9 Of The Weirdest Gadgets Made In The '80s

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The 1980s were a weird and wonderful time when it came to technology. Microchips had started to hit their stride, becoming cheap enough to include in affordable devices, and the electronics sector as a whole was ready for prime time. The thing is, no one knew the difference between a good, bad, or just plain weird use for this powerful technology. That's why the '80s became the golden age of strange gadgets.

TV channels (remember those?) were filled with ads for the latest electronic junk you could buy. Toys, in particular, were fertile ground for some battery-powered magic. Those Saturday morning cartoons (many of which were thinly disguised ads) were sandwiched between (not so disguised) toy ads of every stripe. Naturally, batteries never seemed to be included. When it comes to weird — and sometimes also wonderful — '80s gadgets, you could write literal books on the subject, but these are surely some of the most interesting and memorable examples.

You're probably very familiar with the Sony Walkman, the iconic '80s portable tape deck that made music personal in a way no one had ever considered before. So iconic was this device, in fact, that if you have the right model, it might be worth hundreds of dollars now. Less well-known is the Sony Watchman, which (as you likely deduced) is a pocket TV.

You might think that in order to make a TV this small, the only viable technology would be LCD. However, in 1982, when the first Watchman was released in Japan, LCD screens were nowhere near ready to be used for any sort of consumer televisions. Not even one with a two-inch screen. No, what you're looking at here is an honest-to-goodness tube TV, one of those CRTs that retro enthusiasts love so much.

There were several Watchman models over the years, with the first color models arriving right at the end of the '80s. Sony would also use its CRT expertise to create small color TV sets in only slightly less portable form, such as the rare and sought-after Sony KVX-370 Indextron. That means Sony made CRTs that went from a tiny two-inch model all the way to the largest production CRT in history. That would be the enormous Sony PVM-4300, a 440-pound, 43-inch monster that you probably didn't want to put anywhere but the ground floor. Now that's range.

"Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!" is one of the most insidious '80s earworms, but the actual device is a fascinating thing in its own right. Good marketing can only take you so far, but the Clapper really was a smart application of electronics. At least, it promised to be.

The Clapper first saw the light of day in 1984. In its original iteration, it was essentially a smart plug, but instead of being operated by radio signals, the Clapper listened for sharp bursts of sound above a certain threshold. The intended way to operate it was to clap twice, with a small pause. Whatever you had connected to the Clapper would then either turn on or turn off. Unfortunately, the first generation was notorious for being too sensitive, and so noise from your TV or any loud noises from the environment could trigger it.

This was rectified in 1987 with the release of the Smart Clapper, a device you can still buy today. With better electronics and a refined design, this was the first version of the Clapper that actually worked as advertised. Later, there would be the Clapper Plus, which added remote control functionality in addition to being sound-activated. There is actually a modern Clapper version that allows two different clap patterns: two claps to trigger one switch, and three claps to trigger the other. Given that it usually goes for around twenty bucks, that's technically ten bucks per Clapper if you think about it. 

The Power Glove is technically associated with the '80s, given that it was released to the world in 1989. In truth, it was more a gadget of the early '90s, with Nintendo doing a sizable marketing push. The glove even featured in the cartoon "Captain N: The Game Master," and the movie "The Wizard." 

The thing is, the Power Glove is so bad. That's not just a paraphrasing of the infamous line from "The Wizard," it's also an unironic description of the glove as a product. In the U.S., the Power Glove was manufactured by Mattel. By all accounts, there wasn't anything wrong with the quality from a material perspective. It's just that it didn't really work well as a controller.

The Power Glove was an early and basic form of motion control, but mapping coarse movement to the directional pad (D-pad) directions doesn't really make playing your games any better. It would take until the advent of the Nintendo Wii for the company to really nail a form of motion control that added something to gameplay. Instead, the Power Glove was a novelty, a true gimmick. Accessories like the NES Zapper actually offered something fun and unique, with good games (like Duck Hunt) designed around the peripheral. Today, the Power Glove is an '80s toy worth serious cash to the right collector, but they certainly don't want it to actually play anything. Best of all, it's not even the weirdest product made by Nintendo – just the most famous.

Given that we are only starting to see true household robots emerging now, it can be hard to imagine that someone was already selling robots to the public all the way back in the 1980s. But Radio Shack was known for stocking its shelves with high-tech toys you wouldn't see anywhere else.

Three robots, in particular, are associated with Radio Shack during this time: Armatron, Robie Sr., and Robie Jr. Armatron is a purely mechanical robotic arm. That is to say, it doesn't have any computer chips or electronic smarts. It has a clever design where one motor drives a transmission that can be manipulated by using the two joysticks.

Robie Sr. is another robot that has no computer brain of any kind. Instead, you could record movement commands to a cassette tape using the tape deck built into its chest, then play those movements back. It's essentially an analog form of programming. Robie Jr. is actually just a rebrand of the Japanese Tomy Omnibot Jr., but it is quite sophisticated. It has an ultrasonic remote control and can enter a follow mode where it moves towards the remote, which means it can follow you around. Robie Jr. has several pre-recorded phrases, and even a bumper that tells the bot that it's run into something, letting it turn away until it finds a clear path. It's not that different from some cheap modern robot vacuums, actually.

