Daily One Inch Button - Floppy Disk 3.5"

How solid they were. How formidable when compared to the bigger disks that preceded them, that held half as much information and yet were so much more prone to being broken. Then there was that ickle little tab that caused so much consternation - was it locked or unlocked? Could you write to the disk or not? I remember the moment when I saw that computers were no longer coming loaded with the 3.5" disk drives. I thought, how are we going to get our data from one place to another? Now there are little gadgets the size of a thumb that hold as much as a thousand of these disks. Imagine how much easier it would have been to install Space Quest IV if it had come on a thumb drive instead of a dozen of these?

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Daily One Inch Button - Old TV

Please Note: This was posted on Sunday, June 08. The management of the Daily One Inch Button will be away from computers from Sunday evening until Tuesday evening due to the Jewish holiday of Shavuos.

Oh, televisions. In ye old merry times, we would watch things like the moon walk and President Nixon admitting that he was not, in fact, a crook. Okay, so I wasn't alive for either of those monumental events but many people watched them on old televisions like this adorable one here.

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Daily One Inch Button - Portable Tape Deck

Many men (and women) were and currently are able to walk with this device, which did not necessarily mean that they were or are even now walk men and walk women. I personally was super jealous when my friends got newer models than me with all kinds of fancy functions whereas mine seemed to be older and came from sales of the garage variety. I was actually looking for one earlier today - it has a special function that allows it to record via an internal or external microphone. That's a special kind of tape deck.

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Daily One Inch Button - Transistor Radio

You're not going to be able to hear Howard Stern on this radio. There's no Martha Stewart channel, either. This is the kind of radio that people used to listen to Guiding Light, when it was a radio soap opera. People listened to all kinds of dramatic recordings on the radio - still do in the UK and other countries. I wonder if there are people out there listening to This American Life on this kind of radio. It may not be commercial free but it also doesn't come with an annual subscription fee.

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Daily One Inch Button - Turntable

When I was a young lad, my brother and I would take really old records from the cheap bins at the Princeton Record Exchange and make scratch experimentations with them. We wanted to be like Run DMC but we usually sounded like two white kids in West Windsor, scratching cheap records.

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Daily One Inch Button - Old Style Phone

For some people, this mobile phone is the definition of old. For most of us, this style of phone was not used in our lifetimes. When I was a kid we actually owned a rotary phone but it certainly wasn't like this one. What a cheerful phone it is, though.

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Daily One Inch Button - Jukebox Hero!

The last time I saw a jukebox, it was internet capable, downloading new tracks from a server and having a capacity of tens of thousands of songs - quite a change from the jukeboxes depicted on Happy Days, what with their vinyl records and a capacity of maybe a hundred songs tops.

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Daily One Inch Button - Gramophone

If you'd like, you can pretend there's a happy dog sitting right next to that gramophone. He's only too happy to play you some Dizzy Gilepsie but if you have "Remain In Light" on vinyl he'll play that for you as well. Actually, he's one of the only ways to play Pearl Jam's annual Holiday single - they're only on vinyl. I should know - 10 club for life, yo.

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Daily One Inch Button - Teleprinter

They came into prominence during World War II - the image of people sitting at enormous devices, transmitting data slowly comes to mind. Though these machines are now more or less obsolete, they do have a grandchild that is still out there, helping deaf people communicate through the written word. It may not be as snazzy as a standard Blackberry but it certainly gets the job done.

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Daily One Inch Button - Daguerrotype Camera

As our friend wikipedia says, the Daguerrotype was the first commercially viable camera because hours of waiting weren't needed to take photos. One of my favorite photographs of Edgar Allen Poe actually was taken on this type of camera. When I was in photography class back in the day, I used to want to be able to use this kind of camera. Too bad ebay didn't exist - I could have gotten one. Alas.

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Daily One Inch Button - Royal Manual Typewriter

I bought a typewriter like this one in 1998 - it was a Royal manual. My grandmother obm took one look at it and laughed, telling me that when she was working at one job in Romania (sometime in the 1940s I think) they had one of those typewriters and it was considered old. Show your love for old typewriters with this button. More old typewriters to be added soon iy"H.

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