IÂ read this article on the BBC website today regarding the announcement that Currys will shortly stop selling equipment with cassette decks. Frankly I’m amazed that they still sell them - where on earth can you get a cassette to put in one anyway?
Of course I have to remind myself that not everyone is in to bleeding edge technology. There must be many people for whom the eternal bluray vs HD-DVD discussion is simply double dutch. And perhaps this is a good thing - for one it is certainly cheaper to be ignorant of the latest technologies, and perhaps it doesn’t actually have that much effect on productivity - I would hate to estimate the time I have spent trying to pair bluetooth devices reliably, let alone find a handsfree set that actually survives long enough for the warranty to expire. Even my trusty Xbox360 only lasted six months before dying a painful death, whereas the good old Sega Megadrive is probably still running quietly and reliably attached to the old black and white TV in the spare bedroom.
It’s a pity that nostalgia can only be felt for past events and scenarios. I don’t feel too much of it for anything in the past as I’m a current \ future focused person. However the death of the cassette deck does indeed remind me of many evenings spent compiling mixtapes. Back then compilations could only be compiled at slightly slower than real time. That is, to compile a mixtape once you had decided on a tracklist, would take slightly longer than the 90 minutes that the good old TDK tape would run for. Longer if your compilation order didn’t split comfortably in to two 45 minute segments. I wonder how many mixtapes I did and how much time I spent lovingly crafting them for people. And the nice thing was that people appreciated the effort that went in to a mixtape. I would always listen to them when given one… because there was a little bit of who that person was recorded in to every single one of them. (more…)