In the U.S., the '80s were both a low point and the golden age of video games. In 1983, for example, the industry experienced what's now known as the video game crash of, er, 1983. Following a flood of shovelware, consumers revolted, and it seemed that video games were a fad that had reached a conclusion. That would change with the release of the NES in the mid-'80s, kicking off a boom that's still going. But just one year before the crash, we got the Vectrex, one of the strangest consoles ever to see the light of day.

First, unlike other home consoles such as the Atari 2600, the Vectrex came with a display. The screen was in portrait orientation, which was another oddity for home systems, but by far the most important difference was the use of vector graphics. All other consoles used raster graphics.

What does that mean? Well, say you're playing Super Mario Bros. on your NES. The image consists of a grid of colored dots. With raster graphics, the electron beams of a CRT start at the top left of the screen and then draw these dots line-by-line to create a single frame. Then the beams go back to the starting position and draw the next frame. By contrast, the Vectrex uses a special CRT that draws shapes on-screen like a pen and not line-by-line, making sharp, almost neon-like graphics. It needed inserts for color, but nothing else looked like the fast, sharp Vectrex graphics at the time.

The Fisher-Price PXL-2000 shows that there's a thin line between genius and madness. This gadget was only available from 1987 to 1988, so it's widely considered a failure. However, it's also a technical achievement and pure audacity when you consider the idea was to make a camcorder cheap enough to sell as a child's toy. This was during a time when only your upper-middle-class families could afford a video camera. It's hard to imagine today, when even the cheapest smartphones can shoot crisp HD video, but this was premium tech in the '80s.

So how did Fisher-Price manage to make a toy camcorder that actually recorded video? The big innovation is that the PXL-2000 used regular audio cassette tapes. To make this work, it recorded grainy, low-res black-and-white video, and you could fit around four minutes of footage per side. Part of why this could work is that the tape ran at high speed, but this was so noisy that the sound from your video would be unusable.

That might not have been too much of an impediment to having fun, but the real showstopper was how power-hungry the PXL-2000 was. Six AA batteries gave you a mere seven minutes of run time. You couldn't even fill both sides of a single tape without needing a battery change! Disposable batteries weren't cheap back then, so it's no surprise the PXL-2000 didn't last. That said, there's no doubt that it was genuinely innovative.

Music may be the thing the 1980s were best known for. This was the age of the synthesizer and electronic music, after all. So it was completely normal for pop and even alternative acts to have at least one keyboard on stage. But a keyboard doesn't exactly have the same pizazz as a guitar. So why not combine the electronic powers of a keyboard with the shape of a guitar? That's effectively what Yamaha's Keytar is.

The SHS-10 was released in 1987, and artists like Devo, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Prince famously used Keytars. The SHS-10 specifically only weighed about 2.4 pounds and let keyboardists prance around the stage in a way that just wasn't possible before.

However, Yamaha's Keytar wasn't the first of its kind by a long shot. You can see a large and bulky keytar feature prominently in Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," and the origins of the keytar as a class of instrument stretched much further back than the '80s. Synthesizers were gearing up in the 1970s, and artists like Edgar Winter were slinging full-size keyboards around their necks in a bid to rock out as much as their guitar-wielding co-performers. The Mattson Syntar is the first instrument you could rightly call a keytar. The Moog Liberation came shortly after, but both of these instruments look like they belong in the '70s. The Keytar from Yamaha, with its bright plastics and angular design, is so '80s it hurts.

The late Sir Clive Sinclair is one of those rare genius inventors who seemed capable of anything. He's best known as a personal computing pioneer with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, quite possibly the first computer I ever used. Sinclair personal computers were a major success, but sadly, the Sinclair C5 personal transport was just too far ahead of its time.

This 1985 electric vehicle (EV) looks like the '80s idea of what a futuristic scooter would be. It's actually quite nice to look at even today, but it's what's under that iconic shell that matters. It's a battery-powered tricycle that ultimately was too low to the ground for motorists to see you, and with too little power and range. Battery technology in particular was nowhere near ready. 

Today, small personal EVs aren't uncommon. Cities are littered with electric scooters that far outperform what the C5 can do, and hoverboards and Segways have had their day, too. Yet, the C5 still has a cult following, with owners of the dwindling number of remaining running examples getting together and tooling around to keep the dream alive. If the C5 had come out a few decades later, it could have been something much more impactful. Unfortunately for him, Sir Clive was apparently born too soon.

3D technology has come and gone over the decades. The first 3D movies date to the 1920s, and even before that, stereoscopic images have been around since the 1850s. So perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that there was an attempt at building a console with 3D imagery in the '80s. What is perhaps surprising is that it was Sega, with its eight-bit Master System, that released a set of active shutter glasses called the SegaScope 3-D.

Only a limited list of eight games worked with the glasses, and it really was an experiment more than anything else, but what a forward-looking device! Sega doesn't have to feel bad about the SegaScope failing, either. There have been many attempts at 3D video game systems over the decades, with the latest being PC and standalone VR systems. Most have not been mainstream successes.

One very interesting fact is that the lead architect of the more modern PlayStations, Mark Cerny, actually worked on the SegaScope. That's experience which undoubtedly came in handy decades later, when the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 each got their own VR headsets. Even the PlayStation 3 supported stereoscopic gaming if you had a 3D TV.