Blackberrys, Film Cameras and All the Other Tech That Makes us Nostalgic

Writers of different generations pen obituaries to the gadgets they miss the most By The Editors of Off Duty March 26, 2023 Tap story

Here's a look back (mostly fondly) on gear that better software and cheaper components have made obsolete. A lawyer mourns typing on his BlackBerry Bold . An auction observer recalls how his iPod Classic made him interact with music. And a doctor reminisces about speaking her notes into a Dictaphone instead of pecking them into an electronic chart while her patient waits. Read more

Film Cameras

The scent of my Gen X adolescence wasn’t watermelon Lip Smacker or the Body Shop’s white musk; it was a vinegary combination of hydroquinone, acetic acid and sodium thiosulfate. Known as “developer,” “stop bath” and “fixer” in darkroom parlance, these pungent potions made printing photos from film cameras possible.

Healthy? Probably not, but it was all part of the process. You had to print photos by hand from the film negative in the dim amber glow of a safelight, using sensitive paper, a device called an enlarger, sloshing trays of the aforementioned solutions—and a whole lot of tactile trial and error. The ritual required attention, and attention made it special. By the time I was initiating a new generation of shooters into the fold, digital cameras had become common. I hear that Gen Z boosters are leading an analog photography comeback. I suppose if it can happen for mom jeans, it can happen for the darkroom. —Sarah Karnasiewicz

PowerPoint

Modern slideshow programs steer you toward building slickly produced “decks.” This wasn’t the case during my middle-school years in the 2000s. Microsoft PowerPoint, with its massive library of hideous bells and whistles, practically insisted that you create truly stupid masterpieces.

Now every deck I’m forced to watch tries to look like it’s my friend. Bring back the bomb guy! My sisters and I still make each other slideshows of the old, janky variety. Their tone is white-collar absurdist, faithful to the medium. “Get Inspired,” chimes one recent slide’s heading, followed by a bulleted list of schlocky advice. Once, this would absolutely have passed at a team-building off-site—or at least earned someone a solid B+ on an eighth-grade final project. Next slide, please. —Amy Rose Spiegel

The iPod

I went to record stores every weekend during college, stretching my budget to build a collection. In 2006, my senior year, I did an about-face, spending $349 for the fifth-generation 80 gigabyte iPod, a portable music library that could store the contents of 40 vinyl crates.

A year after I bought my iPod, the first iPhone came out, which made tagging and syncing up MP3s feel like the chore it was. Eventually, I gave up and began paying for Spotify. More recently, frustrated that the service keeps removing albums I like, I’ve started downloading music again. If I really love an album, I buy it on vinyl. That old iPod still sits near my turntable. But only one of them is collecting dust. —Sami Reiss

AOL Instant Messenger

Born in 1997, AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM) was the world’s first truly ubiquitous instant-messaging client. I remember the Pavlovian response I had to the sound of my best friends signing on (a door creaking open) or signing off (a door slamming shut). Remember when you could just sign off?

AIM taught millennials like me how to exist online—how to craft a digital identity, how to interact with others, and how to test the boundaries of digital pseudo-anonymity. We used the Away Message, which would display when you were offline, to covertly (often, too covertly) send coded messages to crushes. By the time it shut down in 2017, I had long signed off the platform for good and moved on to what I thought were bigger and better things: Twitter and Instagram. I doubt I’ll ever look back on them this fondly. —Michelle Ma

BlackBerry

The BlackBerry was the first piece of technology that made me, a millennial, feel like a grown-up. They were so much lighter (therefore cooler) than the bricks our parents carried. Their raised keyboards elevated hand-held typing to an Olympic-level sport, and Brick Breaker was the only game we needed. Emails fired off with élan.

BlackBerrys felt exclusive and executive. Kim Kardashian carried a BlackBerry Bold to answer emails, though she took selfies on an iPhone. Even former President Barack Obama refused to part with his beloved BlackBerry once he took office. Today, phones are all screen, rarely have a keyboard and easily perform all sorts of gymnastics. But after 10 years of iPhone ownership, I still fumble with the on-screen keyboard, misspelling words and struggling to select text. I’m confident I never made a typo with BlackBerry’s tactile typers. —Todd Plummer

Dictaphone

When I graduated from medical school in 1983, physicians recorded their patient encounters into a hand-held tape recorder. Mine was made by a company called Dictaphone. Each evening, a transcriptionist retrieved its tiny cassette and typed the visit notes on my behalf. I’d review and sign them before they made their way into the patient’s paper records. Alas, paper charts are cumbersome. As electronic medical records became more affordable, then mandatory in 2014, everyone made the switch.

As a shortcut, I use speech-to-text software, but my little group of human transcriptionists understood my slightly southern accent in a way that artificial intelligence can’t seem to manage. Each transcriptionist always added their initials at the bottom of the record. I think of these people I got to know when I sit in my office, pecking away at my keyboard well after everyone else has left for the day. I miss my Dictaphone, but I really miss the humans who made it work. —Colleen Arnold

Google Reader

Ten years ago this July, Google shut down Google Reader, then the best way to read news online. I’m still mad it’s gone. The free service let you subscribe to any publication, then browse all its headlines in one place. This gave me complete control over my media diet. I started each morning with every article from NPR and Lifehacker, plus webcomics from XKCD.

In retrospect, it’s clear Reader shaped not only how we interacted with the web, but also how it was populated. In February, 2013, the month before it was retired due to a declining user base, Reader drove at least 25 million referrals to news sites, according to Buzzfeed. There’s hope we could get a version of the Reader-age internet back. But these days, I approach any new product with caution. It could easily disappear. —Justin Pot

Produced by Shay D. Cohen Photo illustrations: Max-O-Matic; Getty; Alamy Read the full story