A different fic....

[conuly]

"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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A year after Assad's fall, families of missing detainees languish without answers

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Comments

[glaurung]

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

[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.)

[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.

[shadowkat]

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

[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.)