2000s
2004
The iPod Click Wheel
Apple's music player, and the click wheel that made scrolling through 5,000 songs genuinely pleasant.
🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets
163 things · 7 decades · 0 memories jogged
A shedload of stuff you'd forgotten you remembered.
Sweets that got discontinued, telly that stopped at half eleven, gadgets that weighed a kilo. Pick a decade and fall in.
Start here
Every decade in the vault
📻
1950s
Rationing ends, the telly arrives, and everything is suddenly in colour. Except the telly.
24 things
🎸
1960s
Colour, pop, and the sense that someone had finally opened a window.
24 things
🕺
1970s
Brown. Everything was brown. And somehow brilliant.
23 things
📼
1980s
Neon, plastic, and a computer that loaded from a cassette in eleven minutes.
24 things
💿
1990s
Dial-up, Britpop, and a Tamagotchi dying in your school bag.
24 things
📱
2000s
Frosted tips, flip phones and a MiniDisc you spent a whole evening filling.
23 things
📸
2010s
The decade we all got the same phone and started missing the old ones.
21 things
Most remembered
The ones that got everyone going
1980s
1982
ZX Spectrum 48K
Sinclair's £175 home computer put programming into British bedrooms and created an entire games industry.
📟 Tech & Gadgets🕹️ Video Games
1960s
1964
Radio Caroline
A ship anchored in international waters playing records all day, listened to under the bedclothes on a transistor radio.
🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets
1970s
1974
Ceefax
Text pages broadcast in the gaps of the TV signal: news, football scores, and page 302 for the weather.
📺 Telly📟 Tech & Gadgets
1960s
1964
Top Of The Pops
The chart show that decided what was in your ears for the following seven days, whether you liked it or not.
📺 Telly🎵 Music
1960s
1966
Action Man
Palitoy's licensed version of GI Joe, sold in Britain with a straight face and an enormous range of kit.
🧸 Toys & Games
2010s
2013
Vine
A video app with a hard six-second limit that produced more genuinely funny content per minute than anything since.
📟 Tech & Gadgets
1970s
1970
Spangles
The sweet everyone over forty brings up unprompted. Discontinued in 1984, briefly revived, and mourned ever since.
🍬 Sweets & Chocolate
Just added
Fresh out of the loft
1950s
1953
The Coronation Television
More than two million television sets were bought or rented for the 1953 Coronation, and most of them had twenty people sitting in front of them.
📺 Telly🛋️ Around The House
1950s
1954
Rationing Ending
Meat was the last thing to come off ration in July 1954, ending a system that had outlasted the war by nine years.
🍽️ Food & Drink🏬 Shops & High Street
1950s
1950
Meccano
Perforated steel strips, brass nuts and a tiny spanner. Meccano built engineers, and quite a lot of frustration.
🧸 Toys & Games
1950s
1950
The Bakelite Telephone
The GPO 332 sat in the hall on a special table, weighed about the same as a brick, and had a drawer for the numbers you actually rang.
📟 Tech & Gadgets🛋️ Around The House
1950s
1955
Corona Pop Man
A lorry, a crate of glass bottles in colours that do not exist in nature, and threepence back for every empty you returned.
🍽️ Food & Drink
1950s
1956
The Dansette Record Player
Portable, two-tone, with an autochanger that stacked eight singles and dropped them one at a time onto the turntable.
🎵 Music🛋️ Around The House
1950s
1952
Spam Fritters
Tinned meat in batter. A school dinner staple that divides every family gathering to this day.
🍽️ Food & Drink✏️ School
1950s
1950
Listen With Mother
Fifteen minutes of stories and nursery rhymes on the Home Service at quarter to two, aimed at under-fives and the mothers who needed a sit down.
📺 Telly✏️ School
Long reads
Features
Ten sweets the nineties quietly took away from us
Discontinued, reformulated or shrunk beyond recognition. A roll call of the confectionery that did not make it out of the decade intact.
The home computers that accidentally built the British games industry
A rubber-keyed machine from Cambridge and a beige box from Acorn put programming into a million bedrooms, and the people who grew up with th
Why everything in the seventies was brown
Avocado bathrooms, orange kitchens and a wall of woodchip. There are actual reasons, and they are more interesting than "people had no
Your turn
Got something we have missed?
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