conuly | A different fic....

"He took the Walkman out of his pocket and flipped through the songs in the cassette."

Oh, sweetie. That's... that's just not how cassette tapes work. Not even overseas. You fast forward or rewind - literally winding the tape again - and hope that your timing is amazing. I mean, with practice I guess you can get pretty good, but still.

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An SMBC comic about Tolkein. Seems to be a theme for today.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

greenwoodside

I'm laughing, but -- omg! I feel so very old now.

Jumping through tracks on a cassette. Young people these days! I want to put an arm round their shoulders and tell 'em about the good old days when you'd be playing your music and there'd suddenly be a noise like a crocodile chewing a tarpaulin, and you'd open up the player and see all the cassette's guts unspooled and wrapped all round the compartment. Great times.

From:

conuly

a crocodile chewing a tarpaulin

I really now need to ask if you've ever heard this.

From:

greenwoodside

Only in my dreams, sadly. In Wales, the closest thing I've experienced would be a heathland ram chewing on some rough grass and staring at me in a coolly evaluative manner reminiscent of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

From:

elisi

😂😂😂 Bless, they tried. If only they'd gone for a CD, they'd have been fine...

From:

glaurung

Or a portable 8-track player, if we must have pre-digital forms of music.

From:

shadowkat

Nah, 8 track tapes were similar to cassettes, you have to rewind. Also they did not fit in a pocket. (I know I had one.)

From:

glaurung

The special thing about 8 track tapes is that the tape in them was a continuous loop - no rewinding or flipping was ever required. Each cartridge could hold up to 80 minutes of music, and instantly switch between 4 different tracks ( 2 tracks per stereo channel).

Since the tape was a loop, while you could fast forward an 8 track, you could not rewind them. Switching tracks meant jumping into the middle of whatever was on the next track. Songs that spanned different tracks would fade out, then fade back up as the player switched tracks. The downsides were hugely obvious, but they dominated car stereos in the 60s and 70’s, then died out once the audio quality of double sided cassettes got good enough.

Edited Date: 2025-12-15 09:56 am (UTC)

From:

shadowkat

Well, I admittedly last had one in 1981.;-)

From:

shadowkat

I just remember them breaking on me? Maybe because I tried to rewind them? But they always broke on me. (I had ABBA, Jesus Christ Superstar, Linda Roundstand, Air Supply, Helen Reddy - or that's all I remember. I think I was 12 at the time. My parents believed 8 track was the way to go, not cassettes (probably for the reasons you state above), but alas, they were wrong. It was the last time they invested in a gadget prior to it being proven by the marketplace, and out in the marketplace for at least five years.)

From:

maju

Someone didn't do enough research.

Thinking about it, now it seems that in some ways cassettes were a step backward from records, because with records you could easily choose which song to play.

From:

conuly

Could you? I'm not sure I've ever used a record player.

From:

maju

I'm 76 and I grew up with 78 rpm records, followed by faster LPS, EPs, and singles. With LPs and EPs you could choose where to place the needle of the record player between tracks if you didn't want to just play all the songs.

From:

glaurung

Unless you were using an automatic record changer with a stack of records, in which case the stack of LP’s waiting to play next prevented you from seeing the gaps between the tracks on the record currently playing. But in general, yeah, you can absolutely pick which track to hear next if you’re willing to move the needle manually.

From:

kyrielle

Yeah, but you couldn't carry them around to listen on the go. And your kids could scratch them while choosing which song to play. *guilty look*

From:

maju

True - they had definite disadvantages.

From:

glaurung

For music on the go, you had “highway hi-fi” in the late 50’s - a record player that sat under the dash of your Chrysler and played proprietary 16rpm seven inch records. The low rpm was to help reduce needle skipping due to bumpy roads. Compact tape cassette players were not available until 1963, and some people just could not live with whatever the local DJ liked to play on the radio.

For music you could carry with you, in the 1920’s, there was the Mikiphone, a wind up record player that folded into a round metal case that fit in a coat pocket. It had competitors (the peter pan record player, the cameraphone record player), but none were as compact as the mikiphone (sort of like how the ipod was smaller than its competitors in 2001). It played regular sized records, which look comically huge compared to the teeny player. Heres a video of someone setting one up and having it play a record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnfNBpghZzo

Edited Date: 2025-12-14 10:31 pm (UTC)

From:

kyrielle

Huh, today I learned! Thank you! :) I grew up after we had cassette tapes, so I guess I just assumed the record players never traveled well because the ones I saw didn't. Neat!

From:

glaurung

Car record players never caught on because of the high price (a $200 add on for $2400 cars), plus the proprietary format and limited music selection (only columbia artists were available on Highway hifi, due to a boneheaded exclusive deal). And there were reliability issues with the players. But from 1955 to the introduction of the 8 track tape in 1964, it was the only way to listen to your own music on the road.

