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New Life for REELRADIO

Negin said:
Still got a lot of mine, then again I tend to prefer the older tech stuff.
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I'm not exactly living at the cutting edge of technology myself (I'm one of the remaining 472 people in America who doesn't have a smartphone, and proud of it :LOL: ), but give me a flash drive any day of the week .
 
Oldbones said:
I'm not exactly living at the cutting edge of technology myself (I'm one of the remaining 472 people in America who doesn't have a smartphone, and proud of it :LOL: ), but give me a flash drive any day of the week .
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Make it 473 without a smart phone! Only a flipper that is used for...wait for it...Talking!
 
My friend John, who only switched to a smartphone a couple of years ago, now says flip phone users are the 21st Century equivalent of a Luddite. :p
 
More like the Amish than the Luddites. The Swartzentruber Amish reject all technology, but other branches permit some categories of modernities, as long as they're of ye olde school.

Peter Santenello's excellent videos:

www.youtube.com

AMISH

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
 
Since we're talking about uses for cassette tapes, here is one use that was quite technical, was available to only a few members of a minority group (blind), and didn't last very long.

In 1979, TeleSensory Systems, a Mountainview, California-based technology company that manufactured and sold products for the blind and low vision community, came up with the VersaBraille. What the company did was tcreate a product that allowed blind people to use cassette tapes as basically braille notetakers, and I actually got to work with one of the company's products while I was doing a summer 1988 volunteer internship at Channel 10 in Phoenix (I can't remember if it still had the KOOL-TV callsign at the time.)

Anyway, the product looked like a standard cassette player/recorder and you could play standard cassette tapes in it in the standard way. However, it also allowed you to, on higher-quality Type 1 cassette tapes (it didn't work on Type 2 or Type 4 papes) press abutton that transformed the cassette into, essentially, a braille notebook. You could then write notes in braille using a braille keyboard and then compartmentalize those notes into however many different categories you wanted. If you played the portions of the cassette tape with the braille notes on them with a standard recorder, all you heard were a bunch of random beeps.

Here is a website with more information and a picture of the VersaBraille. Enjoy!

 
ted chittenden said:
Since we're talking about uses for cassette tapes, here is one use that was quite technical, was available to only a few members of a minority group (blind), and didn't last very long.

In 1979, TeleSensory Systems, a Mountainview, California-based technology company that manufactured and sold products for the blind and low vision community, came up with the VersaBraille. What the company did was tcreate a product that allowed blind people to use cassette tapes as basically braille notetakers, and I actually got to work with one of the company's products while I was doing a summer 1988 volunteer internship at Channel 10 in Phoenix (I can't remember if it still had the KOOL-TV callsign at the time.)

Anyway, the product looked like a standard cassette player/recorder and you could play standard cassette tapes in it in the standard way. However, it also allowed you to, on higher-quality Type 1 cassette tapes (it didn't work on Type 2 or Type 4 papes) press abutton that transformed the cassette into, essentially, a braille notebook. You could then write notes in braille using a braille keyboard and then compartmentalize those notes into however many different categories you wanted. If you played the portions of the cassette tape with the braille notes on them with a standard recorder, all you heard were a bunch of random beeps.

Here is a website with more information and a picture of the VersaBraille. Enjoy!

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Neat story, Ted.

By the way, KOOL-TV became KTSP October 2, 1982.
 
radiofan2023 said:
Does this guy have his own catchphrase, like Huell's "That's AMAAAAZING!"?
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Huell Howser embodied the wonderment of a child discovering something for the first time. It was that endearing quality which made him so popular with Southern California viewers for close to 30 years.

For those who are unfamiliar with him, the Wikipedia page on him is remarkably accurate.
 
radiofan2023 said:
Well that's not amaaaaazing at all!
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Nope. But I find Santenello's videos similarly enjoyable because he, just like Howser, allows the people he's visiting to tell their own stories and to control the flow of each videolog. Santenello has a laid back and modest persona and doesn't insert himself into each story in order to make himself the star of it, like so many contemporary Youtube "influencers" do. Highly recommendable channel.

K.M. Richards said:
Huell Howser embodied the wonderment of a child discovering something for the first time. It was that endearing quality which made him so popular with Southern California viewers for close to 30 years.

For those who are unfamiliar with him, the Wikipedia page on him is remarkably accurate.
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And if people want a sampler plate of his work, there is also a 24/7 official livestream on Youtube that plays several dozen of his broadcasts in a loop. This livestream has a 12 hour long DVR rewind window enabled, so you can go backwards and find an episode that looks interesting, assuming the current one playing doesn't jive you.


This livestream exclusively airs his "Visiting" series, which was his most personal and low-key program. If you search, the entire library of his California's Gold series, which was his most definitive and celebrated work, can be watched on Chapman University's web site.
 
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So, today, listening to a January 1974 aircheck of Shadoe Stevens on KROQ, there's an ad for a stereo store in Burbank. And highlighted is the Blaupunkt Bamberg---an AM/FM/Cassette unit---that could record directly from the radio. That's the little red button

ba8f3e5afdebc4940380bf2dbf72a8d5.jpg


I had NO idea. Apparently Blaupunkt made them from 1971-1978.

Most aircheckers weren't able to afford Blaupunkt stereos, and the only cars it was ever standard on were the last Porsche 930 and the first Porsche 928, so...money again....but---if that tech had ever caught on, it would have been an airchecker's road-tripping dream.
 
michael hagerty said:
So, today, listening to a January 1974 aircheck of Shadoe Stevens on KROQ, there's an ad for a stereo store in Burbank. And highlighted is the Blaupunkt Bamberg---an AM/FM/Cassette unit---that could record directly from the radio. That's the little red button

View attachment 9640


I had NO idea. Apparently Blaupunkt made them from 1971-1978.

Most aircheckers weren't able to afford Blaupunkt stereos, and the only cars it was ever standard on were the last Porsche 930 and the first Porsche 928, so...money again....but---if that tech had ever caught on, it would have been an airchecker's road-tripping dream.
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I remember a college teacher having that unit in his pick-up truck. Then again he taught Mass Com there too. He got it from Pacific Stereo or Cal Stereo back in the 70s, I went to the college in the early 80s.
 


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