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67 Old Gadgets That Look Almost Unbelievable Compared To The Technology We Have Today
Technology moves so fast that it sometimes feels impossible to keep up. Everything is touchscreen, smart, AI-powered, and designed to do half the work for us. It definitely makes life easier, but all that sleek modern tech can feel a little boring compared to the chunky buttons, strange shapes, and wonderfully funky gadgets we used to have.
Which brings us to r/OldTech, a subreddit where people share vintage finds they’ve stumbled across. We’ve rounded up some of the coolest ones below. Scroll down and see how many take you straight back in time.
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#1
Found My Dads Old “Music Player”
RELATED:
#2
Does Anyone Know About This TV?
#3
My Grandpa’s Boombox (In Nearly Perfect Condition)
It is January 9, 2007, at Macworld in San Francisco. Steve Jobs is onstage in his usual black turtleneck and jeans, with grey New Balance sneakers on his feet, and in a few minutes he will reveal a device that changes what people expect from a phone for good.
The original iPhone combined a phone and an iPod with desktop-style internet features, all of it controlled through a large multi-touch screen. According to Apple’s own look back at the launch, the result was a completely new way of interacting with a mobile device.
#4
Technology Should've Stopped Right There
The introduction of the first iPhone was one of those moments that split the world into a before and an after. Everyone watching got a glimpse of what technology could achieve, and it felt genuinely shocking back then.
The iPhone is far from the only breakthrough like that, of course. Companies have been dropping incredible innovations throughout history and they still do it today, so it gets easy to forget about plenty of them. So let’s take a walk back through some gadget features that once felt like absolute magic.
#7
Ayo I Got This Old PC Found Outside Was Wondering What It’s Worth Could Be
#8
I Found It In A Trash Can
#9
Old Video Camera I Found At A Rummage Sale!
Rewind to April 1972, when Edwin Land pulled an SX-70 out of his suit pocket at Polaroid’s annual meeting and took five photos in about ten seconds.
The camera folded flat enough to sit inside his jacket, and every picture slid out on its own and developed right in front of him. Before that, instant photos still had to be peeled apart by hand once you took them, so getting rid of that step was a pretty big deal.
Obviously, today we don’t do any of that work. We snap a photo on our phone and it’s sitting in the gallery a second later. But watching an image slowly appear on a piece of paper in your hand must have felt seriously futuristic in 1972.
#10
I Put Together A Whole Period Correct Sony Av Cabinet For 1989
#11
Found This Absolute Dinosaur Of A Printer Still In Daily Use At Sfo International Airport
Bill Swallow 1 week ago
Okidata Microline printers were pretty rugged. I had the Oki 84 wide-carriage. The base was practically battleship-armor steel. You could shove that thing off a table while it was printing and it would never miss a beat.
#12
Found On My Campus In A Dumpster
Seven years later, Sony changed the way people listened to music. The Walkman went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, and you could finally take your own tapes with you anywhere.
The first model came with two headset jacks, labeled guys and dolls, so a friend could plug in and hear the same song. Chairman Akio Morita insisted on that because he thought sitting in public with headphones on felt antisocial. Pretty ironic when you consider that’s all any of us do now.
Either way, the sharing didn’t stop at a second jack. There was also a bright orange button marked “hotline” on the casing, and pressing it faded the music down and switched on a tiny built-in microphone. That let the two of you talk over the track without pulling anything out of your ears.
#14
(?) Motorola Uswest Megaphone
Speaking of features that would feel pretty unnecessary now, IBM had one in 1995 that looked straight out of a spy movie. The ThinkPad 701C came with the famous “Butterfly” keyboard, which actually unfolded when you opened the laptop.
Two sections slid out from inside the case to create a full-size keyboard that was wider than the computer itself. Once laptops got bigger screens and wider bodies, there was no real need for it anymore, but at the time it was an incredibly clever way to squeeze more keyboard into a tiny machine.
#16
Pager/Beeper
DrBronxx 1 week ago
Pagers weren't really a commonplace thing where I'm from. Mostly rich people or people who needed to be contacted quickly, like on-call doctors. So, when I saw them on US TV shows I never really understood how they worked. Like Ross on Friends - jimbo vs jumbo. I never really understood what that was.
#17
I Am Stunned At This Collection Pulled From A Single Box At Parents House / Family Home
Bill Swallow 1 week ago
You'd faint if you saw any one of the boxes in my attic - let alone my server room.
#18
Found My Dream Cd Player Today Locally
Phone makers got especially creative once mobile phones really took off. Before every device became a flat rectangle, there were flips, sliders, and all kinds of strange designs competing for attention.
The Motorola Razr V3, released in 2004, became famous for being ridiculously thin for a flip phone, while Nokia went a step further with the N95 a few years later. That one had a two-way slider, so you could slide it down to reveal the keypad or push it the other way to bring out dedicated music controls.
