Posted on 04/15/2014 9:47:23 AM PDT by C19fan
Children's perplexed reactions to a Sony Walkman have been caught on camera, with the majority frustrated at operating clunky buttons over a touch screen. Los Angeles-based filmmakers Benny and Rafi Fine asked volunteers aged six to 13 to guess what the bulky device was, with suggestions including a 'walkie-talkie' or 'boombox'. 'What is this?' one nine-year-old girl quizzed as she investigated the Eighties-era cassette player, while another exclaimed 'I'm not going to give up, I'm a survivor,' as she determinedly tried to figure out how it worked.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
See #52.
We could only go to school in the dead of winter when Dad could spare us from farm work. We had walk across fields to get there. You couldn’t even see your hand in front of you, it would be snowing so hard. Then when we got there we had to chop wood for the stove.
yeah, but you probably only had 3 channels, so it’s not like it was that hard! ;^)
I grew up overseas, had 1 channel that was AFRTS (Armed Forces Radio and Television Service) and 2 Panamanian channels (spanish).
Watched lots of Topo Gigo and American shows dubbed in Spanish...
CDs all get copied immediately to mp3. Direct purchase of mp3 all get saved to device.
I don’t trust the network. With good reason.
And had chanels 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9.
“My teenagers are just starting to realize how little their friends have been exposed to.”
My uncle used to take his awesome antique gun collection to schools in Ohio and give an all day lecture to multiple classes explaining the importance of each innovation and how it impacted war, politics, culture, etc. You couldn’t even bring a gun into schools today. Teachers would hold a cross up (or, today it would be a go-green sticker) to ward off your evil. I’ll explain anything a kid will listen to just to give them exposure to stuff they haven’t seen. When their eyes glaze, I stop.
I have a high end Nakamichi tape deck. Unfortunately, I haven't used it in years.
But there is no doubt that the sound quality is better. LPs too. Even ripping to digital from an LP sounds better.
I remember at one point I knew the basic zones for the antenna on each channel, pure muscle memory didn’t even have to think about it. Change to 4 move the ears, channel 9 ears to here.
I have a Seafoam Green rotary phone a foot away from me on my desk. It’s a beaut!
Buttons that you have to move half an inch are clunky, they’re also failure points, the #1 death of walkmans was that the read/play head would stop locking in place (or stop unlocking when you hit stop). You can still have buttons that work with gloves on, my MP3 has 3 buttons, on/off, volume up, volume down. Because all they do is engage an electronic contact they move less than mm when you push them. And my touchscreen is pressure triggered not current triggered so it too works with gloves.
It’s not saying that old is necessarily just pointing out that a lot of old stuff showed clear room for improvement. Walkman buttons WERE clunky, because they had to be. They’re not bad because they’re old, they’re bad because they have to be huge with lots of motion and are a frequent point of failure.
I showed you the dictionary entry, it’s not meaningless. And it’s not an insult either, because it’s true. They were clunky, sorry you take that fact personally.
And we liked it!!
A major difference is that back then, stuff was simple enough that an inquisitive child could grasp the basic concepts behind pretty much anything. Today, gadgets are so sophisticated as to be indistinguishable from magic. A mere iPhone (a small glassy black slab conjuring up worlds near, far and virtual) consists of literally hundreds of billions of distinct components, all operating according to billions of individual instructions; when I started, radios could be built from a handful of simple parts, and computers weren’t much more complex. Kids can’t comprehend gadgets by just disassembling them anymore; it’s magic, it works, and no amount of staring at the pieces (short of an electron microscope) elicits how it works - you need a major degree to understand a common phone. Texting and playing Minecraft is more rewarding to most kids.
“We used to have to walk uphill through the snow to change the channel. “
Well then,,, you needed to wiggle the rabbit ears too!
No kidding.
Here we have a modern-day version of the parable of the ten virgins. For five it was SOP to already have oil in their lamps, whereas the other five (after being unable to mooch) had to do some last-minute shopping. "And while they went to buy..."
[... the wifi signal went dead.]
Sorry, stu: I was there. The Walkman 'play' button had to move, because the head had to move. If it's a design requirement (and it was), throwing meaningless insults like "clunky" at it is stupid. An elegant solution to an engineering problem doesn't cease to be elegant when the entire matter is overcome by technological advancement.
, sorry you take that fact personally.
Try to refrain from mindreading, you're no good at it. Go ahead and use "clunky" and other meaningless noises to express yourself. It's very revealing.
After buying my first fuel injected motorcycle (Ducati) I will NEVER buy another carb based bike. Oh how I hated tuning and synching those infernal carbs.
I have a Walkman somewhere. I don’t know why I kept it. I was moving and had come across my HUGE box of old cassettes. I was thinking of digitizing them. Then realized how many hundreds of hours that would take and tossed the whole lot in the trash. I suppose I’ll regret it when an EMP takes out my MP3 player when I’m craving some tunes on a mechanical analogue device.
Gotta run, going to go watch Blazing Saddles on Betamax.
I also have an Ampex reel to reel another foot away! I’m old!
I still use'm.
I even have a couple new ones I bought while they were still selling them.
They do everything I need for them to do. So....
(PS, I'm a retired chip-maker)
Don’t kick yourself, EMP would wipe the tape anyway.
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