Dial-up modems, pagers and the family Nokia are getting a second life at A Walk Through Time, a free exhibition by Skills Development Academy (SDA) that runs at shopping malls across Singapore until 20 December 2026, from 11am to 8pm daily.
The show splits into two halves. The first, Memory Lane, recreates scenes from a 1980s or 90s HDB estate: a mama shop corner complete with coin phone, marble folding table and red plastic stools; a retro study room with a CRT monitor, typewriter and fax machine; and a living room set with an old TV, VCR, radio cassette player and even a Sega Saturn. Alongside the room sets, a gadget showcase traces decades of everyday tech, from the Motorola brick phone and pagers through the Nokia 3310, Sony Ericsson W20 and BlackBerry 9790, plus Walkmans, Discmans, phone cards and paper street directories.
Displays are arranged by era, so you can watch single tasks evolve: navigating by street directory versus Google Maps, waiting by a payphone versus sending a WhatsApp voice note, taping songs off the radio versus a Spotify algorithm building your playlist.
The second zone, AI Era, bridges past and present. A 'Spot Which Is AI' challenge offers four tests on AI-generated visuals and voices that are harder to beat than you'd expect. The AI Interactive Hub demonstrates which tools, from ChatGPT and Gemini to Canva and Copilot, handle everyday jobs like drafting emails or summarising meetings. There's also an AI Prompt Lab with a guide called Lumo teaching the C.I.D.O. framework (Context, Instruction, Details, Output), and a Grandmaster AI station that prints a bazi fortune reading from your birth details. SDA, which has trained over 150,000 Singaporeans, also runs adult AI courses if the exhibition sparks something.
The rotating mall schedule makes it easy to slot in: AMK Hub (26 Oct-1 Nov), Bedok Mall (4-10 Nov), Suntec City (16-22 Nov), Downtown East (23-29 Nov), Bugis Junction (30 Nov-6 Dec), Leisure Park Kallang (7-13 Dec) and KINEX (14-20 Dec). Admission costs nothing, the venues are air-conditioned, and there's shopping and food all around, so it works as a low-effort family outing.
Who's it for? Anyone who grew up in Singapore in the 80s, 90s or early 2000s will get a nostalgia hit, while Gen Z and Alpha visitors get a rare hands-on look at gadgets they've only seen as icons, like the floppy disk in the Save button. It's an easy hour or two, and the ride home tends to turn into a debate about whose childhood had better tech.
