I just spent the holidays with a bunch of my wife’s family. There were six kids with us aged 13-2.
I had a fun time talking to the 13 year old about old tech one night. The look on her face as I was explaining how Netflix started as a mail based DVD rental service was priceless.
DVD is old tech?
Be Kind Rewind, did you mention Blockbuster was the thing before Netflix?
I might still have a tape or two of songs recorded off of the radio from the early ‘80s, but they would be buried in a drawer of nearly 300 cassettes collecting dust. [the drawer was one of two I purchased from Canadian outfit, Can-Am.ca, still using today]
The only radio broadcast I can remember recording was Roger Waters’ Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (and then I taped over most of it to record Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 during my classical phase; I found another source of the Water’s broadcast many years later)
King Biscuit Flour Hour, Sunday nights (I forget which station 
)
Springsteen, Warren Zevon, Elvis Costello, and many more, before I started going to 3rd Street Jazz to buy bootleg LPs, then recording & trading those
I remember listening to Casey Kasem on American Top 40 with a cassette in the stereo and my fingers on the play and record buttons ready to record. I used to hate when he’d start playing a song and talk for the first couple of seconds.
I don’t believe we talked blockbuster, but, did get around to Internet cafes and payphones using international calling cards, among other things.
To this day, there are still some songs from my youth that, when they end, I still say a few words of random advertisements that came on right after the song ended on the radio, because someone didn’t hit the stop button on the tape recorder quickly enough. Just burned into my memory from playing the mix tapes over and over.
A local radio station would count down the top 100 rock songs over the Labour Day weekend. The list was published in the paper before the countdown, which made recording a mixed tape that much easier.
To the point above, I listened to the radio recording of Free Bird so many times that every time I listen to it now my brain immediately inserts the DJ chiming in at the end of the 4+ minute guitar outro “Find the ending boys!”.
I would show that to my kids, but they would go into crisis mode due to all the AI images.
I didn’t look closely enough to tell if they were AI or stock photos (which AI would use as source material, I guess?), but yeah
Same. Also a couple of songs that glitched when I was tapin them, so when it plays on Spotify or the radio I miss that one moment where it went wonky for half a second.
Last night my stepson worked out in our gym with me. He’s 10, and big into rock. Zep, Metallica, AC/DC, Pantera, Korn, QOTSA, etc. We started a video playlist from Enter Sandman on YouTube on the gym TV and every other video had concert footage of shirtless sweaty crowds moshing and crowd surfing. He was blown away that this was a thing that happened.
“I should have been born in the ‘90s!” Not exactly but I get the sentiment. I’m taking him to the Foo/QOTSA show in DC this summer but I haven’t told him yet.
Gen-Xtra credit for anyone who knows the significance of the gangsta holiday coming up next week, January 20.
That’s David Lynch’s birthday, I do know that
I’ll drop 1 hint per day until the 20th.
