My grandma had an Arvin 3" reel recorder from the early 70s that she and her son used to exchanged tape messages on when he was in Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated she and grandpa bought a b/w Zenith to watch the funeral and by the mid 70s it was just a stand for the Kmart set because my uncle had sworn off fixing it or the picture tube was gone. He hated being over there so much that neither he nor grandma complained that I was taping over the messages, she encouraged it in fact. It finally quit working but by that time I was using a shoebox mono Panasonic and close to buying my first stereo gear.
My uncle was one of the earliest salesmen for C-band home satellite systems and an amateur operator, original calls WB7TYU and he took a new callsign a few years before he left the air. I was never impressed when he told me he was doing an EME (earth-moon-earth) but when he patched into the local repeater to call the hospital to ask about his grandfather's condition it hit me as to just how cool and vital it was to be able to do this on a Yaesu in a 1979 Pinto