obsessed with old formats/technology

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i can give you all a timeline of when music and movie formats came out.

1948 the LP record : there were 10 inch and 12 inch albums. they were only mono in '48. LPs successfully replace old 78rpm records. a 12 inch LP holds around 20 minutes of music on each side. 10 inch LPs (EPs?) held two songs on each side. CORRECT ME IF I'M INCORRECT , PLEASE.

1949 the 45 rpm record : there were 10 inch 45s and 7 inch 45s. the seven inch 45s held 4 minutes of music on each side.

1957 stereo sound records came out

1958 THE RCA TAPE : was a big cassette tape that held up to an hour of music in either mono or stereo. it was a failure and got discontinued around 1964.

1959 FIDELIPAC : was a tape cartridge. similar to an 8 track. The tape contained radio music and commercials i think. The tapes were used in radio stations until the 1990s.

1963 STEREO PAK : was invented by Madman Muntz , a guy that sold cars and made TVs. these tapes held 2 programs of music with stereo sound. Inspired by Fidelipac tapes.

1964 The First Cassette tapes came out by Philips. They werent suited for music at the time.

1965 Stereo 8 aka 8 Tracks : a tape cartridge that held 4 programs of stereo sound music. Inferior to Stereo Pak but was popular. Songs on some tapes had to be rearranged or some were cut into two parts.

1967 Play Tape aka 2 track tapes. Small tapes with fewer songs. Lasted 2 or 3 years.

1969 mini cassettes : used for voice recording.

1970 chrome type II cassettes
Quad sound 8 tracks (four audio channels)

1971 Quad Disc : a record format

mid 70s : type III cassettes (Ferro-Chrome) , type IV cassettes (metal - the best)

1975 Betamax : the first home video format. Held only 1 hour of recorded TV. 250 television lines video resolution.

1976 Sony Elcaset : superior to cassettes. Discontinued in 1980.
VHS TAPES : held 2 hours of recorded TV. 240 lines.

1978 MCA DiscoVision aka laser disc : a 12 inch CD that had movies on them. usually 1 hour on each side. picture quality was way better than VHS. 400 lines. and audio was CD quality.

1981 Capacitance Electronic Disc : a 12 inch record with a movie on it. Discontinued in 1986.

1983 music CD's

mid-80s : 8 inch laser discs : held 20 minutes of music videos on each side.

1984 VHD : a movie on a record. Superior to CED and laser disc in some ways. Had 3D and 4 channel audio. video quality was about the same as VHS and Beta. Only came out in Japan and lasted only a few years.

1987 CD-video : a gold CD with 20 or 30 minutes of music and a 5 minute music video (laser disc quality).

DAT : a camcorder tape used to record digital music. Used professionally until the mid-2000s.

1988 3 inch CD singles : like a 45 rpm record , only smaller. held 2 songs.

1992 mini discs : popular in japan , but not so much in America. They were better than CD-Rs.

Digital cassettes : a failed format. nothing special about it. 1992-1996. neither mini disc or Digital cassettes replaced analog cassettes and CDs continued to be more popular.
then as years went on mp3 players replaced CDs.

1997 DVDs : digital video 480p. Dolby 5.1 surround

2006 HD DVD & Blu ray discs

I read it

It's mind blowing how technology has come since 1948 or sooner.

2016 :
1 TB hard disk drives
Blu ray discs (50 GB)
USB flash memory (100 GB +) ?
HD Televisions - 3840x2160p

The last 50 years

1966 : data stored onto reel to reel tape. Computers with flashy lights.

1976 : first desk top computers. Data was stored onto floppy disks which held like 8 MB.

1986 : I think stuffed was stored on to cassettes (Commodore 64). Floppy disks too.

1996 : CDs (700 MB)

2006 : DVDs (4 GB - 8 GB)
Flash memory drive
Laptop/desktop computers
iPods

2016 : Blu ray discs (50 GB)

The OP looks pretty accurate.

A lot of stuff I never heard of.

The 1959 "feldelipac" is probably the brand name for what we used in our 1990's college radio station (and was the mainstay of all radio at the time), and just called "carts" by my time. Big heavy cartridges that looked and felt like eight track tapes. Came in every time length from seconds up to an hour. Their main distinquishing trait was that they were "self cueing" (would play and then cycle back and start at the starting point.

Most of the audio you heard on the radio up to the early 2000's ( news witnesses, jingles, commercials, sound bites, promos) were on carts.


DATs (digital audio tapes) were cool. Essentially digital versions of cassettes, but smaller and more able to precisely edited than cassettes. Like carts they were only used by radio stations, and not by the public. But the "digital cassette" was an attempt to make a consumer version of the DAT. Never caught on (maybe partially because it came to late and had to compete with both CDR's and MP3 downloads). Even in radio DATs are used as much anymore.

