Category
media
Cassette tapes, VHS clutter, and the sound a Walkman made when the batteries died.
Formats that came and went — the physical media everyone owned a drawer full of and can't quite throw away.
15 catalogued finds
Cassette tape
“A compact magnetic tape cartridge used for music and mixtapes, rewound with a pencil when the tape deck ate it.”
8-track tape
“A bulky magnetic tape cartridge format popular briefly in cars and home stereos before cassettes took over, known for its audible click between tracks.”
Floppy disk
“A thin magnetic storage disk in a plastic sleeve, used to save and transport computer files back when 1.44MB felt like plenty of space.”
Laserdisc
“An early optical video disc format the size of a vinyl record, offering sharper picture quality than VHS but never becoming mainstream.”
Betamax tape
“Sony's videotape format that lost the format war to VHS despite arguably better picture quality, now a symbol of the wrong horse to bet on.”
TV Guide magazine
“A weekly pocket-sized magazine listing every channel's programming, essential before onscreen guides existed and often left open on the coffee table.”
Camcorder
“A shoulder-mounted or handheld video camera that recorded straight to tape, responsible for hours of shaky home movies and birthday party footage.”
Walkman
“A portable cassette player with foam headphones that let you take your music collection anywhere, one AA battery at a time.”
Discman
“A portable CD player known for skipping if you so much as jogged with it, eventually solved by "anti-skip" buffering technology.”
Super 8 film reel
“A small reel of home-movie film shot on a Super 8 camera, projected onto a bedsheet or wall for family movie nights.”
Reel-to-reel tape recorder
“An open-reel magnetic tape recorder that threaded tape between two spinning reels, used for high-fidelity home audio recording before cassettes simplified things.”
Slide projector carousel
“A rotating tray of 35mm photo slides loaded into a projector for family slideshow nights, complete with the click-whir sound of advancing to the next slide.”
Answering machine
“A cassette-based device that recorded phone messages while you were out, complete with a blinking light and a beep that meant someone had actually called.”
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8mm home movie camera
“A spring-wound film camera used to shoot silent home movies, capturing birthdays and vacations in grainy, flickering color.”
Rolodex
“A rotating card file for storing names, addresses, and phone numbers on a desk, flipped through by hand before contact lists lived in a phone.”