Radio Nurse: Shoddy Goods 019
1What was your most loved (or most hated) baby and kid tech, either from you raising a kid or something you remember growing up?
I remember Speak & Spell seeming just like a super-computer to me. I even had the ET module plug-in. And somehow Merlin, which just seems totally unusable to me now, was basically as cool as a game console.
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As a kid, we had a mechanical typewriter. I had no issues with typing tests that came years later in middle school. Also for running out of reading materials, I resorted to atlases and various Thomas Guide map books.
Electronics: one of those Science Fair kits from Radio Shack.
Never got a good enough signal for the AM crystal radio, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Had that too
As a kid, color TV was as fancy as it got. I remember getting my first electric typewriter as I went to college, from KMart I think actually,
From raising a kid? The old Apple ][+
not the ][E
we got a used one for her when she was about 5, used a TV as a monitor. Tubed TV. LOL
never had a game system until she was old enough for like a Sega Genesis. and it was the only one ever. We had (for the time) fancy computers so never went there. Her favorite game was Dungeon Hack.
@Cerridwyn I’m still rocking a IIe at my desk
My daughter’s first console was an Atari 2600. It’s important to teach the classics 
@capnjb
/image thumbs up
Wasn’t that much “tech” for kids around at my time, when it was still 50-50 whether a house had a color TV or black & white. Did get a brand new RCA 9V battery-powered transistor radio as a present when i was about 10 or so. Not too much bigger than a boxed deck of poker cards. First i had ever seen in person, though i knew there were such things. Thought it was so cool. Especially that on a car trip i could listen to my own music (through the rinky-dink primitive wired ear bud).
@phendrick I remember those. I took it to school to listen on the bus to goodness gracious maybe the moon landing or some other Apollo launching because they fascinated us all back then. I remember it got stolen from my locker
@phendrick
You forgot to say monaural earbud, although TBH, it was implied.
I was introduced to ‘tech’ by receiving a battery-operated portable cassette recorder for Christmas when I was about 9 or 10, which also TBH was really quite low tech.
@Cerridwyn @phendrick I took my cigarette size Japanese radio (No speaker, just earphone) to school (2nd grade) to listen to a NASA blast off. I got in trouble! (1959-1960)
/image electronic quarterback
Three things that I inherited from my older brother; a Gilbert chemistry set, an American Flyer train set, and two boxes of Erector Set stuff.
I had a Speak & Math. Got a lot of work out of the workbooks. (In fact, I had a few Disney books-with-tape – little read-alongs with their old picturebooks: Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Cinderella. And some Bugs Bunny light novels. Even a Ninja Turtles comic with a read-along.)
I remember I had this book with barcodes – you would scan the barcode and it would trigger a specific phrase or sound effect from the soundbox (similar to those “push the cow to hear it moo” toys).
I had a Talk ‘n Play, for which you bought sets of a book and cassette tape that would prompt you to follow the story and answer questions/interact with the character in the book & recording by pressing one of four colored buttons. It would know which color you pushed and play the correct response track. It would even tell you to turn the page! Looking back it was extremely clever and interactive for a cassette player.
When I was in college I worked as a security guard at two buildings in Costa Mesa that had the Noguchi Garden in the center of the buildings. It had just been built, it was finished in 1982. It was extremely unpleasant. There was a bunch of tiny trees and no shade. Extremely hot, like a desert. One of the “sculptures” if you could call it that, was a bunch of rocks piled on top of each other. It was called Spirit of the Lima Bean. It was incredibly pretentious. I thought it was awful.
35 years later my boyfriend worked in that building, so I went to visit the gardens again. I didn’t realize that the tiny trees were redwoods so they became huge. But still, half the park had no shade. But it was better. Isamu Noguchi apparently did have a vision for the future. It still wasn’t a great place to eat lunch, which is what it was for.
https://www.travelcostamesa.com/play/arts-and-museums/visual/california-scenario-noguchi-garden