16 gadgets from the 1980s that felt like the future

Before 1979, music was communal by necessity. The radio played what it wanted, and the stereo stayed home. Sony's Walkman changed that in a single product: for the first time, a listener could carry their own soundtrack anywhere. It went on to sell more than 200 million units over its lifetime. It survived the CD era before the iPod made the whole category obsolete.

ColecoVision's pitch in 1982 was simple: arcade games that actually looked like arcade games. Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600 was a pale imitation of itself. On ColecoVision, it was close enough to the real thing that the console sold 1 million units in its first year. Then the video game crash of 1983 hit, Coleco pivoted to Cabbage Patch Kids, and by October 1985, the console was officially gone.

No single object put interactive entertainment in more American living rooms than the Atari 2600. By 1980, Atari was labeled the fastest-growing company in U.S. history, with operating income that had leaped from $174,000 in 1976 to $323 million by 1982.

Then came the E.T. game: so overproduced and so poorly received that hundreds of thousands of cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill. One of those cartridges is now in the Smithsonian.

The Lisa was right about everything except the price. Released in January 1983 at $9,995 (roughly $32,000 today), it was the first mass-market personal computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse. Apple sold only around 10,000 units. A year later, the Macintosh arrived, cheaper and faster, and the Lisa became a footnote to its own innovations. The remaining inventory was buried in a Utah landfill for a tax write-off.

LaserDisc was the best home video format most people never owned. The 12-inch disc offered picture quality that VHS couldn't approach, and it pioneered features that still define home video today: director's commentary tracks, widescreen letterbox formatting, and chapter selection. But the players were expensive, the discs couldn't record anything, and you had to flip the disc halfway through most movies. DVD arrived in 1997 and solved every one of those problems at a fraction of the price.

Betamax was technically better than VHS in nearly every measurable way. It lost the format war anyway. Sony kept Betamax largely proprietary while JVC licensed VHS aggressively to every manufacturer willing to make it.

By 1980, VHS dominated 70% of the U.S. home video market. The lesson became shorthand for every technology debate that followed: the better product doesn't always win.

Sony finally stopped producing Betamax cassettes in 2016.

The Clapper solved a problem so specific it barely sounds real: walking across a dark room to turn off a lamp. It sold millions anyway, mostly because the television commercials were impossible to forget. Clap on, clap off. The tagline wrote itself into a generation's memory so completely that most people can still hear the jingle decades later. Smart plugs and voice assistants have since absorbed everything that made them feel clever.

The Clapper is actually still being manufactured and sold today, but the cultural moment that made it a household punchline is long gone. What disappeared wasn't the product. It was the novelty.

Texas Instruments introduced Speak & Spell at the 1978 Consumer Electronics Show, and the technology inside it was genuinely historic. It contained the world's first digital signal processing chip, a piece of hardware so significant it was later named an IEEE Milestone. Kids used it to learn spelling.

Its cameo in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" in 1982 secured its place in cultural memory long after the product line ended.

The OneStep launched in 1977 as Polaroid's first one-button camera and became the model the brand became synonymous with. The ritual of watching an image develop in your hands was unlike anything else available to consumers. Digital photography didn't just replace it; it made the wait feel pointless.

Fisher-Price launched the PXL 2000 in 1987 as a children's camcorder that recorded video onto standard audiocassette tapes.

The footage was so pixelated and lo-fi that it looked like a dream sequence. Parents bought it as a toy. Artists and filmmakers discovered it as something else entirely, including Richard Linklater, who used it in "Slacker."

It was discontinued after roughly a year on the market, but the aesthetic it created outlasted the camera by decades.

Casio entered the calculator watch market in 1980 and made it mainstream. Earlier models from Pulsar had been expensive metal novelties; Casio's affordable plastic versions put a working calculator on the wrist of anyone who wanted one.

The keys were nearly impossible to press with adult fingers, which turned out to matter. Smartphones made the whole premise unnecessary, but the watches remain collector items and have appeared on fashion runways ever since.

RCA spent 15 years and $200 million developing SelectaVision: a videodisc player that read grooves on a vinyl-like disc with a stylus, exactly like a record player.

It launched in 1981, directly into the middle of the Betamax-VHS wars, and was obsolete almost immediately. The discs wore down with repeated plays, couldn't record anything, and required two discs for most feature films.

RCA discontinued it in April 1984 after selling only 550,000 players and losing $580 million.

The Osborne 1, released April 3, 1981, was the first commercially successful portable computer. At 24 pounds, it used the term "portable" loosely, but it folded into a case and came bundled with $1,500 worth of software at a time when competitors sold hardware and software separately.

In its fiscal year ending February 1983, revenues reached $100 million. Then founder Adam Osborne announced the next model before it was ready, and customers stopped buying the current one. Sales collapsed overnight. The phenomenon became known as the "Osborne Effect" and is still taught in business schools today.

Tomy released the OmniBot in 1984 as a programmable toy robot that could carry drinks, deliver messages via a cassette-based memory system, and be programmed to perform tasks on a timer. It cost $119 and became one of the most wanted items on Christmas lists that year.

The OmniBot wasn't truly intelligent, but it looked exactly like the domestic robots that science fiction had been promising for decades. The novelty-driven market for expensive toy robots proved shallow, and the line was discontinued before the decade was out.

The correcting electric typewriter felt like the future in the early 80s: a lift-off correction tape that could erase a mistake as cleanly as if it had never been typed.

Brother's models became standard equipment in offices and dorm rooms across the country. Then word processors arrived, and the ability to edit before printing made the whole mechanical exercise feel primitive almost overnight.

Brother pivoted to printers and label makers and survived. The typewriter market did not.

Sony released the first Watchman, the FD-210, in Japan in 1982 as a pocket-sized television. To fit a CRT into something truly portable, Sony engineers redesigned the electron gun to sit parallel to the screen rather than behind it. Over 65 models followed.

The analog broadcast signal the Watchman depended on was switched off across the United States in June 2009, rendering every existing model instantly and completely obsolete.