3 Pieces of Childhood Tech That Made You Stand out Back in the day

Owning these gadgets made you the most sought after kid in the neighbourhood

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Few things evoke the excitement and nostalgia of the 90’s than a recollection of all the amazing gadgets we had to amuse ourselves with back in the day. Those were the days where lunches were shared with each other during recess, Pokemon cards were silently exchanged under classroom desks, and hand cricket was the only form of entertainment during the ride home from school.

Competitiveness was high, as was ego and pride. Those were after all, the most formative years for many of us 90’s kids, who were just coming of age in a world that was slowly transitioning from analog to digital tech one gadget at a time. And as much as we learned to be competitive where annual exams and monthly tests were concerned, we’d eventually learn to compete with others in other areas of life too.

Besides academic achievement, there were various other means and ways of ascending the popularity ladder.

Owning a cool and expensive gadget was one of them.

Everyone knew you stood out back in the day if you owned one of these gadgets. Because of this, many of us were bribed into getting good grades by our parents since it guaranteed at least a gift or two from them. We would desperately wait for examination result day so that we could proudly show off our marks cards to our parents and demand whatever we wanted, most often a gadget or piece of tech that would make us stand out amongst our peers at school or the neighbourhood.

We’d work hard at school just to beat our classmates and peers at owning the latest or coolest gadget in town. This gadget would then be showed off on the playground during play time if it was portable in nature, or be bragged about all over — in the school bus, classroom, and neighbourhood playground — in case it was something that was unmovable in nature.

Some of us would envy the gadgets others’ parents had gotten them, and this would motivate us to perform better at school so that we could get better grades and make such demands at home too.

Most ordinary gadgets entered everyone’s homes at almost the same time.

Personal computers, Cassette players, Walkmen, and DVD players were all over the place.

There were however, a few coveted gadgets that not everyone would go on to own, the ones that instantly propelled you to star status amongst your school classmates and neighbourhood friends, in case you did get around to owning one of them.

Here are 3 Pieces of Childhood Tech That Made You Stand out Back in the day:

A CD writer

When desktop computers first came out, they had those cute little CD drives in them. That was the default for most personal computers back then. But do you know what one really had to have in order to stand out from the rest of the crowd?

A CD writer.

CD writing was basically the ability to copy one CD to another, allowing one to replicate a game, movie, or software that they wanted from someone else. The one with the CD writer usually had two CD drives in their computer, the first one in which the software, game, or movie would be placed, and the second one with the empty disc that it had to be written on to.

If your computer had a CD writing facility, you were the top dog back in the day as the rest of the kids would make a beeline to your house with CD writing requests. This meant you could charge them in favours and other forms of payment like Pokemon cards, a can of Pepsi, a packet of chips, or the very thing they’re copying.

Even in this domain, there was a hierarchy as some kids had the ability to write not only CD’s but DVD’s as well with just a single ‘DVD-RW’ (RW stands for re-writable) drive on their computers. In single slot DVD writers, one would have to insert the DVD containing the stuff they wanted to copy, use a software to copy the data onto their computer, and then use the same software to “burn” it back on to an empty CD or DVD.

Initially, the kids with CD writers were the Alphas. But when DVD’s later came out, the one’s with DVD writers gained ascendancy from them to take the top spot. This was because a DVD writer could read and write to both, CD’s and DVD’s, whereas a CD writer let you perform read and write functions only to CD’s.

There were many different types of CD’s and DVD’s back then, but the best you could lay your hands on were the one’s of the DVD-RW/DVD+RW kind. These basically functioned like early versions of flash drives enabling you to write and re-write data onto them endlessly, something that you just couldn’t do with other categories of CD’s or DVD’s.

DVD player with 3 or 6 CD changer

Everyone had VCD or DVD players alright. But you know what’s something that not everyone had? A DVD player with 6 CD changer. That’s what propelled some to elite status among their classmates at school and friends in the neighbourhood.

Having a 6 CD changer, especially one that was a DVD player, was most prized as one could store up to 6 CD’s (or DVD’s) in them, rotating movies at will.

This meant you didn’t have to keep removing and inserting CD’s into the player just to watch a new movie. All you had to do was rotate the changer to an empty slot, load it in there, and start watching. This let you watch new movies without finishing the old ones, and without having to take them out from their slots in order to start watching the new one.

6-CD changer players came with one of the biggest caveats that it prevented lots of fights and squabbles from taking place at home. In ordinary single-disc players, one would have to take out something that another family member might have been watching to watch their own stuff, most often forgetting to put it back later, causing arguments with that family member at home. But with 3 or 6 CD changers, you’d have none of that. Just rotate to an empty slot, insert, and watch away.

I was an only child, but witnessed plenty of arguments between brothers and sisters over who removed whose CD to use the player and forgot to put it back inside. The other would excitedly call their friends home to watch something only to find their CD taken out, and something else put in its place. It was frustrating because the person who took out their CD, whether a parent or sibling, would have kept their CD somewhere else, and we would have to resort to watching something way less interesting in absence of the movie we’d intended to watch.

This was the main reason why owning a 6-cd changer VCD or DVD player was so prestigious. You could literally see the glint in someones eyes as they popped open their 6-cd changer DVD players to put in whatever you brought to their house to watch together.

Good times!

A PlayStation or any kind of gaming console

Back in the day when arcade gaming was all the rage, anyone that had a gaming console brought all the boys to the yard. And by that I mean to their homes. This trend continued even after the days of retro gaming consoles where X-boxes and PlayStation’s had started to take their place. However, not everyone could afford them. While retro gaming consoles were cheap and affordable, PlayStations and X-boxes were expensive and out of reach of regular folk who wanted a gaming console to indulge in multiplayer gaming with their friends. Anyone who owned a PlayStation or an X-box with additional controllers automatically gained ascendancy on the social pecking order as they now owned a means of indoor entertainment that others didn’t. If you headed out to play and saw everyone’s cycles outside one kid’s house, you knew they were all inside for console gaming.

Multiplayer gaming promised hours of endless entertainment during the summer holidays when we’d get tired of playing outside in the scorching sun and wanted something to do indoors. The fact that you could either race, fight, or compete in numerous other ways with your friends is what made multiplayer gaming so attractive. Two players would battle it out on the screen while the rest of the others would cheer them on enthusiastically.

One of the biggest reasons the title of ‘multiplayer gaming console owner’ was so coveted was because it allowed for exclusivity. You see, anyone was free and welcome to play games outside. But when it came to visiting other kids’ homes, there were restrictions on who could and who couldn’t enter certain homes. This was mainly because of past fights and squabbles, where their parents forbade them from allowing a certain kid from the neighbourhood into their house for fear of them inciting an argument and starting a fight all over again.

This meant that while all the kids would head over to a certain kid’s house for console gaming, the one who was restricted from entering that kid’s house was forced to either find someone else to play with outside, or retreat home totally disappointed. Most often, he would end up doing the latter as all the kids would have chosen to go that kid’s house for console gaming and there would be no one left to play with outside.

For the kid forced to go home during such instances, reality sure stung hard.

There was the double whammy of being denied the excitement, joy, and pleasure that came with group gaming along with the termination of the outdoor game they were already indulged in too. It signalled the end of play time itself.

Are you also a 90’s kid? Did you also grow up with such cool gadgets during childhood?

Do you have any recollections of tech pieces that were superior to others and made you stand out from the rest? Did you get to own any of them? How did it make you feel as a child?

Do let me know in the comments section to the side.