What, 'cause the cool kids in the '90s weren't namechecking the Velvet Underground? Or the heshers rocking out to Zeppelin?
I wouldn't know; I wasn't a cool kid in the 90s.
The cool kids should be name-checking a mixture of obscure vintage acts and obscure new acts. That is tradition.
Obscure new acts that are genuinely worth name-checking will probably get harder to come by, since decent music seems to have a six month life on the Internet before it winds up in some car commercial or other and thereby becomes uncool.
Heh. Yes. Also, when name-checking obscure vintage acts it's good to pick at least one that's really un-fashionable. Just to throw people off a bit and emphasis how cool you are.
'Gilbert O'Sullivan was an unsung genius of classic song-writing...'
'Gilbert O'Sullivan was an unsung genius of classic song-writing...'
Jesus Christ!
Best not to try to use Jesus Christ for that purpose, though. People will be wide for your game right away.
Thread/subthread merge: Fade into You. If anyone can reliably find the apparently identical model (except for coloring) on the right they're a better man* than I.
*Used idiomatically per other other thread.
4 is making me think of the weird hipster Burt Bacharach boomlet of ten-ish years ago.
Was there a mainstream Burt Bacharach boomlet?
re: 8
Yeah. Early 90s in Glasgow there used to be a club night (Teardrops) which played a lot of that stuff.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/crying-shame-they-re-unique-1.459675
Lots of really great stuff, to be honest, but I think nights like that, and I'm sure similar things in London and elsewhere [I'm thinking of Bob Stanley and the like] led to a lot of fairly shit easy listening stuff getting revived.
I remember Bob Stanley claiming that Lulu and Petula Clark's late 60s stuff [e.g. Lulu's Muscle Shoals stuff] was the match of Dusty in Memphis. Having bought some of this stuff, I can verify that he was wrong. Although I'm sure this was sampled by someone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOleZTq1Dsw
4 is making me think of the weird hipster Burt Bacharach boomlet of ten-ish years ago.
"Do You Know the Way to San Jose" is a good song with a pretty weird arrangement, you know.
NMH plus vinyl!
love of vinyl was a quaint affection even in the 90s.
15 years from now, kids will probably be all excited about finding a CD copy of the Fiery Furnaces "Blueberry Boat". how quaint! physical media!
"Flipping through" the NMH vinyl? Here's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, here it is again, here it is again, oh look, it's On Avery Island, oh, that's the end of it. Let's... flip through them again?
A kid I was tutoring had no idea what a Walkman was. I tried explaining that, sometime between the time when humans banged rocks together for percussion and the rise of mp3s, music was sometimes recorded onto magnetic tapes spooled up in plastic cassettes. Did I already tell this story? My mind is going.
15.
you left out half their discography. there are two singles, too !
16: I could see a kid not knowing what a Walkman was, but did he/she really not know what cassettes were? When I was a kid I had never (for example) listened to music on a wax cylinder, but at least I knew what they were.
Yes, but MAE, the children of today are worse than you were.
re: 18
I could see it. I don't think I had any awareness of 8-tracks when I was a teenager. I heard the odd jokey reference to them in movies, but didn't really connect it with a thing. Then when I was about 17 or 18 I found out one friend had his parents old 8-track, completely with some cool (and shit) albums. If it hadn't been for that encounter, I could easily imagine not really ever having picked up on what they were like except in some fairly abstract way.
20: My parents bought a stereo in 1970 and never replaced it so I knew what 8-tracks were.
Cassettes were also always bogus. They were portable, but they went straight from being not-as-good-as-vinyl to not-as-good-as-CDs. There was never an era where cassettes were the dominant best way to have your music collection.
There was never an era where cassettes were the dominant best way to have your music collection.
Best, no. But try listening to an LP in your car. And the LP-Walkman had some design flaws that led to it never really gaining widespread acceptance.
The thing to do was to buy an LP and immediately copy it onto cassette. Then if anything ever happened to your cassette copy, you could make a new copy from your pristine-condition LP.
Buying a blank tape and recording a song from the radio was cheaper.
If I was a poor black child, I'd make sure I knew about cassettes.
