The Old Tech In Your Office You Would Rather Forget!

Kate took us on a nostalgic trip down memory lane, revisiting the quirky gadgets that filled office spaces 30 years ago and a few of them will leave you wondering how anyone got anything done!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Fits In with Kate Richie podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm going to take you for a little trip down
memory lane. That's imagine if you worked in an office,
you know, thirty years ago.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Okay, so remember.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Remember they working from work days?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Really weird.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Do you remember leaving the house, saying goodbye to the
kids and getting the train to work?

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh my god, I don't remember.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Work used to say, why don't you work from home today?
There's no way I'm not working from home. I'm coming
into work.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, I'll never get anything done if I stay at home. Awesome. No,
I want to talk about this too, because I saw
the story and we are going mad for the nineties
in our house at the moment, and I'm loving it
because my daughter is absolutely fascinated with things that don't
exist anymore.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yes, I bought the original game Boy the other day.
I did you with Tetris? Oh that's okay.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
I think I've got a Donkey konground somewhere that I'm
trying to dig out because I still have a lot
of a lot of things. We're listening to old songs
and then I saw this list pop up, and I
don't know. You tell me if you've still kind of
got these floating around, but they're vintage items. Now these
are the top ten obsolete office items, and so very

(01:20):
sad kids listening probably I haven't even heard of a
floppy disc.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Oh yeah, I haven't seen one in twenty years. So
much a floppy disc.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
So I remember when I got a Commodore sixty four
for the first time.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
And the games were about what are we talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:40):
A floppy disc?

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, all the games are on a floppy disc. And
Dad went to work one day and a guy burnt
all these games under a floppy disc. And I can
remember being so excited that there was double drag and
there was a double All the best games were on
this one sloppy disc, but they could get damaged very easily.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
It was. But the evolution of the floppy disk went
into the small hard disk here, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
The mini disc.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
It was nothing wrong with.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
The mini disc. Who else has got a fax machine?

Speaker 1 (02:16):
A roll?

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Do you know what?

Speaker 2 (02:17):
I love rolodex And I remember this is going to
show my age. I would use my dad's rolodex from
the police station in Campbelltown and it was an empty one.
It wasn't full of the drug dealers, and it made
me feel like I was working in an office.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
You know that don't know what a rollodex.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
What a rolodex is, isn't the rolodex, if I have
it correctly, is the thing where if you need to
find Jess McNally in the rolodex and her phone number,
you would put it, scroll it down to M. The
little shift would go down and then you'd flick it
up and it would come up on the M page
and then you'd have Jess phoney. It was amazing. Rollodex

(02:57):
is correction fluid. I think people still use liquid paper.
Who's got a landline phone anyway?

Speaker 3 (03:05):
I don't. Do you know what I have got. I've
got one of the old public phones, the red phones.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Do someone like a phone? Gave it?

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Someone gave it to me for my fortieth birthday.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
I stole it.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
No, it doesn't.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
It doesn't work. But it's just one of those retro
public phones that used to go into and you used
to and it's also got that you had to wind
the numbers.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, I quite like those business card holders. Now this
is the one that they said is obsolete. And then
I was sitting at my desk reading this story, looking
at my computer, and it was covered in sticky notes
with all my passwords reminders?

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Are they?

Speaker 3 (03:44):
Well?

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Apparently sticky notes as password reminders.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Where do you put your password?

Speaker 2 (03:49):
If you don't write it on a sticky note and then.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Put it on the wall, you write it in your
notes and then you lock it.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
But I'm writing it on notes.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
In your iPhone. You've got notes, and then you write it,
and then you put a lock on it, and then.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
You forget the password for the lock, yes.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
And then you can't get your password, and then where
do you.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Put your crypto password?

Speaker 1 (04:09):
That's what I'm trying to tell anybody where that is
ever Anyway, I love that.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
I love a filing cabinet and I still have a
hardcover diary, like a diary that I write in.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
I want to get a what did you call the
other thing with the Jess mcnully phone number in it.
I want to get a roller x roll a roller
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