Cassettes were a part of my life from about 1969 till...when? When did the first CD player show up in my world? 1997?...and the first mp3 player? 2002?
The older formats had such long runs that it appears the new ones are here and gone before we really get to know them.
Today's NY Times has a story about the end of one of the few places where cassettes were still in use: "books on tape".
I have boxes filled with cassettes that I haven't listened to a a dozen years or more. Many of them are tapes of shows I hosted in my TalkRadio years. I suppose some archivist fifty years from now might find them...interesting? amusing? quaint?
Companies like Hammacher Schlemmer offer all kinds of machines to convert old formats to the new ones, mostly CD and DVD. But how long will they be around? At APT we have some film from the days when we covered the Legislature with 16mm cameras. Some of it has been converted over the years, but it's an expensive process, and these are tight times for publicasters. We borrowed old drivers ed films from the Alabama Department of Education for the "License To Drive" documentary I produced, and fortunately, a staff member owned a projector that we could use to do a down and dirty dub, showing the film on a white wall and shooting it with a new digital video camera. At some point the machines that play those old formats will no longer be available, and then? Lost for good.
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