When the giant-wheels-on-boots skates were introduced, we assumed that they were a modern invention. But it turns out that they date back at least as far as 1923 when this short film was made. In it, dapper men race around in their silly-looking “cycle-skates.” But to their credit, they all look like they have a degree of mastery over the sport.

Lacking any of our modern safety equipment, these brave chaps demonstrate how to use the skates in skiing or skating fashion. It just goes to show that humans figured out ways to have fun even before there was technology to brag about that fun to the world later (we’re looking at you, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter addicts).

The post 1920s French Skates Were the Dapper Daddy of Rollerblades first appeared on Gajitz.

Way back in the day of the Commodore 64, people who used computers had to really know what they were doing. There were no plug-and-play peripherals and the term “user friendly” hadn’t yet been coined. But if you could write your own programs and assemble complex kits, you could do some pretty incredible things with your personal computer. The Commocoffee 64 was a peripheral meant just for those hard-core geeks who knew their way around a BASIC program and couldn’t get their fill of that dark mistress: espresso.

This ad from a 1985 issue of the Italian magazine Microcomputer extolls the virtues of a coffeemaker controlled entirely by your Commodore 64. Was it ridiculously complex to brew coffee through a computer? Probably. Would it have made more sense to just plug an espresso maker directly into the wall? Absolutely. But we’d be willing to bet that coffee made by a computer is 400% geekier than any other type of coffee in the world, making it the best, of course.

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Modern gadgets are remarkably small considering everything that they can do (hello, phone that plays Sudoku, streams radio stations and lets us take crystal-clear videos of our bizarre neighbors), but our generation was far from the first to think of miniaturizing stuff. Back in the age of records, the Sound Burger was amazing music lovers with its shockingly tiny size and portability. It was basically a clamp that could fit onto either 45 or 33 1/3 RPM records so you could keep your tunes rolling even when you were on the go. Of course, because it had to be played on a flat surface you had to be basically sitting or standing still while it played…but at least you could switch rooms between records.

The Sound Burger was sold in the early 1980s in Japan, but after it made the jump to the U.S. it was renamed Mister Disc – probably because Audio Technica, the company responsible for the awesome gadget, knew how we brutish Americans would mercilessly make fun of something called a “Sound Burger.” Unfortunately, even the love of rich vinyl sound couldn’t save this player from a sad fate. It was released right around the time that Sony’s Walkman was becoming popular, and given the choice between a cassette player that you could walk around with and a record player that you couldn’t…well, we all know how the story ended for the ill-fated Sound Burger/Mister Disc. Luckily for modern vinyl lovers, they still pop up every now and then on eBay – but they always seems to pull a hefty price.

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ATMs are kind of like pigeons these days: they’re everywhere you look in urban settings. The high-tech electronic bankers are a relatively recent invention, but we’ve quickly come to count on them. Way before the ubiquitous ATM there was this curious banking machine dating all the way back to 1918. It was called an automatic receiving teller – and if it wasn’t made obvious by the name, this machine only accepted deposits and could not help with withdrawals. This type of machine was used in schools and other organizations in the 1930s to encourage people to save their money by making frequent deposits to their savings accounts.

The machine works simply enough but at the time must have seemed like a marvel of machinery. If the customer wanted to deposit coins, the machine could tell what type of coins were being inserted (in the same way modern vending machines use the weight to tell the difference between coins). But customers depositing paper money had to actually set the slide dial on the machine to the amount they were depositing before telling the machine to stamp their bank books. We have to wonder how many people in the 30s tried to beat the system by tricking the machine into making their bank accounts look artificially flush.

The post Thrifty History: Antique ATM Encouraged Saving, Cheating? first appeared on Gajitz.