The Talkie project is a Large Language Model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters, trained exclusively on historical texts dating back to before 1931, aiming to simulate the knowledge, culture, and language of a bygone era. Researchers use vintage models to study how knowledge evolves and the capacity for prediction, testing the model's ability to "predict" the future, such as deducing the General Theory of Relativity discovered by Einstein in 1915. Vintage models are free from "contamination" from modern data, and experiments show Talkie can learn programming from a few examples in context. Talkie is the largest vintage language model currently available, trained on 260 billion tokens of historical English texts, including books, newspapers, scientific journals, and patents. It can write Gothic horror stories in the style of the 19th century or describe a traveler's impressions of Cairo in the Victorian era. The model was fine-tuned using old etiquette books, letter-writing guides from the turn of the 20th century, and classic cookbooks, reflecting the culture and values of its era. Training challenges include poor text quality and "temporal leakage."