Interesting Old Videos Showcasing Technology Of The Day

BillDL

The "Retro Tech" playlist of the BBC Archives channel on YouTube is a place that I would strongly encourage some of the younger members here to visit.

It gives a fascinating insight into how advanced certain technologies were for their day back in the 70s, 80s (and probably some from the 90s also), but it also gives a good insight into how advanced we have become and which of those technologies did not come to fruition or were superseded.

Here are some randomly selected examples

Tomorrow's World 1971 - An amazing new development that uses an electronic control box mounted under the dashboard that is connected to a car's speedometer and to a "cassette of tape" containing a pre-recorded route instruction.  Dependent on the tyre size (changeable with a circuit board to match your tyre diameter), electronic beeps are sent to the cassette player to start and stop playback so that it it can keep the interval timings for the voice instructions syncronised with the distance travelled since the last instruction.

A 1986 update on the 1971 in-vehicle navigational aid using CDs and a conveniently dash-mounted discrete 15" CRT TV

Tomorrow's World 1979 - Demonstration of a newfangled self-dial mobile phone. Prior to this the portable phones in a suitcase were connected manually to a recipient number by a switchboard operator.

1981 / 1982 - Introducing the amazing new Compact Disc