#19
Cool Tiny TV I Found
#20
Help Save My Collection From The Ewaste Bin!
#21
My Dad Just Gave Me Philips Infra Red Wireless Headphones From '93
Of course, none of this old tech was perfect. A lot of these features were clunky, overcomplicated, or eventually replaced by something much simpler. Still, you have to admit they were fun.
Modern laptops and phones are incredibly capable, but maybe we could bring back a little of that old-school creativity instead of making every new device look almost exactly the same.
#22
My Employee Just Bought This
Duane Ringlein 1 week ago
My granddaughter (21) bought a CD Bluetooth adaptor to play CDs in her car. On her last visit to my house she raided my old CD collection
#24
Rate My Setup
#27
My Little Museum. I Live In A Relatively Small Apartment So I Couldn’t Get A Desk Big Enough To Display Them All
#33
Old Ti Impact Printer
#37
Got My First Phone At 13 And I Still Have It
#38
Found This Gravis Gamepad In A Box Of Old Broken Keyboards
#40
What Is This Phone Port For? Aux?
#41
Found In My Attic
#42
Grand-Father's Pentium 4 Gateway Desktop. What's It Worth?
#43
Good Condition Microsoft Mouse
#45
Help Connecting This To USB
#46
Did You Have These In Your School's Computer Labs Growing Up?
#49
T-Mobile Is Shutting Down 2g Tomorrow For Good. I Was Able To Make One Last Call On This Motorola V70
#50
2026 And Still Reading Books In My 1st Gen iPad
#51
Can Anybody Identify What This Is?
#55
Help, Non-Existent Charger?
Bill Swallow 1 week ago
Get a model number and look it up online. That should lead you to the power input requirements (AC or DC, voltage, connector polarity). Then, if you want, you should be able to find a modern supply that puts out that power, and rig a cable to connect it. That MA-8860C Corwin 02 mentioned is a good place to start, as long as that is a charging cable and not just a data cable.
#56
Keeping It Real. 80gb iPod
#57
Found Old Tech At Parents Old House, What Am I Looking At?
Bill Swallow 1 week ago (edited)
Video board for a 16-bit ISA bus (IBM PC compatible PC of AT vintage or later, pre MCA, EISA, PCI, or PCI Express bus architecture).
#58
Old Home Intercom I'd Love To Restore
#60
I Remember The Day My Dad Installed This Pioneer Elite 50”plasma Screen TV In Our Living Room, It Was Sometime In 2009 And I Was Around 3 Years Old… 16 Years Later And It’s Still Kicking, Never Even Thought About Replacing It
#61
What Is This?
Nicky Colohan 1 week ago
I did an image search and found this. This object appears to be a vintage Suncom 5.25-inch floppy disk notcher, which was used to punch a write-protect-style notch into single-sided floppy disks so they could be flipped over and used as double-sided disks.
#62
Before Nvme, Dinosaurs Walked The Earth. 🦖
Bill Swallow 1 week ago
Looks like a rather bulky specimen of a 5.25" hard disk. Since it seems to use a stepper motor head positioner instead of a voice coil, and given the layout of the enclosure, that seems to be a fairly old unit, even for the type. I'd be tempted to call it an 8" drive instead of 5.25" except for the size of the thumb holding it. Capacity was probably in the 5 to 10 Megabyte range, and the interface / encoding was likely ST-506 / MFM.
#64
Does Anyone Know Exactly What This Is And If I Can Get The Data Onto Mordern Tech?
#65
Found This Old Graphic Card At A Yard Sale. Can Anyone Tell Me If It's Worth Anything?
Ban-One 5 days ago
Old? OK, technical wise it sure is. But I started with MS DOS, thought the Norton Commander is the coolest thing ever when it came out. Way before Windows. Then later on the Soundblaster 2.0 blew my mind...it's been a while. But surely there are some here that started their journey even before...
#66
Got This From My Dad He Doesn’t Know The Password Any Help For A Factory Reset?
Corwin 02 1 week ago
Vintage Toshiba laptops have a built-in backdoor that allows you to bypass the password using a specially formatted 3.5" floppy disk. 1. On a working computer with a floppy drive, insert a blank 3.5" disk. 2. Use a hex editor application to open the disk's boot sector (Sector 1 / Sector 2 depending on the software). 3. Change the first 5 bytes of that sector to exactly: 4B 45 59 00 00 (which spells out "KEY" in hex). 4. Save the changes. You now have a "Keydisk". 5. Put the disk into your 4020CDT and turn it on. 6. When prompted for the password, simply press Enter. It will bypass the lock and let you straight into the BIOS configuration to clear the password permanently.
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