I loved looking at all of these! That G4 Mac blasted me back to high school
I thought I’d share with you all this 1986 Zenith portable TV my dad gifted me a while back:
I have it hooked up to my partner’s old Gamecube with the help of some adapters. ^_^ I love how cute and small it is!
I remember we had an even smaller portable TV back in the early 90s that my dad played Mario on. I think it was something like this one:
Oh man lots of core memories unlocked! I miss this not super practical but very fun Nokia Twist phone:
liquid filled mice … i wish i owned one, but i’ve always been fascinated by the concept. also sliding phones i say being the owner of an old nokia sliding one, or as it’s been lovingly dubbed, the brick
I first learned UNIX and the rudiments of programming on one of these machines in college, a SPARCstation 20 by Sun Microsystems.
It probably isn’t aesthetically pleasing to anybody else, but I’ve always associated this machine with power and discovery. It probably wouldn’t be very practical to buy one secondhand in 2025, though, but it was a beast in 1996 compared to the 386s and 486s running DOS and Windows 3.11 I knew from high school.
these systems are pretty cool. when i was more interested in owning an old computer i was exploring architectures besides x86 and had looked at SPARCstations in addition to IBM systems using their POWER processor
i like that this system, similar to some older Apple Performas, has a bit of a pizza box appearance. there were a lot of desktop systems like this in the 90s. but i love that this one and the Apple Performa i mentioned were rather slim desktop systems compared to the IBM compatible version of a desktop
The machines I used in college had really sweet Sun-branded Sony Trinitron CRT displays. Between that and the nice serif console font, these machines were a joy to use even though the only editors available were ed
and vi
. (No Emacs.)
Oh man, what a thread!
I’m just gonna leave this here:
More info: Nokia 7110 - GSM Collection
I’d roll one of these today if I could. I know people fawn over iPhones, but in my mind, phones peaked right here with this Nokia. Not featured on that photo is lume green backlight of the screen. Makes it look so lively, and gives it an alien tech-sheen IMO!
my mom has the exact same keyboard omg what a funny coincidence
Me too! I want modern tech with those aesthetics to be more widely available.
And I want more designers to understand that minimalism is allowed to be colorful and playful too.
Semitranslucent colourful plastic or metal stuff like minidisc, old playstation memory cards and controllers, portable cd players, that kind of thing.

minidiscs definitely caught my attention on looks alone. DVD-RAM looks kind of neat too!
Speaking of minidiscs, those tiny GameCube discs were delightful. And the GameCube itself, too. Even the totally impractical handle was kind of charming.
omg i had a palm pilot in high school. it was a Palm Zire. i was fucking obsessed with palm pilots