God I want one of those.
I mean to type Long Playing.
Must have been a long song. Seriously, it sounds like you’re describing 78s rather than the 16 rpm format.
Early records were all fast. The first standard was 78. Other things being equal, slower rpm means more time per side, so long players ran slower.
In the case of the Highway Hi-Fi, the system used 7" records, like 45 rpm singles but with a small center hole. But then the grooves were pressed smaller and more tightly together, and the the speed was slowed down, so you could actually get an LP’s worth of music, around 45 minutes, on one side of the small record. To make all this work, particularly in a moving car, I understand that the needle had to be smaller and press harder. So as I said, the records aren’t really immediately playable on home turntables. There were some other 16 2/3 rpm records made, not for Highway Hi-Fi, with standard grooving, but given that the 33 1/3 rpm LP was rapidly establishing as the high-end standard, it’s hard to see what the point of the slower records would have been.
I suspect that 16 continued to be available as a speed setting on players because it was an easy feature to include, if you were going to build in 33, 45 and 78.
:smack: I meant 78’s. you are correct.
And when that failed, they were used for radio transcription and early audio books:
Me and my family tend to be late adapters of tech.
TV: Didn’t even have a color TV until 1985 (I was ten). Grandma babysat us in the mornings, so we did see a lot of color TV.
Music: Evenly shared between vinyl and 8-track in the early 80s, although we didn’t have enough money to buy new stuff. (Heck I remember my grandfather listening to his Hank Williams and Mexican music 8-tracks until he died in 1994.) We played them on a huge console stereo that was the size of a meat freezer. I threw away my record player around 1990, but recaught the bug in my college years and still buy new and used LPs. Although my college roomates (in 1994) were genuinely suprised I still bought and used cassettes, didn’t buy a CD player until 2003.
Photos: Polaroid was regulary used until the early 90s, but we also had a regular camera from the start. I never had my own film camera, just bought disposables. Bought my first digital in 2007 and never looked back.
I have kept a lot of my old formats, but I don’t actually use any of them regularly.
(I’m in my 30s)
First watched movies on 8-tracks, then moved to VHS. I was aware of betamax, but we never had those. Always had a color tv, but one of our neighborhood babysitters was an elderly couple who had a black&white tv. VCR was always working, and we recorded lots of shows. I remember being distinctly put out when DVD players came out and you couldn’t easily record things with them. I don’t have a dedicated BluRay or HD-DVD player, but with every modern gaming system known to mankind in my living room, who needs a dedicated video player?
Music: Vinyl was always an adult thing, not a format thing. Lots of records in the house, but never any indication that they were hard to find or that they were considered something that could be outdated. Mom still has the original record player we had when I was a child, and I “inherited” the original set of speakers from it. (I bought her some new ones so I could have the pretty wood set.)
I do remember being very young and having some “toy” record player that played small (10"?) stiff plastic disks in bright colors - they played nursery rhymes and Disney songs as I recall. They had huge grooves in them, with little plastic extrusions which were visible to the eye, and were what tripped the ‘needle’ of the machine. I was intrigued when my dad explained (and demonstrated under a magnifying glass) that “real” vinyl was the same way.
I had another player which played a set of metal cylinders which were like the ones from music boxes - the cylinders were intended to be collectible/traded. I was always getting the weird unwanted ones from people. I have no idea what or who made either of those two items.
I remember the fun when walkmans came out, and later the weird getting used to cds where you couldn’t tell where you were in the playback through any visual means.
I distinctly remember teaching my mom to use an i-pod and i-tunes. Even with heavy i-pod use, all of my friends and I still use disks pretty regularly.
Computing. This one is cheating a bit, because my dad was a computer-mad engineer. I remember “helping” him build our first computer, which ran on 8" floppy disks we had to change out. I remember the first computer that had actual internal memory. I remember our first upgrade to a DOS interface, and the subsequent Windows system we installed inside of DOS to run computer games. I clearly remember writing school papers on Wordperfect (those bright blue screens with white letters).
Now I have an emulator on my current computer so I can go back and play some of those old-ass games. Oregon Trail just isn’t right without 8bit bison!
I still have that computer, and most of the old disks we used. They are probably deader than doornails, but I kept as many of them as I could find. It kills me that I have a flashdrive that’s orders of magnitude more storage than that first computer we build together. Just wild.
I’m 59 and I remember before UHF TV. We only got two stations – ABC and CBS and no channel about channel 13. New York City Stations were too far. My father, who owned an appliance store, brought home a UHF tuner one day, and we were able to get NBC – the only ones in town (“Channel 20? How can you watch Channel 20? They only go up to 13!”). A year or two later, all TVs were required to have a UHF tuner built in, but that’s around the time we got cable and all the New York City stations, plus channel 20 (moved down to channel 10 or 12). We got our first color TV in the late 60s; all else before was B&W.
I got my first real stereo around 1968. Before that, I had to get mono albums (I have a mono version of Sgt. Pepper somewhere). Skipped 8 tracks and cassettes, and generally didn’t listen to music much until I could run CDs from my computer.
Computers: The high school got one around 1969. It was a Olivetti Underwood Programa 101, with about as much memory and computing power as a $10 pocket calculator today. I used mainframes at college, learning BASIC and FORTRAN. In the late 80s, my father got a Commodore Vic 20, but my first experience was around 1984, when I used an IBM PC to write documentation for software (something called Enable, which was a great idea, only MS Office killed that market). My first home computer was an Apple IIe, which I got around 1985.
