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For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com)
The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2015: making and selling audiocassettes. There are fewer and fewer competitors in the tape-making business, but NAC still has a healthy market for cassettes -- in October, the company noted "a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year." From the article: [Company president Steve Stepp] said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said. Some artists are still releasing music on tape, but about 70 percent of what the company sells is blank cassettes; there are an awful lot of tape decks out there; my father alone still buys a few hundred blanks each year.
"Ob so le se nc e is Just a 12-Letter Word"
Really?
I loved buying Maxell XL-IIS blanks. That being said, I can't see buying and making tapes today. It'd be like buying an old Polaroid camera... oh wait I did that
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Obviously there are exceptions like wax cylinders and stone tablets, but in general if a medium is cheap and/or does a job thats not easily or cheaply replicated elsewhere it'll stick around. As soon as the Next Thing comes along certain people always predict the demise of that which its superceding. Cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. It didn't. Ditto CDs, they didn't. MP3s were supposed to kill CDs and cassettes. They didn't. Streaming - we are told - is the end of downloads. Yeah, right. DVD killed VHS? No it didn't - not until set top box recorders came along to fill in that functionality. Automatic gearboxes were the death knell of manual transmissions. Oh really? Now driverless cars will be the end of human driven cars. No, don't think so.
Anyone who predicts the end of anything without waiting a few decades is an idiot.
Only weirdos continue to make magtapes in the age of the mp3. Audio magtapes have shit quality (at least, typical audiocassette tape does) and degrade over time, and they break. The ONLY reason AT ALL that they still exist is for 4x4s. A cheap mp3 player often doesn't remember your song position. A cheap tape deck is even cheaper, if you don't cheat and just install an el cheapo amp with an mp3 player directly connected to it.
I went for mp3 in my 4x4 :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Audio cassettes, vinyl, video cassettes, Justin Bieber, rap . . . . . . . for whatever reason, there are a lot of people out there who are perfectly happy with low quality crap. Weird but true.
Firefox 3.6 was painfully slow. The speed improvements from 4 onwards made it much more enjoyable to use until they started copying Chrome and doing other bone headed things.
That's more than the number of weekdays in the year. What the hell does he do with that many?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The chance of having to detangle the tape and using pencils to rewind.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I used to have a tape deck for storage with a VIC 20 IIRC. (This was many years ago.) Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the VIC 20. I seem to remember having spent some time (quite a few years back) scouring for a game called "FLOG" which is 'golf' spelled backwards. It was a pretty neat game or so my memory tells me. It was loaded from the cassettes that it came on - I didn't type or write it myself. I think the source, BASIC, was in the back of the manual.
I just spent a few minutes looking, again, and still didn't find anything that is quite right but I opened up a dubious link that led me to this:
http://www.flog-game.com/
I didn't play it but the graphics are really bad looking and I don't have any real memories of the original game except that I liked it. (I drank, heavily, back then.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Am I the only one who's dying to know what the author's father is doing with those hundreds of blank cassettes every year?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know the mix tape is still a thing if you are trying to impresses someone else's genitals. Or holdouts like my parents, their phone still has a cord and a wheel, the TV is made of wood, they would probably still get a block of ice delivered if that was an option. VHS still exists, poor man example of piracy? I still have books, does that make me a old fogey? Did you take ceramics in school? Why? Have you ever had to mine your own clay and bake it in a kiln in order to have something to eat off of?
I had the tape deck for the Atari, and it was nothing but a trail of tears.
Spend 30 minutes "loading" a program and when it was done...no program.
Spend the same amount of time "saving" a program, and later find out it saved nothing. :(
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I have a high end tape deck and a box of blank Type II and a number of blank Type IV cassettes but I haven't hooked up my tape deck to my new Elite AV receiver nor to my previous one. The last time I used it was around 2000 when I digitized a widow's late husband's demo tapes to clean up the audio and put it on CDs for her.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I remember, back at the dawn of the PC age, going into to my local computer software retailer and browsing the rack for games that were sold on cassettes that were packaged in plastic sandwich bags with a one page set of instructions printed with a dot matrix printer. I'd buy a few, take them home, put one into the cassette player whose audio output was connected to my Apple II+, and start the programming sequence. A few seconds later, the computer would beep and display an error message stating that it couldn't read the tape and to try again.
I never did play those fucking games.
Who's buying these? The same crowd that thinks LPs offer a superior listening experience to digital? Sigh...
Over like Spanish rule of the Americas.
As demonstrated by the fact that people who speak Spanish feel at home from Buenos Aires to Denver
lucm, indeed.
Firefox can't update itself successfully. It updated on my machine this morning and afterwards, it wouldn't start because it had deleted it's own executable. Then I went to the Mozilla website and almost vomited from sheer ugly. Their website has little squares of different shapes and sizes everywhere (Like Windows Metro interface), and as such, presents information extremely both inefficiently and in a manner which is offensive to the eye. It was hard to find the download link amongst all of the other squares which did who knows what. I assume they were advertisements, but similar to the ACA, you can't tell what they do unless you click on them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The guy buys a blank tape every day, over and over, because he forgets he already done it. Terrific repeat customer.
lucm, indeed.
