Does anyone know when the whole "retro" trend came about? I've only ever noticed it within the last few years, but then again I suppose I'm not old enough to remember when it initially came about.
It seems to have become "trendy" to own some vintage technology nowadays, and "retro" seems to be the new catchword.

I kind of have mixed feelings about the whole trend. It's driven up the prices and demand for many items, but it has also saved many such items that would have otherwise ended up thrown out and lost.

Chris

The term retro seems to apply to anything that is old but more appropriately describes anything that is from the latter portion of the art deco era. Picture theatres, milk bars and pubs with heaps of polished timber, mirrors, pastel coloured milky glass lamp shades and chrome door furniture are good examples - along with valve radios like the AWA Radiolette and Airzone Symphony Leader of course.

Holden cars built about twenty years later could also be described as retro with massive chrome grilles and tail fins characteristic of many cars of the 1950s.

Retro to me properly means products made today in the style of yesteryear. Literally, looking backwards. The Chrysler PT Cruiser is an example.

However, eBay sellers in particular like to use retro to simply mean old.

It is simply a shortening of retrospective, which as GTC correctly points out, is literally looking backwards.

The French coined the term around 1964, meaning imitative of the style of the recent past, and this trend was in full swing in graphic design and the fashion world by the early Seventies. It took a bit longer before product designers accepted it. Nowadays "Retro" can mean everything from "a stylish object designed sometime in the 20th Century", to "a new thing with a bit of applied chrome and bright colour", to "stick Audrey Hepburn's face on it and the mugs will buy it".