1980s audio, video, computers

[estirose]

I had a totally random moment of “Dude, you verbed the censorware!” while reading comments on an online story this morning.

Anyway, more things-of-note from my 1980s research/remembrances (mostly from my memory), cut for your sanity:

Audio:
At the time my storyline is set, the two most common ways of listening to music were the audio (cassette) tape – literally, it was tape with sound recorded on it – and the LP/record. To play an audio casette, one needed a cassette tape player of some kind – anything from a simple tape player to a walkman to a boom box to professional audio equipment. Being basically reel-to-real tape about an eighth of an inch wide, it was terribly easy to kill a cassette tape. To listen to something from the beginning, you had to rewind the tape and hope that you got the right part, or at least checked every so often you were in the right place on the tape. Cassettes came with an A and a B side, which meant that if you had singles, there was a second piece of music from the same album on side B.

A bit older than cassettes were records. To play them, you needed a record player or turntable of some kind. The player played by recognizing very very small bumps in the album that were picked up by the player’s needle, which was very small and rather sharp. (CDs work in a similar, though digital way, I think.) This is why scratching a record causes it to make some really weird sounds, and why you really didn’t want to scratch a record if you intended to listen to it a lot. Sometimes, with records, you could tell where one recording ended and the next started, but it depended on the record and how much practice you’d had. Records also had a B side. Most records/LPs are quite a few inches in diameter, but records did come in other sizes, most notably the 45.

In the 1980s, the 8-track player (which was related to the audio cassette, but was built with harder plastic, was bigger, and was less fragile) was being phased out. Coming in during the late part of the decade were CDs – the compact discs that people are familiar with today.

Video:
I’m not as familiar with 1980s video, but here’s what I do know.

* VHS won the format war over Betamax. I vaguely remember Betamax tapes, and they were smaller than VHS tapes.
* Being tapes, they suffered the same problem that audio cassettes and 8-tracks did; it was possible to jumble the tape and render it unreadable.
* Video tapes, like all reel-to-reel tapes, needed to be rewound. If you ever hear the phrase, “Be kind, rewind”, it came from the video tape world.
* Since the very vast majority of people using video cameras also used VHS tapes for recording, video cameras tended to be pretty big. I remember mom renting one out for a recital years later, and it used VHS, and was very very bulky.

Computers:
Most home computers did not connect unless they were on BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems), which required a modem. Some varieties of early modems were acoustic modems and required you to plug the phone handset into couplers on the modem, while others were comperable to modern systems where you just plugged the phone line in. See “War Games” (1983) for an acoustic modem. Compuserve was an early dial-in phone service – and yes, if you had a modem at all, it used up all your phone line. It was impossible to make calls in and out when somebody was using the line.

Laptops were in their infancy in the late 1980s. The few models seem to have a small screen that folded up/out from the system. There were other systems listed as “portable” that were only portable in a vague sense, like the Apple IIc of 1984. Yes, it was portable… compared to its big, hefty older siblings in the Apple II series.

By and large, most computers were running what are called CLIs – Command Line Interfaces. GUIs, graphical user interfaces like we’re used to today were very rare – in fact, I can think of only the 1984-released Apple Macintosh having a GUI, though others came close. This meant that when you wanted a new place to put something, you used the command line to create a directory, instead of, say, going to the menu with your mouse and selecting the “new folder” command. Mice were very rare too, though Apple offered one as an accessory for their Apple IIc.

There are other things here, but I’m out of time.

Crossposted from Ramblings Yet Once More here.