some thoughts-
OP left out HD video discs, a competitor of bluray, they held 30 gigs by cleverly squeezing a red laser down in size, along with some extra data compression. it was like a DVD on steroids. nobody remembers the losers in the format wars, it seems. the phillips digital compact cassette was stillborn, due to the major technical problem that the tiny magnetic tracks in the thin-film r/p head, 11 in all, were easily clogged with oxide residue from the tape, if there was any humidity in the air at all, this was something not foreseen in the developmental labs at phillips. 'tis a pity, because the PASC [Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding] data compression algorithm was superior-sounding to anything today. tests done back in the day, where they subtracted the compressed sound data from the raw data showed that it was a transparent-sounding system, compared with its competitor, the sony minidisc, which threw out wholesale quantities of sound in its data reduction algorithm. more info below-
http://indiscriminate.tripod.com/audio/ ... /dcc.htm#4
in the early 30s, on both sides of the atlantic, experiments in high fidelity stereophonic sound reproduction were taking place, at bell labs in America, and the BBC with the genius alan blumlein. these experiments led to the adoption of 2-channel stereo sound as a standard sound format, 20 years later. MGM studios was the first to commission the creation of a 4-channel audio soundtrack mastering deck which recorded on 35mm optical film, to simplify the mastering of movie soundtracks and incidentally make some of the earliest stereo sound recordings, albeit "accidental stereo" in that the microphones were set up 90 degrees angle relative to a standard modern stereo mic pickup, with the goal being to "fatten up" the mono sound of the day. but played back in stereo they sound stereo-ish to my ears at least. there is at least one CD on the market that has examples of these recordings on it. in the early 80s bell labs put out a series of phonograph LPs with stereo recordings of the Philadelphia orchestra led by leopold Stokowski, in stereo. I have a few tracks of those recordings, they are an aural revelation. RCA records took delivery of their first #300-2 and #300-3 ampex stereo multitrack mastering decks in 1954, and that is when stereo recording commenced at RCA. most of Elvis Presley's early RCA work was recorded by engineer Thorne Nogar, on ampex 300-2 stereo tape decks, then mixed down to mono. a handful of these original stereo recordings exist today and have been put out on CD. one example- "rock around the clock" sounds fresh and clear and stereophonic just like it was recorded yesterday.
I used to use DAT tapes in my audio restoration work, until my 2 r/p decks both gave up the ghost around 2008 or so, when I had to start using an inexpensive Zoom H2 all-digital recorder. until then I got lots of use of those DATs. I can still play them back if need be, on a playback-only DAT machine that luckily still works. before I had the DATs I used a sony WMD-6-pro cassette deck that recorded on metal particle tape, which to my ears sounded on this deck about as clear and low-noise as a good-quality open reel deck sans noise reduction. I could record stuff off of these metal tape recordings that sounded nearly the same as if I recorded them from the original source. but I don't really miss tape, it had problems with eventual dropouts and snarls if the humidity was high which it usually is in my neck of the woods.

Just to point out, digital cassettes are still very widely used for server backups...

I know one person who used to use minidiscs and mini-cassettes all the time, and another who used to own a DAT recorder. It's cool to read about all the different formats, experiments, and totally obscure stuff that's going to be lost with time. just one reason why WP is cool; where else would you find a random discussion about old technology?

^^^^^
I forgot to mention, that the early 80s bell labs reissues were of stereophonic materials recorded in the early 30s. some of the old stuff then was recorded on optical sound recorders, 3 track- and some was recorded on special phonograph discs with two separate tracks on two different parts of the disc, with two cutting lathes working in tandem. the familiar westrex 45/45 vertical/horizontal cutting machines didn't come until a few years later.

Yamaha, for a few years, sold a 4-channel minidisc recorder, which used special data minidiscs that were not stereo-preformatted. they would hold about 18 minutes per channel. they were used as home multitrack studios for amateur musicians.

I love old technology; even old computers, as well. Glad to see this posted.

I wish back in the day I coulda owned a 1985-88 model Cadillac sedan de ville, it was the last of the Detroit land yachts to get downsized to compact size [large compact], they gave it hydraulic dampers to keep the big floaty ride of the land yachts of old, but it handled a lot better. it had nearly as much interior room as the big models.

is beta really superior to VHS as some people say? i've read about it enough times to sway my easily swayable mind to the belief that it is better, but VHS's huge market success over beta has made it hard for me to find beta tapes and players for me to find out myself.

i've been in a movie kind of mood recently and i've been buying a lot of VHS tapes for that reason. i find their incredibly cheap price is enough to make up for the inferior video quality to DVD (which i do not mind much anyway). i haven't had anyone pay me to take them off their hands though...

i appreciate the format for the way it lets you pick up from wherever you left off, making split viewings for long movies (LOTR, i look at you) easier than DVD, where you have to navigate through scene selection, and even then it may not be the exact spot.

i've also been thinking about getting one of those CD players that ipod drove to extinction, precisely because my ipod stopped working and because otherwise my burnt CD Rs would have no use.

i have never, not once encountered a laserdisc in the flesh, though.

appreciating old windows versions more and more now as i look at my old PC games from childhood, wanting to revisit them and finding that my win8 laptop won't run them. we left them behind when we moved to XP.

[this really shows just how young i am, doesn't it?]

beta achieved 240 horz. line resolution with a tape speed of .79 inches per second, whereas JVC's VHS system required 1.31 inches per second to achieve the same feat. so technically beta had better resolution per unit of tape. to my eyes at the time [mid-70s] they were virtually identical in picture quality. VHS had the edge on recording time, twice that of beta from the start. as for CD players, I still have several, including an up-sampling unit that produces a 24 bit/96 KHz output. you can hear the difference [mainly smoother trebles] when playing on ultra-pure SET amps/high efficiency speakers.

It's cool to hear the differences between audio formats. I wonder if I'm the only person who actually likes the sound of a record. I said that to a couple people and they thought that was strange. LOL but if people didn't frequently tell me I was unique, or if I didn't find myself thinking differently from most people I meet, I would never have joined this forum. We're all unique people here, so liking unusual sounds would be common.

I haven't thought about how much I miss being able to return easily to an exact spot in audio/video in years! I've just gotten so used to remembering, or trying to remember, time indexes or chapter numbers. Bookmark functions would be awesome!

It would be cool to play the old Windows games again, yes. I'm not a huge fan of installing virtual machines to do it though, so I probably won't.