Kids React to Walkman

Little River Band cassette not included.

Technology moves so damned fast that by the time you've saved enough money to buy that cool electronic trinket you saw on the shelf at Woolworth's, it's probably become obsolete and been replaced by something newer and better. Well, being replaced by something newer and better seems to have become Sony's corporate-mantra lately. The Japanese tech giant once held the enviable position of being the inventor of the Walkman, the first truly portable consumer stereo cassette player, but ended up losing it's winning grip on mobile music in the 2000s to Apple's juggernaut iPod. Oh they tried extending the brand to the Discman and the MiniDisc Walkman, and Sony enjoyed a brief bit of success with those formats, however with the mass-consumer drive towards digital music during the 21st century, physical storage formats like the Compact Cassette were clearly on their way out and the digital mp3 format was set to preside over their respective funerals. To an old fart like me, it doesn't seem that long ago that I was making kickin' mix tapes on my dual-deck to give to my sweetheart, but to any kid born in the last decade or so, it may as well have been a century. Check out this video of some little peeps pondering a portable cassette player and enjoy their frustrated and embarrassed reactions whilst we sit back and chuckle. Of course I make sure my kids are well-versed in ancient technologies like Atari, VHS and toaster ovens so that this never happens to them. They may grow up to be friendless and weird, but dammit, at least they'll know how to properly clean an LP.



BONUS VIDEO: SOME AWESOME OLD AD FOR A STEREO STORE IN TULSA

Cassettes Come Back

Courtesy of stealing from the internet.

You gotta love hipsters if only because they do nothing without being ironic. They drink the worst beer on the planet, they wear t-shirts from bands they don't listen to, they love dorky outdated glasses that no one in their right mind should find appealing (even after drinking several of those crappy beers) -- and now these hipper-than-thous have somehow managed to bring back…wait for it...the compact audio cassette, known the world over for having the lowest fidelity and reliability of just about any audio format invented since the 1960s. Yikes. Actual real-life bands have even started releasing their albums on this completely outdated format. Granted, the appreciation of any sort of retro technology makes me smile inside, but I could do without the irony. Check out this video for a look at this recent phenomenon. God help us if those hipsters discover VHS, God help us all.