First to use? Last to use? Still use obscure out of use formats? Tell us your stories. Tell us your age if you can.
I’m 38. I lived through 8-tracks, vinyl, cassette, CDs, and mp3s.
I remember black and white TVs, but not a time without color.
I remember the very brief window in college when professionals and academics were using digital audio tapes, which were very closely regulated by the government for fear of pirating (boy did that ship ever sail!).
I actually miss laser discs because I had the impression they were a lossless format like CDs, unlike the compressed DVDs that came after.
I got my first and only telegram in 1992 from my grandparents when I graduated high school.
I miss polaroids, but I stopped using them, and just use the instagram app and other similar things to recreate the experience. I do remember the sort of bastard child of polaroids - that developed the picture instantly, but in the form of tiny stickers.
I used to have a speak and spell. Now I have a speak n spell app!
And how about shrinky dinks, lite brite, and colorforms? Are they still around? Do kids still collect stickers in albums? Friendship bracelets? Beads on safety pins?
Never saw an 8-track player in actual use. My parents might have owned vinyl, and I seem to recall a record player when I was young, but it never interested me very much. I grew up on cassette tapes. In 1996, when I was a freshman in high school, I religiously took my cassette player to school and played the same tapes over and over again. I still remember the first CD I ever owned: a Best Of Queen album. It’s funny to think now how much music we just casually carry around without ever having to swap out physical media. I really don’t miss respooling tapes.
I will say, though, I hung onto tapes a lot longer than most people my age. I worked at an audiobook store during high school and got absolutely hooked on them. Most of the stock was tape, with only a limited CD selection, and frankly tapes were better for audiobooks anyway. Fidelity isn’t as important to the spoken word as it is for music, you could hold more on a tape than a CD (something like 90 minutes on a tape versus 74 on a CD), and when you paused a book a tape held its place, while unless you had an advanced CD player you’d have to find your chapter again every time you stopped playing it. Then digital audiobooks came out and I never looked back.
I regularly purchased and listened to LPs and 45s. I remember reel-to-reel tapes, but never used them. I got my first cassette player in 1969 when I was 12, and it wasn’t even a stereo player. I got an 8 track player a few years later, the first of several. I was in on the CB radio boom of the 70s when there were only 23 channels. I have seen all of these fade in popularity or become obsolete, although I did hang onto a cassette player in my car until last year, when I got a new Cd player. Although I haven’t played a single CD on it since it has an input jack I can play my iPhone on.
I have owned the ubiquitous portable record player, the ubiquitous all in one stereo, the ubituitous radio shack tape player, a Wollensak reel to reel, a tape walkman, a cd walkman, a sony minidics [first gen, made of metal not plastic and it records] a first gen ipod, and currently have a bright red ipod nano.
I have owned a car with an 8track player, a car with just an am radio, a car with a cassette deck, a car with an in dash 1 cd player, a car with an in the trunk 6 cd changer, and a car with an in dash 6 cd changer. My current car has the 6 cd in dash changer and is wired for an ipod.
In my collection, I have several albums of 78s, I have 33s, 45s, a couple ‘audiophile’ albums, and cds. I used to have several wax cylinders but they died in my parent’s housefire.
I remember when there was only black and white, I remember when we only had 1 tv in the house. I remember when we got color and the old black n white went to the playroom for us. I remember saving my money and buying my own 9 inch diagonal tv. I remember owning my first color tv when I finally moved out on my own. I remember the first time I got cable, and the first time I got MTV. I remember my first vcr, and my first DVD.
Born in 1987, grew up with cassettes as the standard music format. My family didn’t get CDs until around 1997, which seems pretty late in retrospect- I think cassettes were about to be phased out of most stores around then. There was no vinyl in the house when I was a kid, but I started collecting it during its revival in 2005. I still buy all my music on CD or vinyl (or very rarely cassette) instead of downloading it. I’ve never used an 8-track.
The format of the TV in my home has not changed in my lifetime (I think the TV I watch now is about 20 years old).
Transitioned from VHS to DVD around the end of 2002, and still using them. I’ve never watched a movie on Laserdisc, HD-DVD or BluRay.
I don’t use physical photographs any more, but I’m not sure when that transition happened, since I was never that into photography and the first camera I owned myself was digital.
