Your Mother Let You Out Wearing That?

I mean really...this is just bad.

This is the front cover, fairly reasonable, even if the hat's a bit cheesy.

Here's another Mathis album--they are both dated 1972. I am not sure which came first...guess I could google that :). This one is much more sartorially reasonable, although still representative of the era.

Why, he is almost handsome here!
It appears that the upper one is first, then the lower one. Just wondering.

8 Tracks

A local thrift store had a good supply of 8 Track tapes the other day. This is just a sample of what was available. Other artists available were Bob Seger, Rod Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Ted Nugent, Kansas, and the sound track "Nadia's Theme."

The irony of the CDs in the background is not lost on me.

Record Club

I don't know if record clubs still exist--I just can't imagine in this day and age that they have survived. They were still operating in the early 1990s, I do remember. It wasn't too bad a deal as long as you dealt with the picking of the selection. Otherwise you ended up with stuff you didn't want and paid too much for it to boot. It is fun to look at the featured artists here--who we still remember and who is lost in the groove-yard of time.

I am not sure when this is from--since cassettes and 8 tracks are offered I would guess late 1970s or early 1980s.

Chinese Rail Road

As recently as 1980, the Chinese were rocking this locomotive in their system. Now, they are rocking the bullet trains. Although not without grief--corruption and graft marred the building process and three folks just got canned for not taking care of an electric train that had been laying dead on the tracks due to being struck by lightening, and was run into by another train, resulting in loss of life.

Photo is from National Geographic.

Film Development By Mail

Getting one's film developed when you lived in a very rural area was not a simple thing. Few towns had stores big enough to have one hour developing and many did not even have the connections to send film out. So you sent it yourself, from home to Kodak or another developer. You would send your 126 cassette, or 35 mm film and it would return to you all developed, your photos and negatives in tidy envelopes and sleeves. It was an exciting day to go to the post office and find your prints waiting for you!

It might be worth exploring sometime how some things today have fallen into our hands to do--in the age of digital, we make our own prints, either at home or at a place like Kinko's. Some other things we have passed on to others to do. What sort of quality and time use implications are in that?

Ad is from a National Geographic mid 1960s.

A Technology Gone: The Typewriter

Again, at a thrift store. The only thing better for finding nostalgia items is an estate sale. Came across this strange instrument...

Not only is this a typewriter, it is a manual typewriter. This size is meant to be a portable--you could call it the first word processor. Touching the keys would cause some mechanical bits to move and make one of these arms, topped with a picture of the letter to hit the ribbon, thus transferring ink to the paper you had rolled it.

Unfortunately the cellphone doesn't quite have the resolution to show the little sculptures of "i/I" and "e/E" and "f/F" and the rest on these key arms.

Does any one use a typewriter any more? For awhile we needed them to fill out forms, but now with autofill, even that use is gone. However, if you were stuck in the jungle, this little machine might be pretty useful. It needs neither cord nor battery. Type to your heart's content, until your fingers tire, your ribbon is worn or you are out of White Out

Changes in Recording Music

Since Edison's invention of the phonograph, humanity has been trying to improve the quality and lifelikeness of the recording of voices and musical instruments. I was in a thrift store the other day and noticed this record:

On the back was a bit of a lesson on the spectrum of sound frequencies, as well as the demo's song list.
There's no date on the demonstrator, but I would think late 1950s/early 1960s. By the mid sixties, stereo 331/3 records--LPs, short for Long Playing--were the norm.

This cover story in Popular Science in 1985 heralded the next significant move in sound recording and reproduction--the digital age. This was the Compact Disc and digitally recorded music's time of introduction and it was a significant move. Other technologies had come along side the LP--8 track tapes and cassette tapes--with some improvement in sound and the introduction of portability but no significant change in the way recorded music was made.

Now, the CD is said to be endangered, with sales down every year. The digital revolution continues with downloads storing music in bytes and bits.

And so it goes.