/ Cory Doctorow / 5:46 pm Tue Jun 25, 2013

Time Magazine's free crapgadgets of the 1980s

Harry McCracken from Time Magazine sez, "Back in the 1980s, TIME magazine sold subscriptions via TV ads--'Hi, I'm Judy, an operator here at TIME'--and sealed the deal by offering free tech gadgets such as phones, clocks and cameras. The commercials live on via YouTube; I've rounded up a bunch of them, complete with the quaint, silly, sometimes cheesy gizmos we gave away."

Shown to the right, "the incredibly compact TIME Micro Headset Radio with crystal-clear fidelity, hideaway headphones."

The Great 1980s TIME Giveaway Gadgets (Thanks, Harry!)

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  3. Free…free and wonderful things.

    All that are at this very moment floating in the Great Pacific garbage patch.

    ‘that’s no sardine, that’s a compass/flashlight!’ Stupid Albatross…

  5. One of those crappy gadgets saved my sanity on a family trip back in the day. My parents, and my grandmother, and 16-year-old me, driving (and not quickly) from Indianapolis to Atlanta. I don’t know what I would have done without that little radio (with the hideaway headphones, of course).

        1. Well, you were 16 and with your elders. Of course it was a bad drive.   :)

          Though at that time I read a lot, so I my own method of escape. As will my kid have, I supposed. Probably some glasses.  Darn kids.

  8. Umberto Eco argued that sometimes technology advances “crabwise” [it goes backwards.] There are few better examples than radio: instantly on, free content, high fidelity, with well-designed controls, a radio is a much underrated technology. Modern, expensive variations of the theme (smartphones in particular) fall short in many ways: they are expensive, resource intensive, and prone to disconnection (still.)

    I love a good headset radio.

    1.  The late great George Carlin had a similar observation, about TV.  He said something to the effect of:  “Yeah, technology is backwards,  In the old days, TV came through a wire, and we had to pay for it.  Now – it comes through the AIR, and it’s FREE!”

    2. Radios offer well-designed controls. Unfortunately, they offer little control over radio content. 

      Personally, I’m in the KILL IT WITH FIRE! camp – Put me in a room where radio plays, I’m getting irritated, sometimes even downright aggressive due to the stress I experience by ads, stupid texts, etc. 

      If I want to experience auditory stimulation, I want it on my terms, with content I choose and being able to pause and skip back when needed.

      1. I still love radios, even if I don’t always love radio, if you get my drift. I have a beautiful new Tivoli Model One in my living room, that I mostly use to listen to podcasts, mp3’s, and Pandora. So I suppose you’re right, content is king. 

        Wishing that I could find a good headset radio, though, they are kind of a disappearing item in most of the big box stores (the aisles are taken over by $300 headphones and the like.) Strange about the headphones too–monster ‘phones in the style of the 70s are back…

      2. The only control for crap radio that I’ve known to work is public radio. (Yeah, I know–pledge drives, giving wingnuts air time, you don’t like Ira Glass or Garrison Keillor, etc.–but I literally cannot stand most commercial radio after having listened to public radio for about a couple of decades in a row.) 

  9. Is his name really Harry McCracken? Sorry, it just sounds like a name you’d use for prank phone calls.

  10. Nothing beats the craptacular SI’s SHOEPHONE.  That lasted 3 months before the mic cut out in mine. Honorable mention is SI’s Football Phone.

  11. I had a summer job working as one of those operators standing by to take your subscription order.

    It was remarkable the number of people who subscribed to get the premium. I don’t know if they were subscribing just to get the premium, or that was the bonus that tipped them over. But it seemed like a fair number of people were very insistent about getting their premium right away, and the magazine was incidental at most.

    Management didn’t do it often, but I do recall one of the premiums being handed around the operators. It was a wristwatch that would have retailed for less than $10 at the time. Sad—sad on multiple levels—to consider that people were suckered into buying a magazine subscription in order to get that.

  12. The Time cameras were once kind of sought after by people who couldn’t afford Dianas or other “name” toy cameras.

  13. I could swear that I went for one of Time’s premiums, but I can’t remember what it was, and none of the listed ones ring a bell. I have to give Time credit for being sports about it–under the entry for their camera, they put in a link for a site for “lomography“, or photography with really cheap cameras.

  14. Gee, I think that last commercial must have been the first time I ever heard “Turn! Turn! Turn!”  (I recall being somewhat puzzled by the lyrics; would it not be more suitable for a magazine named “Turn” ?)

    Otherwise, the earliest thing of this nature that I can recall is the commercial for the Mysteries of the Unknown” books.

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