Flashback: Tapes

I bought my daughter an iPod Touch. She's one and a half. I was twice her age before I got a music player and it was a suitcase-sized Fisher Price Record Player. It got me thinking about how far we've come.

[caption id="attachment_1580" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Remember Tapes?"][/caption]

Remember these? Do you remember scrambling for one when a new hot song came on the radio and you just had to record it? Remember how you used to grab the first tape you saw and do a quick mental assessment of whether or not you could tape over it? This was back before they started playing the same song over and over on the radio. Even though your recording was gonna start halfway through the first verse, you recorded it anyway. Remember accidentally taping over something you liked and being pissed? You get halfway into a song and then hear a new song start playing.

How about wanting to tape something so badly that you stuck a wad of paper in that little hole on top or put scotch tape over it so that you could record over it? Then people would come over your house or see the tape in the car and think it was whatever album was on the label and you had to tell them, "Naw I taped over that. This is off the radio" and nobody had a problem with that. Instead of calling you out on being ghetto, they actually wanted to hear what was on your tape. "Yo, this is a good tape. Can I dub this joint?" Everybody had either a double tape boombox or the dual cassette player that was on the "multi-thing" stereo. You know, the one that had the record player at the top, the radio in the middle and the tape player at the bottom. And all of them had that little three digit counter as if you were gonna sit and calculate how many seconds were in each song. Those were the days...and I do not miss them one bit.

Especially  this:

[caption id="attachment_1584" align="alignleft" width="203" caption="Cassette Tape Rewinder"][/caption]