Showing posts with label obsolete technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obsolete technology. Show all posts
Friday, February 22, 2019
Time Travel Traffic?
Weird. I was just looking at my blog traffic for the last couple of days. Yesterday I received a hit from a visitor that Statcounter says was using Internet Explorer 6 on a machine operating Windows Server 2003. Was someone actually using such an ancient setup? For that matter were they using mid 2000s vintage hardware to run them on? It was a United States visitor, so it's not like they were visiting from some isolated corner of the planet where users have no choice but to use ancient gear.
Saturday, September 13, 2014
It Lives.
It's been a long time since I've used our VCR. So when I decided to watch a VHS cassette this morning I wasn't sure what would happen. But it worked like it should, and rewound properly too. I guess I should watch some more of what I have lying around.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
The VHS Advantage.
I rented a movie yesterday. As I began to watch it I remembered one of the advantages of the VHS video cassette for watching movie rentals. If there's ads at the beginning you can fast forward through them. DVDs force you to watch through all the crappy ads. I sat there last night for what must have been 5 or 6 minutes of trailers for movies I have no interest in, and an ad trying to get me to by a Blu Ray player. On the other hand you don't need to rewind a DVD.
To most younger readers a VCR is a curiosity at best, something your older relatives might still have in their house, plugged in or not.(I say most because I'm sure there are some young movie buffs who own one to watch movies that will never see the official digital light of day, but are still found on VHS.) I'm old enough to remember when they were high tech and expensive. The first ones I saw in the flesh were in grade school, where they were used to show us kids stuff that was taped off TV. This was early enough that I doubt we were ever shown anything commercially made. These early machines even had mechanical recording timers on them. I wonder if some might have been Betamax machines, Sony's home video format which ultimately lost to JVC's VHS format, despite its supposed better quality.
I'm not sure when my family got our first VCR, but it was some time in the mid-late '80s. But we'd been renting videos for some time before that. When video rental stores began to appear they rented machines in the early days alongside the actual cassettes. After all most people initially didn't have a VCR due to the cost. So when you came home from the video store not only would you be carrying a bag of cassettes, you'd be carrying a big metal case with a heavy VCR in it. I'm not sure when the practice ended, because of course once we got our own machine we didn't need to bother renting one anymore.
One thing I can't remember is whether the ancestor of the DVD, the LaserDisc, was ever offered for rent locally. The format was pretty much a flop in North America, so it's quite amusing to see interviews with musicians circa 1980 speculating on what the format might mean for the industry. A number of them talked about producing visual material for the format, but other than a few concert videos these plans fizzled as the format did. I do remember seeing a few used discs in Saskatoon in the mid '80s, so a few of the machines did reach the market in this area.
To most younger readers a VCR is a curiosity at best, something your older relatives might still have in their house, plugged in or not.(I say most because I'm sure there are some young movie buffs who own one to watch movies that will never see the official digital light of day, but are still found on VHS.) I'm old enough to remember when they were high tech and expensive. The first ones I saw in the flesh were in grade school, where they were used to show us kids stuff that was taped off TV. This was early enough that I doubt we were ever shown anything commercially made. These early machines even had mechanical recording timers on them. I wonder if some might have been Betamax machines, Sony's home video format which ultimately lost to JVC's VHS format, despite its supposed better quality.
I'm not sure when my family got our first VCR, but it was some time in the mid-late '80s. But we'd been renting videos for some time before that. When video rental stores began to appear they rented machines in the early days alongside the actual cassettes. After all most people initially didn't have a VCR due to the cost. So when you came home from the video store not only would you be carrying a bag of cassettes, you'd be carrying a big metal case with a heavy VCR in it. I'm not sure when the practice ended, because of course once we got our own machine we didn't need to bother renting one anymore.
One thing I can't remember is whether the ancestor of the DVD, the LaserDisc, was ever offered for rent locally. The format was pretty much a flop in North America, so it's quite amusing to see interviews with musicians circa 1980 speculating on what the format might mean for the industry. A number of them talked about producing visual material for the format, but other than a few concert videos these plans fizzled as the format did. I do remember seeing a few used discs in Saskatoon in the mid '80s, so a few of the machines did reach the market in this area.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
The Real Retro.
No doubt you've heard about them. The folks who persist in buying vinyl. They come up with all sorts of interesting reasons involving waveforms and the human ear, stuff like that.
Bah, humbug to that!
If you want to be really hip and not buy into all those newfangled formats like mp3s and CDs listen to cassettes! Vinyl is for wimps. It takes a real man or woman to listen to music on cassette. I personally intend to to listen to a lot more music via cassette in the foreseeable future, and I might buy myself a Sony Walkman(a real cassette Walkman, not the radio and mp3 pretenders Sony slaps the name on) one of these days.
Okay, I'm not really doing this out of some misguided jihad against modern audio tech. I simply remembered how many cassettes I have lying around and intend to listen to them more, since there's a lot of great music on them. I'm not sure how many I have, but I bought a lot of them over the years, which of course will seem strange to younger readers who started buying music after the prerecorded cassette format was put out to pasture.
In an era when people want their music instantly and can randomly access hundreds or thousands of songs from a device that fits in their palm the idea of listening to cassettes can seem frustrating. Want to listen to a specific song on the cassette? You need to sit there and fast forward or rewind until you reach the beginning of the song. Even vinyl allows quicker access to a tune. Even if you listen to a side all the way through in most cases you'll need to spend some time rewinding or fast forwarding because most albums don't have equal amounts of material on a side. But in a way the cassette was truer to the way albums were recorded during their heyday than other formats, as songs were recorded one after another on reel to reel multitracks before being mixed down to a master reel to real stereo tape. Like a cassette to access a certain point on such tapes you had to fast foward or rewind them, although this was faster and there were ways of aiding the process.
Bah, humbug to that!
If you want to be really hip and not buy into all those newfangled formats like mp3s and CDs listen to cassettes! Vinyl is for wimps. It takes a real man or woman to listen to music on cassette. I personally intend to to listen to a lot more music via cassette in the foreseeable future, and I might buy myself a Sony Walkman(a real cassette Walkman, not the radio and mp3 pretenders Sony slaps the name on) one of these days.
Okay, I'm not really doing this out of some misguided jihad against modern audio tech. I simply remembered how many cassettes I have lying around and intend to listen to them more, since there's a lot of great music on them. I'm not sure how many I have, but I bought a lot of them over the years, which of course will seem strange to younger readers who started buying music after the prerecorded cassette format was put out to pasture.
In an era when people want their music instantly and can randomly access hundreds or thousands of songs from a device that fits in their palm the idea of listening to cassettes can seem frustrating. Want to listen to a specific song on the cassette? You need to sit there and fast forward or rewind until you reach the beginning of the song. Even vinyl allows quicker access to a tune. Even if you listen to a side all the way through in most cases you'll need to spend some time rewinding or fast forwarding because most albums don't have equal amounts of material on a side. But in a way the cassette was truer to the way albums were recorded during their heyday than other formats, as songs were recorded one after another on reel to reel multitracks before being mixed down to a master reel to real stereo tape. Like a cassette to access a certain point on such tapes you had to fast foward or rewind them, although this was faster and there were ways of aiding the process.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