That's not Firefox 's roots. Firefox originated as the stand alone browser without all the other crap. In its inception, it was separate from seamonkey or the Netscape stile internet suite.
If he said back to its Netscape roots, you would be accurate. But since the entire concept of Firefox was a standalone browser , the association to seamonkey is a bit off.
I haven't bought in blank cassette tapes in 20 years, and I am not even part of the hipster mp3 crowd. I don't own any music on mp3 (very few people who have mp3s actually own it, but that is another tale for another day). I do have several hundred CDs.
What got me wondering is that I have bought much more recently, backup drive tapes in different formats. That got me wondering if perhaps this company is doing a lot of volume in DAT, DLT or other formats, and maybe not so much in classic cassette tapes.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You can feel the weight balance to tell how much of the tape is on one reel versus the other. You can rewind and fastforward by gut-feeling, with no display. Every operation of the player is tactile, and there are no hidden options menus, touchscreens, or any of that crap.
Don't you know that electrons flow differently through silicon compared to vacuum? Silicon is too cold and you can hear that. Just give me an old tube amp hooked up to an old AM tube radio and feel the warmth.........
In the UK, as a kid I used to record the top 40 chart off radio 1 onto cassette. And then shove the tape in a walkman! That is 3 button presses - Record, rewind, play. Nothing comes close in convenience today. All they need to do is change the radio cassette player and walkman to record to tape using a 16 bit, 24khz digital recording format, and it would easily compete with CD/IPOD
I had the tape deck for the Atari, and it was nothing but a trail of tears.
Yes. The tape interface on the Atari 400 and 800 and their descendants was particularly slow, even compared to the Spectrum and C64.
:-(
I suspect that this is because- while it was ahead of its time enough that it could compete with later competitors like the C64- it came out in the late 70s when memory sizes were much smaller. The load speed wouldn't have been an issue given the small size of programs able to fit into the 8 KB of RAM they launched with. (Quite good for the time; the 400 was originally only intended to have 4 KB).
Unfortunately, they didn't improve it on the later models, such as the 64 KB 800XL. I had an 800XL, and even programs designed to fit into 48 KB could easily take over 15 minutes to load!
I suspect they didn't upgrade it for the "XL" models because by that point the US market was becoming primarily disk-based. Unfortunately in Europe, tapes were still common until the 8-bit market died in the early 1990s. I had a disk drive with my 800XL, but lots of games were tape only. Uuuuurrrrrgh!!
Eventually discovered a good program that was able to transfer most games to disk, but not before enduring years of PITA slow loading from tape, complete with "LOAD ERROR- TRY OTHER SIDE"!
Not that this was a problem with cassettes themselves- as they were never originally designed for that- and I guess when disk drives were very expensive, they were the only way of cheaply storing data. But while I'll cut cassettes a lot of slack, I'll never get nostalgic for loading from tape.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
We used cassette tapes for other purposes too... http://www.oldcomputers.net/hp... We'd save off a program to cassette for storage, and it usually worked the next time you tried to load the program. Follow the link and check out the three people in the picture, ready to get to work!
The first time I found ample access to a computer (HP 9830A desktop calculator) was at Texas A&M in '76-'77. Its hard to believe that I spent entire nights from dusk to dawn in the math building on campus, learning BASIC, including a Star Trek game. There's no telling how much thermal paper I ran through the printer.
I read TFA last night from ARS itself...
As soon as I read the summary, I realized they got it backwards.
From TFA:
''In a September article, Bloomberg reported that NAC “has deals with major record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group as well as a number of small contracts with indie bands. About 70 percent of the company's sales are from music cassettes while the rest are blank cassettes.” ''
70% pre-recorded; 30% blanks.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Unfortunately, they didn't improve it on the later models, such as the 64 KB 800XL. I had an 800XL, and even programs designed to fit into 48 KB could easily take over 15 minutes to load! :-(
Oh yeah...start the tape, then wait, and wait, and wait...
Did you ever have something called the "Happy Drive", a modified floppy drive that let you copy almost any copy-protected disk? Best investment I ever made for the Atari 800 that I had (I didn't have the XL version, just the regular "clunker" version).
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I had a cassette recorder for the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 several years before I got the floppy drive. I had a huge number of cassettes for both programs and backups. One popular program in the various home computer magazines was a database to keep track of your programs on cassettes.
Firefox 3.6 was painfully slow. The speed improvements from 4 onwards made it much more enjoyable to use until they started copying Chrome and doing other bone headed things.
Yeah, it was great until about Firefox 29...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't recall ever owning an Atari other than the game system. By the way, I just noticed I never finished my draft. ;-) I'll get that finished when I kick the kids out for the day. The two and their mates are planning on heading out to engage in some familial fun so it will settle down again shortly.
