1980s hotel minibar
It’s the machine that goes “PING!” From the maternity ward scene in the Monty Python movie Meaning of Life.
It’s the chest of drawers from a dolls’ house. Someone’s put a TV on it presumably so they can watch in bed.
Jeffrey Combs
Grandma keeps the Atari in the drawers.
Is it an espresso machine?
Prototype Sony WatchMan
You beat me to it. Take my upvote!
When TVs were first invented, nobody could afford one. Small towns all over the US installed large cabinets outside of every town hall with the biggest CRT screens they could afford in them, which was only about 9" at the time.
People would crowd around them to watch the news every night.
Sometimes they’d do movie nights where they would put up giant curved mirrors to make the picture much bigger, and they’d put up big loudspeakers for the audio. Only problem is that everything would be backwards, so they couldn’t watch movies with subtitles.
Eventually TVs became cheap enough to get in the home, but this was pretty inexpensive entertainment for people, especially during the Great Depression. People would even try to earn a few $ by selling homemade treats during the movie nights.
Back in the old days all subtitles were actually written by humans. TV studios would have huge rooms full of transcriptionists who typed all the subtitles in real time, for every show, on big mechanical keyboards. It’s kind of remarkable they could hear anything over how loud those keyboards were. Eventually Big Stenography started snapping up all the transcriptionist talent so the networks switched to AI transcription, which is why today’s subtitles don’t have the same warmth or depth that classic subtitles have.
The Crushinator
“You gotta romance a fine robot like that!”
That’s a premium piece of tech. A Simmons TCR signal isolator, with mechanical switches. Been decades since I saw one. The new SDRs are technically more efficient, but you could dial this baby in so much better than the autoisolators we work with now. Of course external signal gates are a thing so focusing isn’t really an issue anymore, but damn do I miss spending half an hour hunting for that perfect shade of orange.
I miss the VXJunkies subreddit. Is there an equivalent here?
That’s an old iphone from the 80s.
This is a old filing cabinet with a screen for indexing.
Original Model Janet from the Beta version of The Good Place.
That’s the thing that made Shaka’s walls fall.
A Dalek with an office job.
