Tape find.

Found these in a Charity shop over the weekend. Although I have most of this music already recorded on to metal tape I couldn't resist buying them for 5 pounds each. Has anyone else found anything similar recently?

 

The carrying cases were probably originally £5 each.

It reminds me of my late mothers collection which a charity shop rejected so thankfully I still have.
One of the tapes had a Boots price label of something like £6.49 on it.

What you bought probably cost the original purchaser a couple of £100s.
Of course, due to streaming services recorded music has very little value now.

 

Still love to listen to all my tapes Longman. I think I remember you found something similar a while ago. I don't often find much in charity shops these days so it's always nice when you find something of interest to you.

 

Yes. Locally "Scope" occasionally sells tapes but charges £1 each - the same as CDs and most vinyl. When I bought a couple a month or two ago the young bloke on the till (maybe work experience or similar) had to ask the manager what they were so he could assign them to the correct category.

Since Sainsbury's has completely stopped selling CDs, DVDs, and from what I saw vinyl, I wonder how long it will be before youngsters are asking what they are.

 

The children of today have no idea. My son said he didn't know what a casette tape was and had never seen one. When I got him to listen to one he could not believe his ears. They don't understand what we had to listen to.

 

How old is he? Low end 2005 Ford Kas still came with factory fitted radio cassette. My wife had one.
Actually I can do better than that. A 2008 Ka with a factory fitted Ford Radio Cassette.
Admittedly they might have had a warehouse full they were trying to use up.
https://www.motors.co.uk/car-62673906/?i=4&m=sp

 

He is 16 years old. The only thing they know about is the internet. In the nineties I had a mini disc player fitted in my Cavalier. Loved it. Still listen to CD's in my jazz. Still have the mini-disc player.

 

That explains it. When I was 16 the "computers" at college were teletypes with acoustic couplers on modems that linked them back to the mainframe.
Games were typed in from a book

 

Personally I never came into contact with computers until the early nineties when i bought my first PC. It was a Goldstar 16 mg with 2mb of ram. I only used it to play a game on with my daughter. Hoe things have changed. I just use a phone and that's it.

 

We had a computer (singular) at school in the 1970s. At least we thought we did
https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-bus2017-1.html
To write programs we pushed little squares out of pre-perforated punch cards.
That reminded me. We only played around with the terminals at college I said about at lunch time.
When it came to a formal computing assignment, for some reason (familiarity) our college maths teacher insisted we used punch cards!

In the 1980s I was using computers at work (many of which cost more than a house) regularly.
One memory was ordering a 10MByte hard drive cartridge which cost £100 to store all of
our departments work.

I didn't get my own PC at home until about the same time as you, but had several computers before then.
One early PC memory was using a 14K4 dial up modem to chat to Tiffany (the singer) fans in the USA on a chat board.
Of course if you wanted to listen to her you had to buy a cassette or CD. How things have changed.

 

I left school in 1966. At that time there was no computers in school. That Goldstar I had cost over 1000 pounds at the time. Not much could be stored with only a few mb of storage. As you say. How things have changed.

 

On a whim I gave my nephew a restored Panasonic three-piece radiocassette boombox for his thirteenth birthday along with a handful of prerecorded tapes. His mother was delighted - it was the only technology she's ever been in a position to explain to her son.

 

I can relate to all of this. I have my mother's collection of classical cassette tapes. Mum is 95 and has progressed to CD's but I am surprised by the quality of the DG and Decca "digital" sourced cassettes. Many are Chrome tapes or Cobalt ones with good definition and still sound pretty good especially in my Pioneer CT-F1000 deck which was designed to auto calibrate for Chrome tapes.

On the computer history story I was that maths teacher in the 1970's using mark sense cards with my year 10 classes learning to code in Fortran. No hanging chads on those cards

 

Mr X. I let my son listen to a d-6c, a ex-615 and finally a mini disc player MZE900. I could tell from his expressions that he was really surprised just how good they all sounded. He was shocked at the size of the min disc player. It is half the size and much thinner. When I told him how long the batteries lasted he couldn't believe it. Would he use one-no. To the children of today image is more important.

 

I had to check what a Mark Sense card was. I have used similar technology in Multiple Choice exams but have never seen it used for computing. Having used the Pre-Perforated cards it was obvious to me how the infamous "Hanging Chads" of the 2000 US election could occur. Along with the computer the school did have a special frame to hold a punch card with rubber strips in to ensure the chads pushed out cleanly, but they only had the one of those, so most of the time we just held the card in one hand and pushed the chads out with a ballpoint pen.

@Derek marshall I guess you are talking about phones. From what I have noticed the coolest thing these days is to have a phone about the same size as an iPad mini or a paperback book. Some of the women at work walk around with them sticking out of their back pockets. It makes me wonder how often they sit on them.

 

Longman. Yes, I was talking about his mobile phone. What you are saying is very true. The girls tend to put their phones in the back pockets.