Our first home computer was the TI-99. It had a slot for cartridges (we had a game called Tombstone and some Pac-man and Space Invaders ripoffs). But there was no floppy drive. Instead, when my dad was teaching me how to do some simple Basic programs, we would save them to a standard audio cassette. Yep, we hooked up one of these to the computer, pressed record, and stored the data on a cassette.
Same here.
We had a TI99 4/A, and I LOVED Tunnels of Doom, and the various Adventure games. Man those were fun.
Born 1981.
I vaguely remember my parents getting their first VCR. It was sometime after 1987. In fact, the house my parents bought that year had one of those huge (like 10’ diameter) satellite dishes on their property, so we had satellite in our house before a VCR. (Any kids of the late 80’s remember DTV on Disney?) I remember my aunt having a betamax player, and renting beta tapes at the local video store. My wife and I bought VHS tapes until we got our first DVD player in 2003 or so. We bought and rented DVDs until we got Dish satellite in 2009. I’ve never used Netflix, and have a hard time understanding the whole ‘streaming’ thing. (What do you do? Set a laptop on the floor in front of the couch and just… watch a movie that’s being transmitted to your computer via a wireless internet connection?)
I’ve seen HDTV programming and HDTVs at friend’s houses. I own an old-fashioned box tv. Have never seen a blu-ray movie.
I remember having a record player in my bedroom in 4th grade. I was addicted to Bob Seger and to this day, 20 years later, I can’t hear the song “Hollywood Nights” without having a momentary flashback to a record spinning on the turntable 
My first car was a 1976 VW bus, affectionately dubbed the “shaggin’ wagon”. It had an 8-track player in it when I got it, but I switched it out for a tape deck. A Blaupunkt Seattle. I carried my cassettes in one of those portable cases that looked like tiny suitcases.
My first CD player was a Sony 5-disk changer hooked up thru the aux jacks on an old POS boombox. My first CD was the green covered Fleetwood Mac greatest hits, which I still have today.
My parents didn’t get their first computer until 1998 or so, a Compaq with Windows 98. I left home soon after, and my wife and I bought a HP with Windows XP on it in 2002. We didn’t replace that until last year, when we got a refurbished machine, also with Windows XP.
I’ve never used iTunes and don’t really know what it is. I have a Sony mp3 player, but all the music on it has been transferred to it from CD using Windows media player. I listen to NPR, classical music, and music is not a big part of my life. I currently have approximately 4,000 books, and all are physical, paper-in-a-binding books. The oldest is from 1883, the newest is Stieg Larson’s trilogy. I have never even seen a Kindle.
I had a stack of 78s which had belonged to my grandfather until another family member wandered off with them. Still have a few 45s which I don’t envisage ever playing again. And I have about 500 LPs and a working turntable. I’m a bit doubtful about the state of the stylus, however. So no plans to play any of them either.
I should probably get rid of the turntable and the records but my husband would have a conniption, so it’s not worth the trouble.
8 tracks never took off in Australia and my cassettes have all long degraded and been tossed. I still have piles of CDs which I occasionally listen to but laziness has overtaken me in my old age and I just tend to listen to the iPod these days.
We didn’t get television in Australia until 1956, so I remember getting our very first b & w 21" (huge back in the day).
I sincerely urge all right-thinking dopers to get with the 21st century, purchase a new I-pod and rid yourselves of all that obsolete, space wasting ol’ stereo gear that’s cluttering up the house. That Pioneer SX-1280 your dad brought back from Vietnam - boat anchor material. Likewise those damn AR-3a speakers that are so awkward to move and are only good to put plants on. Records, cassettes - that’s just crazy talk, man. And some of that stuff still has tubes and things that get all hot - that has to be dangerous.
Do yourself a favor and send all that junk to me - I’ll dispose of it in a convenient and environmentally safe manner.
In my story, music is the media in question.
I was born in 1950, and had acquired my first three 45rpm records before I was nine. (I still have two of them, my Mom still has the third one.) I was already a record geek by the time I got my first LP in early 1964. As a teenager I got a few eight-tracks for my car, but hated the format for the well-known obvious reasons. Embraced cassette recording in the early 70’s, made a ton of compilation and personal favorite mix tapes for car and home.
Although I loved collecting and listening to vinyl records, I was always maddened by the fragility and inherent noisiness of the medium. Warps, scratches, pops, hiss, not to mention frequent tonearm stylus replacements. Most of my favorite albums were replaced at least once, many of them several times. When CD’s first appeared, I was instantly on board, and I never again bought new vinyl when the album was available on CD. I haven’t missed the “analog warmth” of vinyl for a moment- I’ve always been one to listen to how the music was put together, and cd’s gave me the clarity and cleanliness I’d always wished for. 25 (?) years later, all of my old vinyl has been transferred to CD or other digital storage, including those very first two 45’s (which I still listen to).
It’s possible to connect a computer to a television and watch content on that. It is also possible to stream Netflix on one of the current generation of game consoles, the Wii, the XBox 360, and the PlayStation 3, and probably the most convenient way since those are already connected to your TV set.
I dug out a cassette from 1980 last week to take along to my 30 year school reunion. It still worked perfectly.
I still have a floppy disc writeable Sony mavica… I bought it for a ridiculous amount, just as the digital camera revolution was taking off… i paid a ridiculous amount for megapixels. My Cell Cam is 200 times more advanced.
i take pictures with it still… qite an accomplishment by Sony.