, we sometimes took radios with us, although it wasn't a universal habit by then. I don't think kids today take along a radio for group listening at all. They've got their own personal iPod, even when they're in groups.

I'm amazed too that people collect batteries. I'd think the old acid ones would rot through and burst, like they always did if you left them in the device too long. Some of the ones in this fellow's collection are evidently quite old, though.

[whitetail.livejournal.com]

Toshiba seems to stand for "Tokyo Shibaura Electric".

And Seikosha was the original name for Seiko. (They use Seikosha for their printers now, but the name originally appeared on their watches dating back to the 19th century.)

BTW, I have a Toshiba electronic desktop calculator from 1971! It cost my dad a small fortune back then...

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The first electronic calculator I saw was around '72/73 or so, when we'd gone to buy carpet (bright orange high-pile shag - tres '70s). The clerk at the carpet place had it set on the desk very prominently, so that customers could see the display. It was obviously a conversation piece. It had a red LED display. My own first one was a huge Sperry-Rand handheld, that used like six batteries (that it burned through in maybe two hours), and had a green LED display so bright that I could read by it. That was around '75 or so.

[whitetail.livejournal.com]

My dad's very first desktop calculator had those little vacuum tubes with filaments inside that formed the various numbers. That one cost about $1000 in 1970. He didn't use that one for long because so many of the little filaments burned out so quickly...

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

My dad had one of the green LED calculators when I was growing up. It was one of those "don't touch without supervision" items because it was so expensive at the time. And it had to be plugged in because batteries couldn't power it for long. I've heard they weren't true LEDs, but I don't remember what I was told those were. They were certainly an icy color I didn't see on any definite LEDs ever again.

I remember the vacuum tube numbers too. We still have some lab equipment with those. I love watching those machines work. It's like watching vintage sci-fi.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

You're right. On reflection, I don't think it was an LED display. LEDs wouldn't have eaten batteries like that, for one thing. I also recall being able to see a faint sort of gridwork under the display, and the numbers definitely appeared in little tubes. They were a cool, icy green-blue, not at all a pure colour. I'm not sure if they even had green LEDs at that time.

I suppose it must have been either gas discharge, or more likely, one of those weird, seldom-seen capacitor displays where leakage through the special plastic dielectric makes it glow. Those are generally blue or green.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I reeeally don't think that's the part of the 60s they want to go back to. A lot of them are worried that that's the part of the 60s the government's been taking us back to, though.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Bush seems to be trying to avoid Truman's errors (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4812562.stm), although I'd like to see rather more vigour exercised. Iran and Syria would both have gone Iraq's route by now, were it my call. Had we reached an understanding with the German generals in 1945, re-armed them, and (armed as the only nation with atom bombs) stormed east to deal with Stalin, as Churchill and Patton both advocated, today's world would be a much different place. Much of the unhappiness of the past half-century has arisen from the need of each side to court third-world allies against the other.

In the end, we came through the Cold War because both sides were ultimately secular societies concerned with material wealth. We just differed wildly in how best to generate that wealth. We don't have that common thread with Islam. If we did, we'd not be having the issues that we do in Iraq.

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

I want to bite all the juvenile morons who thought the 60s and 70s were so great. Living on the verge of anihilation wasn't great.

I have long said, too, that Bush was full of it when he said that democracies don't wage war on each other. Bull. They do, quite readily. Few things are more barbaric than the mob rule of democracies untempered by a representative structure.

What don't go to war easily are shallow, materialistic societies, unless their material well-being is directly threatened. Establishing that in the currently Islamic world would make everyone's lives better.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I want to kick these people sometimes. Seriously. I meet them online, and at work too, anymore. I remember crying myself to sleep at times because you just didn't know if the world was going to be there much longer. There was a time in the late 80s / early 90s where it finally sunk in that the whole nightmare was over, and there wasn't going to be a nuclear war. That entire decade was undoubtedly the happiest time of my life, because there wasn't that shadow of annihilation hanging over everything. I might die, but I could be sure that civilization would go on. It's very sad that I had to reach my 30s before being able to experience that. I have a smouldering hatred toward Islam for taking that away.

You're correct in that democracy isn't going to fix anything in and of itself. Democracy works (sort of) when you have a sane, civilized electorate. The recent Palestinian vote shows what happens otherwise. I don't know if Bush is too stupid to see this, or if he has to pretend otherwise for policy reasons. Until the Dubai ports deal, I'd have said the latter, but now I'm no longer sure.

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

There are now really two generations alive who could watch "War Games" or "My Science Project" and not get anything but the "retro" and "campy" nature of them. Or the future scenes in the "Terminator" movies. These weren't jokes, but realistic thoughts on what we had to look forward to.

I'd personally gotten faith in detente fairly early in the 80s, probably around the time Gorbachev wound up in charge. It probably helped that a big chunk of my ancestry was Russian; there was a sort of feeling that if I was sane enough to realize we shouldn't destroy the world, perhaps they were too. And that they were making a concerted effort to appear more western was a big indication that they'd turned a corner.

But I also saw the rise of the newer threat somewhat earlier. Probably around the time of the Leon Klinghoffer murder on the cruise ship. Terrorism on that scale we could shrug off indefinitely. But I just had a feeling if we did simply shrug it off, it would only get worse. Pity I was right. More's the pity Russia didn't collapse sooner; with another nuclear superpower still checking us, our paws were tied. There wasn't much we could safely do but shrug it off then. Yet another reason not to allow another hostile nation to get nukes; even if Iran itself mellowed and was contained, it would continue to get in the way of our ability to deal rapidly with new threats as they popped up.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

There are now really two generations alive who could watch "War Games" or "My Science Project" and not get anything but the "retro" and "campy" nature of them.

I had that odd disconnect when I was trying to explain the humour of "Dr. Strangelove" to a 20 something friend. She'd been assigned to write a report on comedy movies of the 60s for a college class. She saw it more as an artifact than as a movie, much like I see stuff from the 30s, I think.

I recall now when I was little, how romantic WWII appeared, like some distant, shining crusade. For the people actually living through those times, I'm sure it was terrifying. We can see it now with the knowledge of how it ended, and somehow that ending colours one's perception of the whole event, and makes the grimmest times like the spring of '42 seem merely acts in a drama. I think the Cold War may be like that for kids.



Gorbachev

I trusted Smilin' Mike right off. It was that lunatic Reagan that I feared during the 80s. You never knew if his astrologer was going to tell him it was a propitious time for a sneak attack.