As a way if distributing music, I agree, but they were around before that. I recorded “The Trouble with Tribbles” on my cassette player in December 1967, for a girl who sat behind me in writing class who wasn’t able to see it. And I wasn’t breaking new ground.
Okay. 1970 was when my father–I was 9 at the time–transitioned from reel-to-reel to cassettes, and I thought we were early adapters.
You were. Cassette quality wasn’t very good back then, and I don’t think they had the cassette decks they had a few years later.
I went from reel-to-reel to cassettes in 1979, and then digitized the cassettes I hadn’t gotten CDs for in 2000 or so.
My Dad transitioned from real-to-real to 8-track. He even had a player in his bitchin van and a big case full of dozens of tapes. It was KACHUNK
interesting where the songs would break when switching tracks.
Most of my flying in the past five years has been on smaller “regional” jets (United Express, American Eagle). I’ve yet to see one of those planes which has seatback screens.
I had a voice tape recorder in the late 70s and the sound wasn’t great. Then I went to Japan in 1981 and all the Japanese audio manufacturers were making “Walkman” type portable cassette players. The sound quality of the players was amazing.
There were rental music stores at the time, so we all copied music, copyrights be damned. I came back from Japan with a ton of music.
I bought my first cassette player and recorder in 1970 as a kid, and it wasn’t a difficult or expensive purchase. (I know the date because I used my new recorder to record the music from the PBS series The Six Wives of Henry VIII). So it couldn’t have been cutting-edge.
According to Wikipedia, Compact Cassette was introduced in 1963, and pre-recorded music cassette tapes were introduced in the US in 1966.
Car bras might have helped mitigate gravel damage but they didn’t help the paint: when dust got under the bra it acted just like sandpaper.
I had a 1989 Dodge Daytona that came with a bra from the previous owner (wrinkled up in a box, it had been on the car at one time), but I never got around to putting it on. Say, that teminds me:
Automotive headlights that extend and retract up into the ‘slipstream.’ 80s Corvettes, Porsche 928, KITT, all awesome. Flip-over lights on the grill-plane were older/before my time, 1966 Chargers had those.
Little wiper blades for the headlamps were never popular but are good & gone now. Some cars have sprayers, maybe cameras/lidar will need them one day again.
The first issue of TV Guide was released on April 3, 1953, when I was six weeks old, so it (barely) qualifies. In the 60s, it was the most read magazine in the country. Now, I believe it only exists in digital form, and the print magazine has completely disappeared.
My car’s rear view camera has a sprayer. I don’t recall if it has a wiper. I’ll look next time I’m in the vacinity of my car.
The stand alone gps’s aren’t entirely gone yet. I’ve found that my phone gps doesn’t work in Canada so when I visit there, I dig up my old TomTom and put in on top of my dashboard once again.
Noit true. You can still get a subscription to the hard-copy dead tree edition of TV Guide. I know, because my wife subscribed for a while
Ignorance fought, once again.
Thanks!
That actually makes sense once I think about it. The type of person to use a TV Guide is probably also more likely the type to still watch over the air or cable TV, i.e. older, and there’s probably at least enough thousands of them to support a small monthly (weekly? we never had TV Guide) print run.
The OP. Is looking for things that weren’t there when you were a child rather than in your lifetime. The title does say “lifetime” but the OP itself lays out that I’m looking for things that weren’t there when you were a child.
I’m more interested in things that had the experience of watching come into existence and become popular, and then largely went away.
This gets me in the mind of technology that I watched rise up, and then fade (or crash) away.
For certain values of ubiquitous, Unix workstations were very common in university computer labs, and probably some corporate settings, and then completely gone. I’m talking about dedicated Unix workstations like you’d get from Sun, SiliconGraphics, and DEC. Their disappearance is highly correlated with the disappearance of those companies, too.
And yes, it would be technically right (the best kind of right!) to call Macs Unix workstations, but I’m not accepting that, because they’ve been so heavily wrapped in a very non-Unix UI. The same as Android is technically Linux, but also not what anyone means when they talk about “running Linux.” I’m not calling Linux computers Unix workstations, because they’re just general purpose PCs that happen to be running Linux, not computers like a SparcStation that were always designed with the intent of running the Solaris flavor of Unix.
Those were called knuckle-busters in the industry.
Speaking of credit card verification, I remember seeing* a credit card presented and the cashier hauling up what looked like a thin phone book and carefully checking to see whether the card’s number was in it.
After that period, them picking up the phone, dialing a number, then the CC number, and waiting several moments for the okay.
*I was far too young to be presenting a card myself.
I actually had to use those things from 2006 to 2011. I can remember two instances where I actually broke a card when it got stuck under the moving top part of the machine. And so many times the carbon would be so faint I’d have to write in the numbers anyway. Hated them so much!! I was so glad when we finally moved into the 21st century to use Square for swipes and now newer tap-to-pay devices.
When I worked in my parents’ hardware store, in the late '70s and early '80s, we had those books, which were lists of invalid numbers. We accepted credit cards, but we rarely had credit-card transactions – maybe one a day.
We actually offered credit lines to regular customers, and that was much more common; one of my mother’s jobs for the store was to send out the monthly billing statements for those customers.