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I remember that Kenmore sold a big perforated plastic ball that you could use to sprinkle clothes. You filled it with water, tossed it into the dryer with the laundry to be sprinkled, and ran the dryer for a few minutes. Never actually saw one in use -- I'll bet it made a hell of a lot of...

Kevin's #8 was an absolutely typical Norge Village. The one here was, to my memory, nearly identical down to the paneling -- I think the floor was probably different, but that's it. I might have even seen some of those clothes... And note that #8-10 are all Norge self service dry cleaning...

VIRs/VITs Television stations had been inserting reference signals into their transmissions, for their own test purposes, since the 1960s. Someone came up with the bright idea to use them as calibration signals inside a TV set to true-up the color reproduction, eliminating the constant...

We had several home versions of TV game shows. Concentration and Password were popular ones. In fact, I've still got a Password set somewhere. Some oddball ones: King of the Hill was a child's game. It came with a board shaped something like a volcano. There was a path that wound around...

When I was in college, in our building we had Risk parties. We'd take two or three boards and place them side by side, and you could move armies from one board to another at the edges. We sometimes had 20 people playing. We played spades until sufficiently drunk. At that point, we played...

I don't know about that. I do some recording at home and I've got an MOTU 828, and it is worlds better than the built-in sound on any computer I've come across. You also have to allow for the fact that computer built-in sound does not have an RIAA phono preamp, so unless the turntable has one...

Yeah, the small block Chevy is probably the most widely produced automotive engine ever... GM literally made millions of them, and parts of all sorts, ranging from factory replacements to full-up racing parts, are widely available. In Sportsman-level stock car racing, you hardly see anything else.

Growing up, we never had a matched pair. In fact, for a while, we didn't have a dryer at all -- wash was either hung on the line, or, if the weather was bad, everything went to the laundromat. Bought my first set in 1992, a Whirlpool set. The dryer was actually one model level up from the...

Blackstone Wasn't that the one where the timer acts mechanically on the valve, and if power goes off during the fill, the valve does not close? I recall there was a thread about that a while ago.

The ART USB Phono Plus does everything you need audio-wise. It has stereo inputs which are switchable between phono and line level inputs, and a USB 2.0 interface. It comes with a copy of Audacity, which is a good basic digital audio recording and editing package. Sweetwater Sound is a good...

I recall that on my stepmother's Kenmore, circa 1972, at one point we were living in a rental house in an area that had high water pressure. After the tub filled, the machine paused for 10-20 seconds before agitation started. It didn't do that when we lived in a different house with lower...

We had a Kenmore range that had those. It came with a house that we bought. My wife hated it, and if we had stayed in that house, we would have replaced it. (The solid burners weren't the only issue. The oven cleaning cycle made the panel so hot that the membrane touch pad would start to...

Frigidaire had a very fancy TOL series in the late '60s that's been discussed here before; I forget what they were called. They had the controls in an overhead panel, and the washer motor had an electronic drive system with continuously variable speed. They apparently only produced a handful...

An advantage of higher frequencies is transformers can be smaller and lighter. That's why most aircraft that have AC power systems use 400 Hz. On the other hand, lower frequencies are better for building induction motors that will run at a reasonable RPM. In the early 20th century, a lot of...

What Frigilux said There's a certain nostalgia factor with turntables, and I appreciate that. But I don't miss how fragile vinyl is, or how little (by modern standards) recording time there is on a side. And I especially don't miss the surface noise.

Wow, a Diablo 33 disc drive. I haven't seen one of those in ages. It's a front-loading cartridge, holding a whopping 5 megabytes.

johnrk, thanks! I don't think Norge was a popular brand here when I was growing up, in the '60s. I don't recall ever seeing any other than at the Norge Village laundromat. I guess Montgomery Ward had some. We didn't go in there much because my parents regarded their stuff as cheap. Been...

It's a reflection of what has happened in residential architecture in general. There is no style these days -- "traditional" is a cloying mishmash of pseudo-19th-century and earlier vernaculars, and it seems like the most important thing is to be trendy, whatever the trend happens to be at the...

A lot of houses then had water heaters that were not that large. If, say, a family member was taking a shower, then you could set the washer so it would not start until the water heater had had time to recover. Based on that, I'm a bit surprised that this did not become more popular. Then...

If it's natural gas, that "whoomp" should be fixable. But if it's LP gas, that is the way it ignites -- all of a sudden. We have LP gas fireplaces and they do that. Scared the heck out of me the first time I saw it.