Interesting thread. After my last birthday (#70) I took a sample of my blood + a soil sample from the front yard and sent them out for analysis. The result: I really am older than dirt…
I owe part of my (well tolerated) hearing loss & tinnitus to Jimi Hendrix, whom I saw live twice.
It has always been the music that really thrilled me in life, more than anything else. I’ve seen photos of my twin brother & me, sitting in our identical high chairs, gleefully tossing food on the walls as my father grooved to Count Basic or Ellington on LP. He had all 9 Beethoven symphonies conducted by Toscanini. By age 7 or 8 I had played the grooves of all those LPs.
I have that Toscanini boxed set on RCA Victor Red Seal. It was my parent’s, but they don’t have a worthy turntable. Fortunately it’s not in too bad shape considering the had been played on a Garrard record changer.
Funny thing about that set. I knew every symphony by heart well before puberty–but knew nothing about different conductors & orchestras having different interpretations of these symphonies. As a child, I thought those recording actually were the symphonies.
Later on when I began buying classical records, I went nuts hearing other interpretations that I liked as well or even better than Toscanini. I finally realized, “This dude conducts faster than anyone else on earth.”
Yes, but the Toscanini is always valid. For me, they became the HD-650 of Beethoven Symphony recordings. Although you are right about speed. The Pastorale deserves more time.
You know, I don’t want to listen to headphones tonight. I don’t want TV, or music. I want a nice all American 5 (small tube version) AM radio, tune to some clear channel radio. 1010 WINS, 1020 KDKA 1030 WBZ 1000 CFL, or one of the others, and hear the voices I used to hear 1965-1980 before everything got crazy political. Late night call-ins. Coast-to-Coast AM. UFO stuff.
Zenith record player with hinged speakers: check.
Upgrade to Garrard turntable: check.
Taking a magnet attached to a wire to fish out Coke bottle caps from pop machine to fill a contest board: check.
Listening to Larry LouJack, Bob Serrat, etc evening’s on WLS, WOKY: check
S.S. Kreskee`s:yep
Wolfman Jack. Rockin’ Rock Robbins. And the Baseball greats, Red Barber. Harry Caray, Jack Buck. And the talk show hosts. Art Bell, Larry King, Larry Glick All the folks on KMOX 1120. John Cigna on KDKA.
When we lived in Jacksonville, Fla. We listened to WAPE (The Big Ape)
Some of WAPE’s alumni, from both AM 690 and FM 95.1, include the late great Jay Thomas, Douglas “The Greaseman” Tracht, Cleveland Wheeler, Honest John, Mark “The Unknown DJ” Driscoll, Kandy Klutch, Hoyle Dempsey, Marjorie “Marj” Fizzy, Tom Murphy, Ross Earl, JJ The Night Guy, Tony Mann, Marcus “Mark The Shark” Bowder, Billy Goat, Chase Daniels, Jay Styles, Dave-O, The Tin Man, Dani, Steve Sutton, Christopher “Trane On The Radio” Trane, Patricia “Pat” Harrison, Just Jim, Aaron Daniels, CC Rider, Miss Lara, Spoon, Amadeus, Eden Kendall, Michael Knight, Russ The Hammer, Cadillac Jack, and WAPE’s legendary mascot himself, The Big Ape.and Wild Bill Miller…
I recall reading truly serious discussions (in the PC-DOS era) of ‘why do we need to do multi-tasking - nobody does 2 things at once on a computer’. The thinking was that TSR routines can handle any required ‘extra stuff’ (all in 640KB).
Also “why would anyone need a hard drive” was actually the subject of an article in one of the PC Magazine of the time. In that timeframe to run Framework (integrated spreadsheet, database, word processor which had capabilities that I still cannot have in modern apps) you would sometimes have to swap the diskettes in your floppy drive (5.25" version) to recalculate a spreadsheet (assuming that you did not have a hard drive, which I did not at the time).
Some time later I was trying to decide if 20MB was big enough or do I need to spend big bucks on a 40 MB drive.
Some time after that I heard on NPR a debate about SPAM email where one side was saying ‘it will never be a problem because it only takes ONE SECOND to delete an email’.
Sidekick got to be a necessity. And my Atari ST or JDOW’s Amiga could run circles around the DOS machines, having 4 meg unsegmented memory. But for years before that I had an Atari 800 with 48k RAM and 4 “Happy” 5.25 floppies. When I got The ST I went for a 30 meg hard drive.
Yes, I got mine JUST after they started packing them all with 48K RAM. (This was actually extra RAM, it came with 16k internally, I think the OS used about 8K) The 8K Star Raiders game is STILL one of the best out there. And for war games, Eastern Front is STILL pretty much unsurpassed. Chris Crawford is well known as a giant of game design. I ended up with a couple of 800s, and a few 130s - there was an auction locally where a supplier/warehouse had gone out of business and the bank sold off everything.
I realized on re-reading that there may have been a random brain slip or two…
a 10% penalty if you are UNDER age 59 ½
and on the music side, I got an anniversary copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young because my wife’s copy was played many times on her fold-down music center. I haven’t played it in the 3 months since I bought it because I can just look at the song listing and I know every note.
