We had "swat toys" a long time before that.
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Pics from my 1966 Topps Batman complete set. I really dug Cat Woman as a kid and still do. Looked like Batman and Boy Wonder did also.

The number 1 card “The Batman” in really nice shape is hard to find. Mine is alright. I am 50 now and wasn’t even born yet and wanted to complete this set. Early in the pandemic I was bored and kept an eye on Ebay for lots of nice condition cards and pieced a set tougher. Kinda fun. Shame that Stern put the reprint set cards in the BM 66 pin.

To add along with Batman, Mars Attacks and Civil War News were the best non sports card sets from the 1960’s IMHO.

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I bought so many different 5-cent packs of trading cards and stickers as a kid. The neighborhood corner drug store seemed to have something new every week.
One of my favorites cards was the 1964 Munsters card #1.

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Kools. Yech. When I was a smoker and was looking to bum a cigarette I would turn down a Kool and go without

This thread is too cool! It inspires lots of internet searches as posts get added ...

I did not play with Dark Wing Duck in 1991 as I was already an adult at the time, but there sure was some cool Playmates merch - I just added this one to the Pinball Loft this week. He's over a foot tall!
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That graded gum pic is great. I have unopened wax boxes of sports cards from the 80’s. Recently a friend and I opened some packs and “double dog” dared each other to eat the gum from those packs.

The result was similar to the kid who licked the flagpole in Christmas Story. Don’t eat “vintage” 35 year old gum folks! What were we thinking??

I remember that I would start saving up my lunch money every October to buy new stuff for that years upcoming Xmas train garden. The scale models were (and I assume still are) expensive. Would head to the hobby shop wanting to get that nice brick police station or maybe even a factory or two. Instead my 13 year old budget could only afford this ….

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Think this was one of the cheapest models at the time. Cheap enough to buy one or two a week. Soon had enough to them to theme my next years garden as “Under Development” no trees, shrubs or paper rolls of grass needed. Just dirt from local baseball diamond and a few matchbox construction vehicles. Think I bought 3 boxes of the little construction worker sets and I was good to go.

Toaster pizza at it's prime. Hot and dangerous, the molten lava sauce was guaranteed to blister the roof of your mouth and the hot globs of cheese would pull out all gooey and scald your chin. I've burned the roof of my mouth since, but NOWHERE as horribly as with these. The only food I loved that I had to recover from for a few/many days to eat them again. Also the ruin of many toasters....

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The last one I bought was a VCR/DVD combo from Walmart for around $50.00. About 5 years ago.

And now that they are no longer manufactured, the prices for VCRs are taking off on eBay, especially NOS ones.

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A few years ago, VCR players were a dime a dozen in the pawn shops. Now, if you can find one, you pay up.

I have a high end Mitsubishi VCR (NIB)
that I bought about 15-20 yrs ago
but never used.
Might get what i paid for it way back when,
assuming the drive belts have not rotted.

They're still on the cheap side in most thrift store. But just like vintage video games, those prices will go up.

One item to look for is one of these:pasted_image (resized).png

Funai made the only VCR that could record ATSC broadcasts on VHS. So this is the only VCR you can record over the air directly still.
It was also sold as a Magnavox combo recorder/player as well. I have one of these (unfortunatly it's broken at this time).
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Since we're on the topic of vintage electronics, who had any one of these?
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And who is better than Isaac Asimov promoting the TRS-80?
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...Samuel L. Jackson promoting the Power Book!
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That picture of Asimov made me laugh. I saw him speak during a Star Trek convention in the mid '70s. During his talk, he had mentioned that he had recently gotten his first word processor.

Afterwards, I got to talk with him for a bit, and asked him if the word processor increased his (famously prolific) writing speed. He said that it actually made him slower - because now he spent more time "word crafting" stuff, since it was so easy to make changes.

Previously, when using a typewriter, making changes was so annoying that he would stick with whatever he originally wrote, unless it was a clear "mistake". With the word processor, he said he spent a lot more time making small "improvements" that he never would have bothered with before.

So while he thought it made him slower, he thought that the end result was better writing. I always thought that was interesting.

