What do you remember being invented?

[compo]

ITV
Colour television
Affordable ball point pens

 

[Melonfish]

I remember when you used to be able to shake a can of coke up and then pop the ringpull slightly you'd get a jet of coke that went like 20-30 feet! of course those were the completely removable tabs, i remember when these changed, i was so GLAD! i'd once gashed my finger open pulling those tabs off.
upside, easier to open can, downside, no more ringpull frizbee's.

i remember marathon changing to snickers.
i remember 5 and a quarter inch floppies being the new thing, then 3.5inch floppies being even better! hell i remember when they went double density and ramped the memory from 77k to 1.4mb!

 

[Chromatic]

I also remember the Sinclair scientific calculator - must have in 1975 for every biochemistry undergraduate. Then 1976 a programmable version came out - I had to have that. I'm not sure it helped my studies but I felt like a proper scientist with it sitting in the breast pocket of my lab coat.

I've got a Sinclair Cambridge Scientific on my desk now, I just got it out of my drawer to have a little play with it after reading this.

 

[machew]

I had a nice business at uni, buying in 720kb FDD for about 10p each, punching a hole in the corner formatting them to 1.44mb and selling them for £1 each.

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

Shopping malls? I don't know if they were really invented or if they just evolved from indoor markets + mass consumerism, but they weren't there when I was a kid. And together with malls came automatically opening doors because opening your own doors was deemed far too complicated.


Cycle lanes and cycle helmets.

And somewhere along the line Health and Safety got invented.

Computer arcade games, such as Space Invaders and Asteroids, were great fun when they arrived in the pubs. Almost as good as pinball. So it hasn't all been bad...

 

[Globalti]

I remember buying my first CD, it was best of the Stranglers.

 

[TheDoctor]

Teletext.

 

[Cheddar George]

Plastic fizzy drink bottles ..... i still remember the thrill of seeing the first bottle in the supermarket that could hold a full 2 litres ! To a small child this was massive leap forward for the human race.

 

[buddha]

cd player - and the indestructible cd's (I think I remember Tomorrow's World showing an elephant walking on a cd?)

I saw an article on the BBC site yesterday, where a 'student' had created a camera that tells the photographer a description of what they have taken. The report seemed to hail it as something wonderful and innovative. Except that all it does is send the picture online and 'menial' people will manually describe the picture (for a fee) and send that description back to the photographer.

 

[Arch]

Shopping malls? I don't know if they were really invented or if they just evolved from indoor markets + mass consumerism, but they weren't there when I was a kid. And together with malls came automatically opening doors because opening your own doors was deemed far too complicated.

I think they were a habit we picked up from the States weren't they? I agree, when I was a kid, you walked from shop to shop outdoors. That was in Belfast. But when we moved back to Leicester, they already had the Haymarket Centre - I've just looked it up and that was built in '73, so Belfast was just behind the times - understandably, given the circumstances...

Here's the Haymarket, she's a beauty ain't she?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nedtrifle/1135092137/

 

[lukesdad]

Girls, I was probably about 12 at the time.

 

[compo]

I remember when I was young enough to remember.

 

[postman]

Widgets in beer cans.

 

[Hover Fly]

I like the sound they make, but stoppering an expensive liquid with a squidgy bit of tree Makes No Sense.

EDIT Corks, that is. Not fax machines. I don't like the noise faxes make at all.

It does if it is a good wine expected to age, it supposedly lets about the right of air through, experiments to make a suitable porous screw cap have so far been dismal failures. Incidently "corked" wine is more often caused by bad hygiene than the cork. And what would happen to all the cork forets in Portugal if people stopped using cork?

 

[rb58]

Central locking on cars.