The portable record players of the 20's and 30's were in an entirely different era or sound quality. All records then were not just analog, they were 100% mechanical - no electronics of any kind. Sound quality was always poor and a 10 inch record held one song on each side -- but the miracle of being able to listen to music at all, without waiting for it to come up on the radio, overrode any such considerations. Miniaturizing the player was easy, if you were willing to sacrifice volume (a smaller horn meant softer volume). But the records were still thick 10 or 12" shellac disks, 3-5 minutes per side, that you had too bring along in addition to the tiny player.

It's a testament to just how important music is to us as humans that we invented these ridiculous technologies just to be able to hear music when we wanted, making every ordinary person with a little money in their pocket as able to have music on demand as a prince or emperor with a live band on retainer.

Edited Date: 2025-12-15 10:06 am (UTC)

From:

hudebnik

Wow, I've never seen/heard one of those before! I've learned my New Thing For The Day.

It produces remarkably good sound, considering the "amp" is a Bakelite chamber of a few cubic inches of air.

I notice the wind-up crank is just under the disk, which means it has to not rotate while it's winding down, or it would scrape against the moving disk. Somebody decided that putting it in that specific place was worth the extra hardware to make that happen. It's amazing what people did with analogue hardware....

From:

shadowkat

Well no. Cassettes you could tape off of. Records - you could tape off of, but you couldn't well put it on a new record easily. Also, records were a lot harder to choose which song to play - I scratched a lot of records attempting to do that. You had to pick up the needle and put it on the right track. It was actually easier to wind to the next song on a cassette. It's why I personally preferred cassettes. (I had a record player/cassette player/radio in college - this is how I know.)

From:

maju

Yes, I grew up with records and I understand their disadvantages. I was happy to embrace cassettes when they arrived.

From:

shadowkat

I was kind of grateful when records went out of fashion and disappeared, replaced by CDs, Cassettes, and MP3 players. Now, they are back again ...noooo, I refuse to go back to records. (Hugs Iphone MP3 app to my chest for dear life.)

From:

sixbeforelunch

Someone needs to make a community for cross-generational beta reading. "Can you read my story set in 1993?" "Sure if you can tell me if this fifteen year old character is behaving like an actual modern fifteen year old."

From:

conuly

That's not a half bad idea!

From:

ethelmay

"But 1993 was only--" [calculates] - oh goddammit.

I know quite well there was a big difference between 1893 and 1925, but somehow in my own lifetime it seems different.

From:

conuly

You said it!

From:

carbonel

The funny thing is, you could do that with an older and much worse but related device -- an 8-track cassette.

From:

the_siobhan

Somebody recently posted a scene was supposed to be taking place in a high school in the 80s and there was a girl listening to a walkman and holding it like she was texting on it.

From:

shadowkat

"He took the Walkman out of his pocket and flipped through the songs in the cassette."

LOL! Clearly whomever wrote this has never used or seen a Walkman in their lives, or a cassette.

Because you cannot fit a Walkman in your pocket effectively, well not unless it's a big pocket? I carried it around my neck or in a bag. Maybe a coat pocket.

Also, yep, rewind the cassette. Be nice if we could have flipped through it - but nope. That's a cell phone MP3 player, not a Walkman with a cassette.

I just read the comments, I feel old now. I remember 8 track tapes, tape players, walkmans, record players, CD players....and am amazed that there are people out there who have no idea how a walkman and a cassette player works.

Edited Date: 2025-12-15 02:52 am (UTC)

From:

chez_jae

*titters*

Old-school tech is so complicated. LOL!

From:

calimac

I can't believe it. It's spelled right in the comic to which you link, and yet you still get it wrong.

From:

conuly

I can believe it

From:

calimac

So then who is this "Tolkein" to whom you refer? There is no such author.

From:

amado1

I love seeing things like this in writing -- little bits that make you realize the author is much younger than the characters/setting they're writing. It usually makes me feel affectionate instead of like, rolling my eyes or what have you, but when it comes to my OWN writing, I'm always so concerned that I'll unknowingly walk into a mistake like this and people 20-30 years older than me will read it and go, "what the fuck..." XD

From:

conuly

The older you get, the less you have to worry about that!

From:

glaurung

Pedant note: tape players had little 3 digit counters on them, specifically so you could note the position of each song on the tape (and its duration) in counter digits, allowing you to fast forward/rewind to a specific song on the tape by keeping track of the numbers on the counter. No one I knew did this, but that is what the counter was for.

From:

hudebnik

Technically, yes, as long as you remember to rewind the tape to the beginning and reset the counter to 000 before you start. And I don't remember whether our first Walkman had a tape counter.