Not one of those, but still have a Mac Plus with a whole 1 MB of memory!! Originally I had the external floppy drive as well, but after getting tied of doing the floppy disc shuffle, I got a 60MB external drive. At the time people would say "what would you ever need 60MB for".

From that list, I had the Apple IIe, the TRS 80 CoCo, and the PowerBook 100. I still have both of the Apples.

My, Robot

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I have a PowerBook 100, 140 and 170 here. I loved the 100 and wrote two books with it while on a boat. Its screen was easily readable in the sun. I called mine PeeWee the PB. <G>

///Rich Wolfson

The earliest Mac I ever had was a SE-30, but I do have a G4 cube
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I have everything like the one in the picture except for the speakers. Maybe some day I'll set it up in the garage and get a picture of Snake-Jazz with it.SnakeJazz iMacs (resized).jpg

I found my old 20Q handheld game in a box of stuff the other day.
It has the year 2004 on the back. Are they still being made?
This thing is incredible. However, if I answer all the questions while thinking of “pinball machine,” the 20Q’s best guess is “slot machine.”

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My all-time favorite MAD Magazine song parody. From MAD Follies #4 (1966).

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This was my first one. I spent many hours playing the old Sierra adventure games (King's Quest, Space Quest, etc.) on it.

Of course, much of that time was spent listening to horrible grinding noises (and possibly swapping a disk) while waiting for the next screen to load. Nothing teaches patience quite like 5 1/4" floppy disks.

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Except maybe using the cassette tape loader on a Commodore 64...

A Tool shop I worked for in the early 80s had two like this to make programs on paper tape in ASCII.
Then load the program into the CNC turning centers via its tape reader
one guy could even read the tape (punched holes no text)

The engineering on the cube is really well done, how it all fits together.

Oh, yes, The Cube. It was beautiful. And then rumors started happening of cat hair getting into the CD slot. For whatever reason, Cube sales did not materialize. This cratered Apple's earnings and the stock followed. It was a wild ride down for the stockholders at the time.

This machine brings back memories both good and bad from early in my work career in the oil field.
It was a pain in the butt to create and load up those paper tapes,
but it did save a lot of time in running simulations and calculations
that prior had to be done by hand.

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yeah, but it's nothing compared to the noise a C64 1541 made while at work.

iSore

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I had an iMac. I learned to not like the hockey puck, one-button mouse.

another blast from the past.

From Montgomery Wards ( Remember MW? )

I bought a new microwave a couple of years ago. I think I paid around $125.00 for it.

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Classic Macs? Here's something you won't see often, not one, but two Macintosh Portables (or Mac Lugables as we called them back in the day). For good measure, I'll throw in a still shrink wrapped Service binder.

Lugables

Service

Montgomery Wards !! My older brother said, he knew he was an Adult when he got his Montgomery Wards Credit Card.

Our family bought every thing from Wards or Broadway.

As kids we called it Monkey Wards. Do you remember the Best Products catalog showrooms?

My dad recently gave me a bunch of keypunch cards, and showed me this card carrier that he still has with his first program.

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I took a semester of Cobol in college. It was gobs of punchcards. All we had for storage was a correct size paper box. I felt sorry for the girl who dropped her box of cards that went everywhere.

When I was in college, I spent months working on a complex (for the time anyway) Star Trek game on punchcards. I had two full boxes of cards written, and had lots more work to do on it. I never finished the punchcard version, but years later used a bunch of my ideas from it to make this...
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Such a bargain!
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Mind you the $499 was for the computer only. No tape drive, no monitor.

But the TRS-80 Model Two though!
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I remember these little shrimp cocktails in glass cups with metal lids.
My Mom liked to save the empty glasses.
I never got the joke until just now that “Sau-Sea” meant “Saucy.”

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My grandmother cried when my parents gave her a microwave and stand just like the one in your pic.

My Dad always yelled at everyone not to stand in front of/near it when it was being used.

One of the older teens in my neighborhood had the apple 2. All games before they came out on the market too. He was Connected.

That was the best home arcade, when we could access it. Up in town they were installing new arcades every week.

I don’t think it was zork 1, but it might have been.

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Not sure if anyone ever had tente.

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