Behold the new Land Rover Defender Not cheap at all
Behold 25 minutes with more than you ever wanted to know about radiometers
As for 8track in Europe. Ubiquitous is certainly not a word I’d use, but they did make it here; they were used to play jingles and commercials on radio (and tv?) stations up into the 90’s when things started being digital.
The thing about them was that there was no need to rewind. It all went on a loop, and if you got a 10, 15 or 30 second ‘cart’ as they were called, fast forwarding to stop took a few seconds. Pull it out and load the next. If you had two or more, Bob was your uncle*. They were hooked up so when one ended it would trigger the next in the stack.
*Anyone listening to WGN720 in the 80’s will remember the late Bob Collins, who did call himself Uncle Bob on occasion. His green Porsche 928 had vanity plates: SEGUE.
Haven’t been in a school lately, have you? Mechanical pencils are more common than wood, but there are still enough wood ones that sharpeners are all over the place, and used fairly regularly.
What’s harder to find now are the non-electric ones, that bolted to the wall and had a little turn crank. And most of those that you do see are Xacto, which are lousy quality.
For that matter, the little pocket ones, with the blade mounted next to the conical hole, are getting rare, too. But the electrics are still going strong.
That’s because they weren’t. The cans were made of lined cardboard. Only the tops and bottoms were metal.
As mentioned above, anybody who has ever seen an Edmunds Scientific catalog has seen all of that. Same same for 8-track carts. Every episode of WKRP features them.
They were, weren’t they? All-metal cans didn’t sound right, but I couldn’t quite recall.
I could see 8-track being more practical in discos, which I think have always been more popular in Europe.
The little aluminum ones are sold in five-packs at every dollar store where I live. Googling “pencil sharpener” without quotes shows plenty. Might have to do with local supply.
The big percolators are still pretty common at churches and VFW type organizations. The home-sized ones are another story - I haven’t seen one of those except camping in many years
Oh, they’re still around, just rarer than they used to be. Used to be, one of those was a standard school supply, found in every child’s backpack. Though they might still be found in the backpacks of the students who still use wood pencils.
And the wall-mount sharpeners aren’t completely extinct. I stand to inherit the one that Mom has in her house. But most classrooms don’t have them any more.
Broadcast audio carts were similar to 8-tracks, in that they used a continuous loop of tape, but they were not the same, and were not compatible or interchangeable with them.
I knew a teacher who took a group of highschoolers on a field trip. At one point, he asked the bus driver to pull over. The kids got out and he directed them to an overgrown field with a large, flat, rectangular white object at one end. He told them that at one time there had been thousands of these across the country, and asked them what they thought it was. Not a one recognized it as an abandoned drive-in theater. They had never heard of such a thing, let alone seen one.
Y’all’re thinking far too old for “relatively recently” and “youngsters”. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance someone under the age of ten wouldn’t even know what this is;
Even among the kids who recognize the pull tab, probably very few know that with this kind (with the little “wings” where the tab attaches to the ring), you could break the tab off the ring and use it to shoot the ring across the room like a Frisbee.
This very much surprises me. I was born in 1968 in Germany and might call myself a music geek, of all kinds of recorded media and hardware (I’m an electrical engineer), and I had never encountered 8-track before reading about it here on this board. I’ve never seen a player or a tape in the wild.
