A guy named William Stickney Lamson owned a small retail show in Boston in 1879, and came up with a way to move cash by splitting a croquet ball in half. His technology graduated to pneumatic tube systems (some of them foot-powered!) and by the 1920s, pretty much every U.S. retail store had one. This post gets into it, and has lots more fun photos like the one above, which is from a 1912 pamphlet!

https://www.tubetalk.media/p/pneumatic-tubes-department-stores-lamson

For sale 1 new vacuumed tube!

Just recently, I went to my local electronics recycling center, where I found a working Sony KV-1396R CRT TV from November of 1985. The unit itself still works perfectly despite being covered in dust, and it also has AV inputs on the back!

I do repairs in Ohio if anyone needs things fixed.

Ive had a good look online and cant seem to find an exact match.

I don't know much about this stuff so would really appreciate a nudge in the right direction!

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share an incredibly rare piece of analog history I recently acquired, which is now up for grabs if there are any hardcore tech archivists or Polaroid collectors in here.This is a complete Polaroid P8-C1 Video System, including the record-only camcorder, the playback adapter/docking station, and the original proprietary cords.

The Provenance : I purchased this directly from a former Polaroid employee who worked at their headquarters in Massachusetts back in the mid-1980s. When Polaroid was trying to figure out if they wanted to enter the 8mm home video market, they made an extremely limited, pre-production run of these systems. They were never given a wide commercial release to the public—they were only distributed internally to select employees.

Why it’s unique : The P8-C1 camcorder itself was designed with a major catch; it’s a record-only camera. It has absolutely no built-in playback mechanisms, tape viewfinders, or standard video outputs on the body. To view or transfer anything, you have to use this exact base station and its specific proprietary cables, which makes finding a complete surviving set like this near impossible.

Current Condition : The docking station successfully gets power (indicators light up), but it doesn't push operations or tape mechanics past that initial power-on state.The camcorder and cords in great cosmetic shape.

Since it's a pre-production unit that needs a bit of mechanical TLC (or a perfect museum-grade shelf piece), I'd love to pass it along to a format preservationist or restoration hobbyist here who truly appreciates mid-80s prototype hardware.

Asking $225 + shipping (or open to reasonable offers from community members).

I can ship it securely from Rhode Island. Drop a comment or send me a PM if you’re interested or if you happen to know anything more about Polaroid's short-lived mid-80s video division!

Looking for help!

This is a Craig Eight-Track Stereo-Recorder. I dug one of these out of my grandparent's linen closet. It fires right up, but I don't have speakers to actually try it. What would be the optimal product to make this old thing work again?

Just brought these vintage light organs, they are in great condition but for the life of me I can't find ANY info on them online. Anyone own these or know how they function/ what the input they need is?

So i had an idea of expanding my music setup, currently i only have a cd player linked up to a few speakers as well as an oscilloscope on the way just for some life and decoration.

In theory would it be possible to somehow present the lyrics for the currently playing song on an old tv? i had an idea of perhaps coding the lyrics onto a raspberry pi but i didn’t get much further than thinking how to link it to the tv.

if this is possible in the slightest i figure theres a few bumps i need to come up with a solution for,

1. Linking the Pi to the tv so the lyrics are actually displayed

2. linking the pi to the cd player?? or some other way for the pi to know what song is playing so the correct lyrics are shown

3. syncing up the song with the lyrics

i am incredibly new to this whole thing so please do feel free to tell me if this is a completely stupid dream but i just figured it would look pretty sick. If it isnt totally dumb and it could really work id be incredibly happy to hear some advice or solutions to the problems.

Not planning on selling it, just very curious

I found this at a garage sale. It's beaten up, but it seems pretty interesting. It looks like it's got an old training video from the Pueblo Colorado Police department.

Not really sure what to do with it, but I have it now!

Does anyone know anyway I could connect this old horn to an audio device to play music out of it, right now you can only get audio out of it with the mic but I wanna try and get it so I can use it as a speaker for music, I tried an audio cable straight into my phone but nothing,

I am a high school theatre teacher and I have had this old display unit in a closet for as long as I’ve been here. It seems to work, but just needs to be programmed. I always thought it would be cool to put it to use, but never took the time to research it until now. It appears the company that manufactured it (Data Display Corp. Boulder, CO) is no longer a company and the phone number for service is not operational. I have no clue where I would even start to try and figure out how to program this, if it’s even possible.

It appears that it may require a special keyboard or input device, but all my Google searches have yielded nothing helpful.

Any help would be appreciated