Category: Found in the Garage

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Laser? I hardly know her!

Time for another trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, dear readers! This installment of “Found in the Garage” leaps from the ancient days of the reel-to-reel recorder to . . . the ancient days of the first CD player!

What you see is a Hitachi DA-1000, which evidently was The Bomb of 1st gen CD players. It may not be capable of playing home-burned CDs, but it is old enough to buy you alcohol, dating back to around 1983. Here’s some guy’s video of it in action.

(Note: I may still have my Toshiba home DVD player from 2000 somewhere, but I’m sorta hoping that I managed to lose it a few years ago.)

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Amped up!

I know that everything had significance upon a time, but there really was a ton of junk in the garage until last week’s purge.

Today’s archeological finding? The amp for my brother’s bass guitar!

There’s a sordid tale of teen angst and paternal neglect behind this one, but my bro can dish on that if he pleases.

There’s also a tale of mystery as to the whereabouts of the aforementioned bass guitar, but I’m convinced it was sold for drug money by the previous occupant in the house (during the 5-year interregnum before the Rothstoration).

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Up above, aliens hover, shooting home movies for the folks back home

While cleaning out the garage this week (I have the best stay-at-home vacations!), I came across some fun artifacts.

First up: my dad was a professional photographer, and I guess he also shot home movies (pleasedon’tturnouttobeBobCrane):

The item on the left is a Bolex Paillard P3 Zoom Reflex 8mm camera, c. 1963-4. The item on the right is a Flip video camera, c. 2008.

Looking this up online, I find that people still shoot with this Bolex; I should read more to find out how they justify using it instead of our various video and hard-drive based options. Were the lenses that much better then?

More to come . . .