When did radio become "vintage"?

[bigfathairyvika]

The word "vintage" is supposed to refer to wine, but eventually became a generic word for anything someone considered old.

I've had a Google about but haven't found anything referring to when radio became vintage?
Eg: In the 1950s , was spark gap technology from the 1900s considered vintage?

I have noticed lately, equipment from the 1980s and 1990s being called vintage.

Maybe the site infuture will need to renamed "antique-radio" to reflect the age of some of the radios we work on.

Mark

[paulsherwin]

The forum mods usually use a 25 year cutoff to decide if something is 'vintage' or not, though that is applied with discretion. Currently 'vintage' is something made before 1998. 20 years ago it would have been 1978.

[Aub]

What drives me nuts is when folk mix up vintage and retro. To me, retro is something that is new, or pretty new, that looks like it could be old. Vintage is something that IS old ( or at least 25 years old on this forum ) I know people have different views on this but that's my definition.

Cheers

Aub

[Smithdoor]

What do call my equipment from 1960's Antique.
Most other tools are from 1960's and 1970's.

Dave

Originally Posted by bigfathairyvika

The word "vintage" is supposed to refer to wine, but eventually became a generic word for anything someone considered old.

I've had a Google about but haven't found anything referring to when radio became vintage?
Eg: In the 1950s , was spark gap technology from the 1900s considered vintage?

I have noticed lately, equipment from the 1980s and 1990s being called vintage.

Maybe the site infuture will need to renamed "antique-radio" to reflect the age of some of the radios we work on.

Mark

[mole42uk]

AFAIK "Vintage" was a term borrowed from winemaking and applied to cars built between 1919 and 1930. However, these days it seems to apply to anything older that the person describing it.
Antique is similarly applied, but seems to be used to imply monetary value in addition to age.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by mole42uk

AFAIK "Vintage" was a term borrowed from winemaking and applied to cars built between 1919 and 1930.

Yes: in connection with wine it goes back to the 17th century and before, with an etymology associated with "vintner" i.e. wine merchant. Its spread into other fields and looser applications isn't particularly recent. A few examples from the Oxford English Dictionary:

"Goes on working at her vintage telephone" (1950).

"The details of a vintage aircraft..." (1958).

"My name is Larry Alden and maybe you'll only know it if you have a long memory or a stack of vintage jazz records" (1959).

"A debonair gentleman... wearing a vintage tweed jacket" (1985).

The forum policy seems a sensible compromise to me. Probably some of us will never regard anything transistorised - or hailing from this side of WWII - as "vintage", but that's largely a generational issue. I struggle quite to comprehend that my first Ekco A22 is more than three times the age it was when I bought it in 1969, it just seemed like a moderately old radio to me then and it still does now

Paul

[G6Tanuki]

Must admit, I like the German approach which is to use the term 'oldtimer' when talking about old cars, radios, computers etc.

Of course what fits into the category must be a movable; you can't have a 25 year old iPod but a first generation one would definitely count as an oldtimer to me.

[electronicskip]

I suppose you could always have Vintage and Veteran.

[Nickthedentist]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Must admit, I like the German approach which is to use the term 'oldtimer' when talking about old cars, radios, computers etc.

Of course what fits into the category must be a movable; you can't have a 25 year old iPod but a first generation one would definitely count as an oldtimer to me.

Just “old” is fine by me. oldtimer sounds like an American way of referring to an OAP

Anything no longer found in your average UK home counts, e.g. CRT tellies, non-DAB radios, corded telephones, answering machines, cassette recorders, VHS machines, nonelectric clocks etc.

[Herald1360]

If antique refers to >100 years old, then yes, some of the stuff we play with is antique.

[retailer]

The word 'vintage' is quite useful - use it in the description of a sale item and the asking price suddenly doubles as if by magic.

[ScottBouch]

Originally Posted by Aub

What drives me nuts is when folk mix up vintage and retro. To me, retro is something that is new, or pretty new, that looks like it could be old.

Good observation on the word 'retro'. It agrees with Wikipedia:

The term retro has been in use since 1972 to describe on the one hand, new artifacts that self-consciously refer to particular modes, motifs, techniques, and materials of the past But on the other hand, many people use the term to categorize styles that have been created in the past. Retro style refers to new things that display characteristics of the past. Unlike the historicism of the Romantic generations, it is mostly the recent past that retro seeks to recapitulate, focusing on the products, fashions, and artistic styles produced since the Industrial Revolution, the successive styles of Modernity. The English word retro derives from the Latin prefix retro, meaning backwards, or in past times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retro_style

I have two 746 type telephones in use at home. One is original from 1981, so is "vintage", the other is a modern (15 years old) reproduction item, so is "retro". But given a few more years, the "retro" phone will also become "vintage" too!

Mad to think as a child of the 1980's I can be classed as "vintage"! ...But Graham next door is almost an antique.

[The Philpott]

-By it's nature i suppose we have to accept language being wooly and fluid, and the more people that use it, the quicker it morphs. 'Classic' is even more of ambiguous than 'Vintage' as it's utterly in the eye of the beholder.

At some point (and maybe this has already started) Vintage will be applied to anything that is no longer being made such as a Nokia 402.

Dave

[Jez1234]

The one that get's me is when gears that has been manufactured unchanged/re-styled only etc for the last 30 years or more or is called vintage 'cos it's 25 years old (or maybe only 15!) Or it's generically of a pretty unchanging format eg valve guitar amplifiers from the likes of Fender or Marshall etc (no doubt you can still buy a Vox AC30!). I guess that different brands of components will have been used over the years and some minor changes for electrical safety regs etc but other than that with some of these a brand new one is pretty much the same as a 45 year old one.

[Paul_RK]

Yes, the "vintage" term certainly gets strained when it comes to product classes that reach full maturity and/or obsolescence. That includes analogue radios: the first Roberts Revivals are now 33 years old, so could make our vintage category though there's still a, fairly different internally, analogue Revival (R260) hanging on in production. Roberts' little plastic-cased model R9993 has been on the market for sixteen years and counting.

Paul