Welcome to the Museum of Things Experienced With Increasing Rarity. Please leave your bags at the coat check.
Thank you. Come this way.
MOTEWIR is an institution dedicated to the products, inventions, objects and entertainment that were once part of peoples lives, but are slipping or have slipped away. Some visitors consider these items halfway between historical and hysterical. Younger visitors may find some of this of curatorial interest only.
Over here in the Hall of Obsolescence, we have a beige Power Macintosh 9500 desktop computer. In the mid-90s it was a cutting edge device for gearheads and graphic designers, with 32 megabytes of ROM and a $4,900 price tag. The Flying Toasters screensaver may look a bit pixilated to todays jaded eyes, but it was considered high-end video graphics in its time, at least at the consumer level.
The Mac is connected to a dial-up modem. Incredibly, there was a time when people werent constantly online, in-touch and on-call. If you wanted to connect to the Internet, you had to do it manually. Hear this? Every time a modem connected to distant servers, people heard this pterodactyl-like screech. Crazy, I know.
Next to the computer is a telephone hard-wired into a wall. Fun fact for you teens: telephone landlines predate voicemail and texting. If you werent home to get a call, it was like it never happened. Callers would have to try again later.
Watch your step folks, there were a lot of cables back then. Come this way. This primitive object is called an ashtray. Its from a time when many people inhaled from tobacco-containing tubes called cigarettes. Next to the ashtray is its cousin from an earlier era, a spittoon. You can guess its purpose from the name.
This strange metallic thing in my hand, can anyone guess what it is? Its a Brannock Device, once used by salespeople for measuring feet in shoe stores. This thing is analogue all the way, not a wire or cable on it. A real collectors item.
Any questions? No? Right this way this is our Eighties to Noughties Entertainment Room. In the display case is a Michael Jackson action figure in its original packaging. You can tell its from the 80s by the skin colour. Also, by the fact its not encased in an impervious plastic clamshell. Excuse me, maam, please dont touch the vacuum tube receiver/amplifier, its an antique from Radio Shack. You are free to browse the encyclopedia on the bookshelf if you like, along with the Xeroxed zines.
Just past this excellently preserved Betamax recorder we have a stack of HD-DVDs. Remember them? I dont either. Apparently HD-DVD lost the digital battle to Blu-ray back in 2008, even though it was the less expensive format.
And can anyone tell me what this is? Good guess, son, but no, its not a white brick. Its an original, scroll-wheel iPod from 2001. It holds five gigabytes of sound files. Thats the equivalent of one cheap memory stick from Staples today or the disk memory of three Power Mac 9500s from the past.
This is my favourite room: The Gallery of Forgotten Sounds. Here you can listen to the symphony of amphibians, crickets, and grasshoppers that once serenaded people on summer nights, along with the occasional train whistle. For balance we have a backfiring Ford Pinto and a Michael Bolton Christmas medley.
If you would like to enjoy a movie, today our Cinemascope theatre is showing a Ken Burns-like compilation of vanished or vanishing sights and scenes. Milkmen. Visible orthodonture. Body hair. Cursive writing. Migrating birds in V-formations. Woolly caterpillars. Nuns in habits. Hitchhikers. People putzing about, unrushed and unscheduled, conversing in public. Heartfelt goodbyes at airports. Kids playing unsupervised outdoors. And wrinkles! Remember when people with money aged gracefully?
Thanks for coming. Donations will allow us to expand the MOTEWIR collection. In the coming months we hope to add a waterbed, sprocketed film projection equipment, mail-order uranium, lawn darts, and a Christmas tree made of actual cedar.
Any last questions? Whats that public washrooms? Im sorry, thats one thing from the past we dont have here at The Museum of Things Experienced With Increasing Rarity. Just kidding! Down the hall to the left, next to the poster of Simon Le Bon.
www.geoffolson.com
