The 2 track cassette was released at the same time as the 4-track. I’m not sure which came first. But the 8-track killed them both and compact cassette killed everything audio media wise. Given, like vhs, audio compact cassettes are still released in rare occasion to this very day there’s something to be said for non digital technology. Then again phono-records are still released as well. What constitutes better is rather subjective. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a cd over anything other than a record any day. But for portable audio I prefer he-aac. At 88kb. Over 256-bit mp3 or lossless.
I prefer phonograph over all digital audio but I have yet to find any codec that is better than HE-AAC Lv1; lossless or not. That’s my go to for preserving phonographs. So good I went back and re-dumped all my lossless FLAC recordings when HE came out. Despite the compression it keeps the full range, where most lossless cuts some layers. FLAC and Monkey call it Stabilisation; I call it removing noise, the very noise that makes analogue sound the way it does. Full, rich, imperfect.
I bet a few of use here remember seeing, if not using, memory trees. I remember building one so convoluted it had a wood frame to keep it vertical. Everyone thinks today that SSDs are new. We built SSDs out of ram, breadboard, adaptors and watch batteries back in the 80s to stop flipping disks. I ran out of numbers for my memory drive and stopped at 99 (99 64k logical drives). Others got creative and programmed Oct-to-hey interpreters! Microsoft “stole” the idea for WoW, running 16-bit on 32, now 32-bit on 64.
What I find far more interesting than the history itself is the early hacker ethos, right back to Gates and Waz. What we ALL did wrong... how later the ideas were made right.
I still remember... ‘computers are a fad’, ‘you’ll never need more than 64k’, 16-bit is useless money grabbing!
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