But no, no Atari that I personally owned. A few friends had them. I had some TRS-80 models, a few Apples, and some of the Commodore line throughout those years as I recall.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
By the way, I just noticed I never finished my draft. ;-) I'll get that finished when I kick the kids out for the day.
No worries, whenever you get the time. It's been busy all over the last few days.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
No, just a plain old 1050- I didn't have that much disposable income. It was still bloody good at the time, because Dixons (UK retail chain) had a bundle deal which included an 800XL and the 1050 drive for £120, less than the Spectrum (a generally inferior machine) was selling for on its own.
'Course, by that point, the becoming-dated Spectrum was continuing to sell on the fact it had a *huge* established base of software, whereas the 800XL... didn't, so much.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
By that argument Queen Elizabeth rules the world.
You may not be aware of this, but every time you pay income tax in the USA the Queen gets a cut.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/...
Look it up.
lucm, indeed.
SeaMonkey can be built without mail/news and there are Firefox 3.x look alike themes. You get a lean browser with better performance then FF, all the security fixes etc and the familiar FF 3.x UI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
http://www.sharpmz.org/mz-700/... My kids still use it -- seriously!
Not really, because unlike today, car stereos in the 80s and especially in the 90s were a standard DIN size (or double din or what have you). ( iso 7736 in fact! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Now-a-days stereos are built into the dash in whateevr configuration the car maker chooses but they used to be standard and easily replaceable. I had zero knowledge of cars or electricity when i was 17 but stil managed to replace my parents tape deck with a cd player in the 90s.
So its not a real reason to keep dealing with the headaches of audio cassettes. You can drop an mp3 playing stereo in your 80s-90s car for like 50 bucks. People don't even steal them anymore they are so cheap.
-
I grew up in the golden age of audio cassettes. They had lots of great audio features:
- Tape decks routinely came with specs stating the level of "wow" and "flutter" effects you could expect from the deck, caused by variations in the motor speed and gearing system.
- Left and right channel tracks routinely bled into each other.
- Tapes stretched and degraded with each use, further distorting the sound quality.
- And the hiss...the ever-present hiss! You could turn on Dolby NR, which eliminated a lot of the hiss, but also deadened the sound.
No, I have no desire to go back to the "good old days" of audio cassettes. Warm subtleties? Maybe, if you are willing to put with all the extra racket to get that precious warmth. No thanks!
Possibly... but my '98 car has a tape deck and the only "tape" I use is the $5 tape adapter to plug in my phone.
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That's modern web design for ya. I fucking hate it but I'm hardly an authority to effect change in the industry. Since everyone seems to be doing it (even certain technology-focused sites which should know better) I find it easier to just let it wash over me, as best as possible anyway. :)
Just because a new technology comes along, the older one does not automatically become useless. There are often corner cases which are important for hundreds of thousands of users, or an established user base for which technology works good enough.
What tapes, floppies, Polaroid or Yahoo's curated internet directory could not fulfil is manyfold growth over short term expected by stock market. We live in a crazy world where a company can make a useful product, provide a living for tens of thousands of employees and post consistent year over year growth in profits. Yet, it gets forced into quality-killing cost cutting or unnecessary risks by shareholders who expect it to justify 100x price/earning ratio. Then it really dies because the product is crap, not because it's intrinsically useless.
The latest round of silliness is "PC is dying". Of course it is not. It is just been around for enough time for everyone to have one, and people are just in the market for a replacement every few years, where "few" can be as much as a decade for a desktop with a simple use case like balancing the books. But this is too boring for investors, so I am sure I will be forced into doing taxes on my watch when my laptop dies.
Theresa Caputo, the "Long Island Medium", records each of her "readings" with her clients on standard cassette tape using an old-school cassette recorder.
www.tlc.com/tv-shows/long-island-medium/videos/about-a-tape-recorder/
Why the fuck do people suggest SeaMonkey when somebody says they want a "vintage Firefox experience"?! Early releases of Firefox were nothing like SeaMonkey. In fact, they were intentionally not like SeaMonkey! Firefox was created as a response to the bloat and unruly architecture of SeaMonkey (or Mozilla Suite, as it was known then). SeaMonkey embodies the Netscape Communicator mentality that Firefox strove to escape, at least during its early years, although Firefox has now come full-circle and adopted that same mentality with the inclusion of all sorts of unnecessary stuff, along with an unusable UI. So SeaMonkey is the complete opposite of what users asking for a "vintage Firefox experience" want! Only a dumbass would suggest it!
I think he may be talking about the fact that sea monkey.. like netscape before it.. was much much faster on it's feet than Firefox. At least in my experience. I grew to despise firefox because it took forever to load and render. And I'm talking well over 10 years ago already. Although it was a nightmaere for me on BeOS I found it just as unacceptable on OSX. WHy anyone' ever found it spry I haven't the foggiest.
Maybe I should buy a few and boot up my old VIC 20...
... let them have it. It's not as if music is of interest to anyone important.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"