Them them new fangled records - just a platter of vynil that had a spiral groove (groovy man) cut into both sides which you listen to by balancing a stylus needle that ‘read’ the groove and converted the scratching into music via the gubbins inside. Usually required a shilling (old 5p piece) or newer 2p piece to balance the arm so th eneedle didn’t keep skipping.

It was also uselful to hide the vacuum cleaner and the electric food processor which you could guarantee your mum would start using the moment you set anything to record.

Word of warning - listen to what you record before any public airings!

Jonathan’s last blog post..What would you like to see?

It was the abacus that stumped me…….
hey I can remember when they first introduced calculators in school
My mum said no way you will use your head…

yum logarhythms…. doing them in my head was not fun…. cos/tangents/etc…… hmmmm….
and I love math mostly algebra…. go figure

Oh what memories come flooding back! (the tapes not the steam roller bit!)

I remember getting my first radio cassette player back in ‘76/77 as a birthday present from my mum and dad - i thought it was the dogs you-know-what. It had a tape of the last top 40 recorded off the radio itself which i played to death. I also had an abba tape and a tom jones sound-a-like tape as well so i thought i was well wired for sound.

Strolling around the campsite all week - just me and my radio cassette.

Much later i learnt that my dad had been secretly recording down the side of the armchair whilst we’d all been in the room!

Of course, this opens the world of dodgy recordings (i never got the bootleg thing - Chishill wasn’t that advanced in time!) and i’d never heard of them anyway!! a group called the bootlegs???

swapping tapes with friends. ‘mixing’ non-stop melodies by carefully pausing the tape and releasing it on the beat of the next record. If you were lucky, your parents had a music centre - which also taped records and you got to little recording level levers to play with as well. Now the possibilities were endless as you could mix whole albums and singles and cut out all the boring album songs you didn’t like.

Rememeber how pleased with yourself you were when you showed a new-comer how to take up the slack with a pencil on the reel mechanism?

My brother was 40 last weekend (happy birthday bruv’) and his inlaws and their sons/families all chipped in and bought him a 4gb nanopod - he hadn’t got a clue how to use it but he does have a computer so thats a start - the sons are re-visiting to put some content on for him - he’ll soon be addicted.

That really leaves the one question - not how will it end - prob music on demand - your brain hums a tune or thinks of a tune and the earpiece will go off and retreive it and play it or store it for later. You’ll pay a yearly fee like a TV licence fee for all downloads and thats it! No I meant in terms of storage - we used to think C90 were the limit - C120’s were too thin and always breaking. Then came the chrome and metal - were they really any better? then came video and the 4 hr video finally arrived. Wow - a whole album on one double sided tape if you were lucky.

Now we talk of gb’s of songs - thousands of tunes and video to call on - whose collection is that big anyway?

Fond rememberances - the c90 is dead - long live the c90 and for introducing the pre-ipod generation to portable music.

Jonathan (aka purple13)

Jonathan’s last blog post..What would you like to see?

http://tvs-worst-adverts.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/basf_lh_90_blauweiss-thumb.jpg

Yes I am that old…

About 2 years ago a met a kid who had never seen a vinyl record…. raised on DVD’s and CD had no idea…. hubby was sorting out his Beatle collection yes Jim a big beatle and dylan man over here… and this kid thought they where frizbees or something.. nearly fainted I did…