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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Laserdisc
“An early optical video disc format the size of a vinyl record, offering sharper picture quality than VHS but never becoming mainstream.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Camcorder
“A shoulder-mounted or handheld video camera that recorded straight to tape, responsible for hours of shaky home movies and birthday party footage.”
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Walkman
“A portable cassette player with foam headphones that let you take your music collection anywhere, one AA battery at a time.”
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Discman
“A portable CD player known for skipping if you so much as jogged with it, eventually solved by "anti-skip" buffering technology.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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