Can you name these obsolete gadgets?
Every one of these felt like the future at some point. Now they’re museum pieces or punchlines, depending on how old the person laughing happens to be.
One detail per gadget. Name the device behind it.
How it works
Read the clue, take a guess, then scroll down for the reveal and a bit of the device’s actual history.
Question 1
Introduced in 1979. Turned music into something private for the first time, no longer something a whole room had to listen to whether it wanted to or not.
Answer
The Sony Walkman. Sold 400 million units counting later Discman models, and the word itself eventually landed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Rare honor for a piece of consumer electronics.
Question 2
A small belt-worn box that could only receive a phone number. Forced an entire coded shorthand language into existence, just to communicate anything beyond “call me.”
Answer
The pager, or beeper. Usage climbed from 3.2 million units in the early 1980s to 64 million by 1994, before cell phones wiped the market out almost entirely by the early 2000s. Fast rise. Faster fall.
Question 3
Held a maximum of 1.44 megabytes. Sounds absurd now. Was genuinely revolutionary computer storage in its day.
Answer
The floppy disk. Mid-1990s, more than 5 billion units sold worldwide, every single year. Its icon still means “save”; on the software most people use, they have never actually touched one.
Question 4
Pocket-sized digital organizer, 1997. Mostly notes and contacts. None of the internet access that would eventually define its replacement.
Answer
The Palm Pilot, part of the broader PDA category. Handled scheduling capably enough, but its whole function got absorbed into the smartphone within a decade of release.
Question 5
A small cassette tape sat inside this thing, recording every missed call while a family was out. A blinking light announcing exactly how many messages were waiting.
Answer
The answering machine. Once a fixture beside every landline. Disappeared almost entirely once voicemail moved directly onto the phone itself, no separate hardware required anymore.
Question 6
Removable disk storage, 1994. Briefly bridged the gap between an outdated format and whatever would eventually replace it too.
Answer
The Iomega Zip drive. Held far more than a floppy disk ever could, right up until USB thumb drives made the whole concept of a separate storage disk feel pointless within just a few years.
Question 7
CD-playing successor to a cassette-based portable player. Famous for one specific flaw: skip too much while walking, and the music cut out entirely.
Answer
The Discman. Anti-skip protection never fully solved the problem it existed to fix. Friends tapping the case to make it skip on purpose became a small tradition before MP3 players made the whole format obsolete anyway.
Final score
Naming all seven means genuine memory for consumer tech’s fastest-moving decade. Half-right still counts as fluent in a language most smartphones have functionally made extinct.
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