What are 16s? I mean, I could guess, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one and have always wondered what the 16 setting was for on the old phonograph. I’ve seen 33 1/3s (standard), 45s (standard for singles), 78s (older records, maybe circa WWII). What was put out on 16s?
Note that the records were available only by mail order (and only from the Columbia catalog), and because of grooving differences couldn’t be played on home turntables without changing both the needle and the pressure.
I still buy CDs. Then, once I’ve ripped them, I never touch the physical disc again. Or at most, once more, to give it to my mom. You wouldn’t think it would seem like a hassle to just eject one disc, put it back on the shelf, and put another one in, at most once an hour… But it really does seem so much more convenient to just click on a different album in iTunes.
MrWhatsit refuses to get rid of his vinyl collection (well, that sounds like I’m trying to pressure him into it, which I’m not; I don’t care if he keeps it around) even though we no longer have a working turntable in the house, and no plans to buy one.
By the time I was old enough to start buying my own music, cassette tapes were big. Made the switch to CDs by the time I was in high school, and very gradually transitioned to digital. I just noticed that the last physical CD I bought was in 2004, and I didn’t realize it had been that long. There’s no way I’d buy a physical CD now.
Hello my name is Intergalactic Gladiator and I’m 40 (Hi Intergalactic Gladiator).
I grew up using cassette tapes. I, and other kids in the neighborhood, had tape recorders and we would often record ourselves doing stupid voices or playing radio or whatever. We never had an 8 track, but I remember seeing one for the first time in someone’s car.
I bought my first CD at the PX when I was stationed overseas in the Army. It was the soundtrack to Pump IUp the Volume and I bought many others soon after that. In the early days of CD, there were box sets available that were way cheaper than the fancy ones they started putting out with all the extras and I got boxed sets of INXS, AC/DC, and Pink Floyd. Originally, I was reluctant to buy a CD player, but once I did everything was Jake. I also remember the digital tapes and I bought a couple when they were being made.
Like jackdavinvi, I remember black and white TVs, I even bought one with the money I got as gifts from my first communion. At that time, B&W TVs were cheaper than color.
My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, I soon upgraded to the Commodore 64 and even bought a used 128 from a commrade when I was oveseas and he was looking for some plane ticket money.
My first year in college, I bought a 5 inch floppy to keep my papers on. Shortly after that, I had to upgrade to a 3.5. For some reason I was reluctant to get one – I think I was a little stuck on the larger ones because I had a ton of them for my C64. I also remember the 8 inch floppies, but I never had one.
I grew up with record players. There was a nice one in the living room for my parents’ stuff, and a cheap one downstairs for ours. We had a B&W TV for a while, and I never saw cable until I moved out to college. I had a massive tape collection of stuff I had recorded from various sources. My dad was always an early adopter, which is kind of out of character for him. But I remember our first VCR, with a whole tape shelf that popped up out of the top. And our first CD player, which had a feature that has since been lost. In addition to moving from track to track, it had a repeat button. You pressed it once to mark the start of the repeat section, and when you hit it again, it would start looping between those two points until you turned it off. I’ve never seen that on any other player. My dad was also one of the few people who bought into Circuit City’s DIVX program, which got us a lot of movies for basically no money - the “disable the disc after the rental period is over” feature never worked properly. I remember recording .wav files off of audio CDs onto our computer running some early version of Windows. It could only handle a few seconds.
I still have CDs and movies taped on old VHS tapes, off the VCR (of which I own three). The tapes seem to be holding up, and I watched some TV show I taped, and it was so long ago that the cars in a car commercial looked completely alien compared to what you see on the roads now. I would like to move on, technology wise, but would need some young expert in the field to buy the doodads for me, set them up, and give me detailed instruction in their use (also leaving copious cheat sheets to consult when I ferget. Which I will.)
Got a fairly new record player and plenty o’ vinyl, too, just taking up space and collecting dust. Still have a couple of 70’s era big heavy components of some type, for cassettes, and recording cassettes. I don’t think they work, but I don’t know how to dispose of them, so there they sit like the relics they are.
An early form of the record. About the size of a 33 1/3 but moved at 16 rpm’s. You had one song per side. In fact, the name LP means Lng Playing record. Because you could put many songs per side and it would play longer.