14 Obsolete Electronics from the ’80s That Would Confuse Today’s Tech-Savvy Kids

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The 1980s were a golden era of electronics, and there were many that were ground breaking at the time, but they are all either long outdated or have far evolved. When a device was ‘portable’, it was usually a device the size of a small briefcase, and the technological marvel that was once considered ‘portable’ is inconsequential compared to the most basic of modern devices.

If you were a kid in the ’80s, these gadgets were a staple of everyday life, but to today’s tech savvy kids, they might as well be alien artifacts.

Camcorders

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In the ’80s, you had to have a camcorder to capture home movies, and that was no small task. Carrying one around was a mini workout, and these bulky devices needed an entire shoulder to balance them. Camcorders were awkward, heavy, and didn’t even have fancy touchscreens—just some hefty buttons and were unlike today’s smartphones that shoot in HD with a few taps.

Walkman

Any ’80s teen who wanted to listen to music on the go needed the Sony Walkman. Picture the joy of inserting a cassette, if it got tangled, rewinding with a pencil, and listening to it on this boxy little device with earphones that were far from ‘comfortable’. Today’s wireless earbuds and streaming services have long replaced it, and many kids wouldn’t know what to do with a cassette if they saw one.

Portable TV

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Screens are everywhere today, but a portable TV was a pricey novelty in the ’80s. They were usually black and white mini televisions with clunky antennas that would constantly need adjusting. But hey, you may not find any channels worth watching. And kids today have TVs in HD that stream almost anything on demand, so trying to get decent reception on a 5 inch screen would seem prehistoric.

Fax Machine

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Before email, the fax machine was the go to for getting documents out quickly. A test of patience was watching one of these slow machines print out page after page of blurry, low quality copies. In this digital age, the notion of dropping paper into a machine to ‘send’ it would be, quite literally, baffling.

Boom Box

It was not just an electronic device, but a cultural icon. These massive portable radios could blast out music, but usually they needed a stack of D batteries that would die in hours. Kids who are used to pocket sized smartphones with unlimited playlists would probably think this idea of having to carry around this heavy contraption just to listen to your tunes, is absurd.

Rotary Phone

Black Rotary Telephone on White Surface — Photo Credit: chepté cormani/Pexels

For today’s kids, the rotary phone could be the pinnacle of obsolete technology. To make a call you had to dial each number manually, and it was a slow process, especially if someone’s number had a lot of nines. Then, add in the fact that there’s no caller ID or voicemail, and you can see why the idea of these devices makes so little sense in the age of instantaneous communication.

VHS Tapes and VCR

Watching a movie at home was very different long before streaming, you had to pop a VHS tape into a VCR. You couldn’t ‘skip’ to a particular scene, you had to have to rewind or fast forward through it manually, which could take minutes. Today’s on demand generation could be bewildered by the clunky, noisy process and those bulky cassette tapes.

Floppy Disk

The floppy disk was a symbol of early computer storage with a capacity that would be laughable by today’s standards. Think about the need to store the equivalent of a single high quality photo on multiple disks! Today, we have cloud storage and terabyte hard drives, so it’s no wonder kids today would be confused by a floppy.

Cassette Tapes

Cassette tapes existed before Spotify and CDs. If you were lucky, these little plastic rectangles contained around an hour of music. Skip to your favorite song? You’ll better be prepared to fast forward, hoping you stopped at the right place. For today, the idea of physical tapes with magnetic strips might sound utterly alien.

Atari Game Console

Back in the day, the Atari console was a gaming marvel, but now it’s worlds away from today’s consoles. The graphics were simple, the games were pixelated, it only had a joystick and one button. Kids brought up on lifelike graphics would probably wonder why people would spend hours playing Pong or Space Invaders.

Pagers

The primitive ancestor of the smartphone was the pager, or “beeper.” Your pager would display their number in return if someone wanted to reach you and they could page your number. Then, you would have to find a phone to call them back. To kids who have grown up with texting and instant messaging, this system might sound comically inefficient.

Film Cameras

In an age where it’s as easy as tapping a screen to take a picture, film cameras are almost ancient history. Film rolls meant you couldn’t take as many photos as you wanted, and they had to be developed, no immediate previews or retakes! Today’s kids only see film cameras in an art class, making them a vintage curiosity in modern digital photography.

Answering Machine

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There was the answering machine before cell phones with voicemail. It was a little tape recorder connected to the landline and anyone could leave a message after the beep. It required tapes, maintenance, and usually cut people off mid sentence. People had to wait until they got home to see if someone left them a message and kids today might not believe that.

Dot Matrix Printer

The dot matrix printer was noisy, slow and used paper with holes on the sides. Each line would take what seemed like ages to print, a single page only, because each line would be punched out, one dot at a time. It’s hard not to compare this clunky contraption to today’s high speed, wireless color printers.

Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.