Showing posts with label dead tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dead tech. Show all posts

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Exciting. Yeah, that's the ticket


It's exciting!

It's new!

It's an 8-track!

(crickets)

WELL, it also was 1966, and we didn't know any (CLUNK) better. After 1966, the main excite(CLUNK)ment  was when the damn tape jammed in the #&*~!+% 8-track player and $%#@&*! up the whole #$%!*#\ works . . . and why doesn't this tape sound nearly as good as the album???

Son of a bitch.

Pay attention, kiddos, you probably will look back on your iPod just as (ahem) fondly someday -- and by fondly, I mean wistfully derisive of the clearly inferior technology while longing for the days when it ruled the world. Life gets complicated.

And so will you.

Monday, September 10, 2012

This patient's chart doesn't look so good, Doc


God in heaven.

Look at this from the American Enterprise Institute:
The blue line in the chart above displays total annual print newspaper advertising revenue (for the categories national, retail and classified) based on actual annual data from 1950 to 2011, and estimated annual revenue for 2012 using quarterly data through the second quarter of this year, from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). The advertising revenues have been adjusted for inflation, and appear in the chart as millions of constant 2012 dollars. Estimated print advertising revenues of $19.0 billion in 2012 will be the lowest annual amount spent on print newspaper advertising since the NAA started tracking ad revenue in 1950.The decline in print newspaper advertising to a 62-year low is amazing by itself, but the sharp decline in recent years is pretty stunning. This year’s ad revenues of $19 billion will be less than half of the $46 billion spent just five years ago in 2007, and a little more than one-third of the $56.5 billion spent in 2004.
ANY MARKET for those of us with skill sets worthy of the Bronze Age? You know, like newspaper journalism and radio broadcasting? Some of us also have rudimentary skills in hunting and gathering, as well as cave painting.

Will cue up records (45, 33 1/3 and 78 rpm), edit reel-to-reel recording tape, hand-set metal type, tutor students in proportion-wheel and pica-pole use, change typewriter ribbons and develop film for food.

Also will backtime records to end at the top of the hour for a legal ID and the radio news for whatever alms you see fit to give.



HAT TIP:
Rod Dreher.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Back when cassettes ate their peas


"Who wants a tape-cartridge recorder?"

Not enough people, obviously, since I'll bet you've never seen one of these things. This RCA tape-cartridge recorder is a 1959 model, and it's kind of like a cassette deck, only bigger. With better fidelity, too, because it's basically a reel-to-reel machine with the reels in a great big cassette . . . er,
cartridge.

It never stood a chance when little cassettes came along in the mid-1960s.


The world is filled with Philistines! Any idiot knows that Beta the RCA tape-cartridge system is better, but noooooooo!


HEY! You can't argue with "four and one-half years of research."

Well, you can, but that just makes you an audiophobe. Philistine.