Category
Beige boxes, flip phones and anything that needed four AA batteries you did not have.
41 things
The GPO 332 sat in the hall on a special table, weighed about the same as a brick, and had a drawer for the numbers you actually rang.
Two drums, one on wheels, and a Monday morning that took the whole morning.
Pocket sized, leather cased, powered by a PP3 battery, and held against one ear at low volume after lights out.
A ship anchored in international waters playing records all day, listened to under the bedclothes on a transistor radio.
Goblin's bedside contraption: clock, kettle, teapot and lamp, all in one slightly alarming unit.
Britain stayed up for Apollo 11, most of it in front of a set that had been rented specially for the occasion.
Text pages broadcast in the gaps of the TV signal: news, football scores, and page 302 for the weather.
Sunday evening, Radio 1, a C90 in the deck, and a lifetime of recordings with the last two seconds of the DJ on them.
Carbonate your own tap water at home, then ruin it with concentrate that tasted almost but not quite like cola.
A cassette player with headphones and no speaker, which sounded absurd until everybody had one.
Acorn's machine for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, which ended up in nearly every school in Britain.
Sinclair's £175 home computer put programming into British bedrooms and created an entire games industry.
Sony's superior video format lost the war to VHS, leaving a small number of very smug and very stranded households.
The best-selling home computer of all time, and the other half of every argument in every British school in 1985.
A generation booked its holidays off the telly, writing phone numbers down as the pages rotated.
A portable CD player that skipped if you walked, ran on batteries for two hours, and was carried perfectly flat like a waiter.
An entire encyclopedia on one CD, with video clips that ran at postage-stamp size and a "Mind Maze" game nobody finished.
Microsoft launched Windows 95 with a Rolling Stones track and shops opening at midnight, and people actually queued.
56k modems, per-minute charges, and a household rule that nobody used the phone after six.
Rewritable, skip-proof, and you could name every track. Sony's finest format and a commercial disappointment.
The first phone that was genuinely a mass-market object rather than a business tool, with an internal aerial and a game everyone played.
Snake II, composer ringtones, and a reputation for surviving anything, which was mostly deserved.
Nero Burning ROM, a stack of CD-Rs, and a compilation handed over in a paper sleeve with the tracklist on the disc.
Predictive text turned nine keys into a keyboard and created an entire dialect of abbreviations.
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