http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_DiscOriginally Posted by Van Camper
I remember when CDs replaced cassette tapes, and it wasn't in the 90s. You're thinking too narrowly. I'm 44 years old, and my information is accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
I remember when CDs replaced cassette tapes, and it wasn't in the 90s. You're thinking too narrowly. I'm 44 years old, and my information is accurate.
Is it just me, or has the forum gotten a bit more cranky in the last few years?
I remember it too. The irony is, the music industry bent over backwards to find a reliable distribution method that would prevent making lossy analog copies, so they turned to all-digital CD ROM because they thought it couldn't be copied.
Turns out their "perfect solution" made perfect digital copy not just possible but casually simple the moment the underlying technology improved enough and became sufficiently affordable for the average Joe.
And it didn't make it possible only for their product - it made it possible for most everything else, as we can see these days.
I honestly don’t remember much of this, probably because for most of this period I was either a university professor in a publish or perish environment, or a department chair supervising 45 faculty and staf, and whether music was on CD or cassete tape was not high on my list of priorities.
Butt here is what Wikipedia has to say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette
“In many Western countries, the market for cassettes has declined sharply since its peak in the late 1980s. This has been particularly noticeable with pre-recorded cassettes, whose sales were overtaken by those of Compact Discs during the early 1990s. By 1993, annual shipments of CD players had reached 5 million, up 21% from the year before, while cassette player shipments had dropped 7% to approximately 3.4 million.[18] The decline continued such that in 2001 cassettes accounted for only 4% of all music sold. Since then, the pre-recorded market has undergone further decline, with few retailers stocking them because they are no longer issued by the major music labels.[17] Sales of pre-recorded music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to 274,000 by 2007.[19] 2009 saw another record low with 34,000 cassettes sold, and 2,000 of those albums were at least 36 months old, bought at independent retailers in the south Atlantic region, in the suburbs.[20] Most of the major U.S. music companies had discontinued them by late 2002 or 2003. However, as of 2010[update], blank cassettes are still being produced and are sold at many retail stores, and facilities for cassette duplication remain available. Cassette recorders and players are gradually becoming scarcer, but are still widely available and featured in a notable percentage of Hi-Fi systems.[21]
Cassettes remained popular for specific applications, such as car audio, well into the 1990s. Cassettes and their players were typically more rugged and resistant to dust, heat and shocks than the main digital competitor (the CD). Their lower fidelity was not considered a serious drawback inside the typically noisy automobile interior of the time. However, the advent of "shock proof" buffering technology in CD players, the reduction of in-car noise levels, the general heightening of consumer expectations, and the introduction of CD auto-changers meant that by the early 2000s, the CD player was rapidly replacing the cassette player as the default audio component in the majority of new vehicles in Europe and America.”
My 1996 Nissan Pathfinder, which I purchased in late 1996, came with a cassette player. A CD player was available as an option, but the car on the lot did not have one. I did a fair amount of looking around at the time and my recollection is that most of the cars on the lots I visited were equipped with tape cassettes and not CD players. That is purely anecdotal, but that is what I remember.
Sandy
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[url]https://groups.io/g/carbon
exactly ... i had friends in 1983 who owned cd's
nothing was like the speaking in tongues LP ... THAT was something else ..
Speaking of anecdotal evidence, My mid-1995 Mazda came with a CD player and my son's 1996 VW came with a 6-disc changer, both as standard options. By that time, I was already burning my own discs in my computers.
I spent most of my life in some sort of publishing environment or the other, here and overseas. In the 80's it was the PC- and popular science magazines, in the 90's and onward it was (and still is) the Web. The way humans react to and interact with technology in general and computers in particular was always one of my primary interests, so I remember those details pretty well.
I spent 10 years of that time working within the music industry and I remember very well the incredible myopia and almost complete computer illiteracy that was prevalent among the decision makers. I also remember all the screaming and cursing when the outcome became clear.
It was every bit as bad as it was among photographers a few short years later and mostly for the same reasons...
Van Camper,
I am rather perplexed by your list of "images not very still" that would be difficult to photography with digital stitching. The fact is that most of the things you list would also be difficult to photograph with film. I have done a fair amount of stitching from 6X9 cm film negatives, where all I had to do was turn the camera and wind the film and snap the second shop. In almost every case where anything was moving this caused problems.
I don't doubt you do good working stitching 6X12 film, but having done a lot of stitching with both film and digital my take on this is that you are kind of sh*t out of luck if anything is moving, or maybe we get lucky from time to time.
Sandy
For discussion and information about carbon transfer please visit the carbon group at groups.io
[url]https://groups.io/g/carbon
You're confusing media with application, and presuming a lot about what I'm "totally clueless". We were discussing digital media, not the history of personal computing, with which I might be more familiar than you think. There's no need to get upset over being confused; this is just a friendly discussion, not a contest.
Actually, it isn't important for much of anything any more, not even for audio. It is a technology which played a very important role in the grand scheme of things but whose time has past. Ditto for DVD.
Actually, if you want to be techincally precise, it is a DVD-R/RW that holds 4.6 GB of data. A CD-ROM holds 700MB+/- of data. In the 80s, most PCs whether in use by a business or in a home had internal memory measured in K (as in 16K, or the luxurious 48K that my Apple II+ had). My Mac Plus that I took off to college in 1989 had 1 MB of internal RAM, and a whopping 20 MB external hard drive. The kid down the hall had a Mac SE with a 40 MB hard-drive, the biggest on the floor, and therefore bragging rights. I remember when trying to play a 500K WAV file could choke your computer.
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