I've probably told the story of my HS band teacher's young kids coming home wide-eyed one day to report the amazing!!1! new technology their teacher had brought in: big, black CDs. This was in the mid-90s.
23 gets is right. 8 track would have been better, but the so would Betamax.
@22
There was never an era where cassettes were the dominant best way to have your music collection.
True, but there was a pretty long period when cassettes were the only practical way for most people to compile mixes of their favorite songs.
Late 70s - late 90s maybe?
There was a golden moment when some really great cassette technology emerged, that was going to be better than anything. I don't remember what it was called, and thankfully didn't buy it. Swept quickly away by CDs.
To be honest, what surprised me most about the question wasn't the implicit ignorance of the technology, but what it revealed about how thoroughly Sony has lost the brand awareness (aside from in the gaming sector, of course) that they once had, at least with today's kids. Because I can't resist baiting Halford, this was pretty clearly due to the consumer-electronics expertise being subordinated to the demands of its media-publishing side, after the Columbia aquisition. Which is a nice example of what's really so dangerous about content companies being so firmly in the driver's seat w.r.t. policy--the damage it does spreads beyond the content industries into technology more generally.
This is--I assert--remarkable! The persistence of hip signifiers! In the Aeroplane over the Sea came out in 1998, when current freshmen were around five years old. (Not that I think the article was written by a freshman.) Shouldn't these kids be name-dropping bands I've never heard of? Isn't that how it works?
Oh come on, ben. I'm assuming you were a freshman circa 1999 like me. You didn't find Husker Du, Replacements, Throwing Muses, The Chills, Mission of Burma to be hip signifiers?
You didn't find Husker Du, Replacements, Throwing Muses, The Chills, Mission of Burma to be hip signifiers?
I don't think I knew about any of those as a freshman. It's quite possible that I first found out about Mission of Burma because of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic (but it's probably more likely that it was because of some KZSU people who liked them, or something like that).
There was a golden moment when some really great cassette technology emerged, that was going to be better than anything.
You might be thinking of minidiscs, but you're probably thinking of Digital Audio Tape, about which Wikipedia says:
"Although intended as a replacement for audio cassettes, the format was never widely adopted by consumers because of issues of expense and concerns about unauthorized digital quality copies. ... In the late 1980s, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) unsuccessfully lobbied against the introduction of DAT devices into the U.S. Initially, the organization threatened legal action against any manufacturer attempting to sell DAT machines in the country. It later sought to impose restrictions on DAT recorders to prevent them from being used to copy LPs, CDs, and prerecorded cassettes. ... This opposition by CBS [Records] softened after Sony, a DAT manufacturer, bought CBS Records in January 1988. By June 1989, an agreement was reached, and the only concession the RIAA would receive was a more practical recommendation from manufacturers to Congress that legislation be enacted to require that recorders have a Serial Copy Management System to prevent digital copying for more than a single generation."
(In a related article on the DAT single-copy limitation mechanism, Wikipedia claims that: "Even after this [more stringent DRM-mandating] law was shot down, the RIAA still threatened to sue anyone who released an affordable consumer DAT recorder in the US. No one made such a recorder available."--but I must concede that there's no real attempt to demonstrate causation here.)
I remember when bubble memory held some promise. Sigh. I liked the idea of magnetic bubbles. Nowadays it is all quantum pairs and entanglement. There is no romance in that. Garnets and bubbles - that was something you could really work with.
I cannot think of road head without thinking about airbags going off and someone's neck being severely injured and someone else's cock getting bitten off. Seems like a stiff karmic price for negligent driving.
You know who does deserve to have their cock bitten off? The RIAA, that's who.
DAT. I remember hearing about it from Europeans, maybe operating under different rules. I was thinking maybe dax, but that's a star trek thing . . .
In the UK at least, DATs weren't that hard to get. I've used them, although never owned one. A friend had a domestic one, and one nice rehearsal studio I've used in Glasgow used to have a rack in every room with a power mixer, a couple of little reverb/FX units, and a DAT* so you could record your rehearsals.
* not ADAT.
Oddly enough, in Europe, after they were famous for 15 min. as the successors to cassette tapes, they had a second 15 min. as data backup media for largish sites. I exaggerate, it might have been as long as a year.
Still have hundreds of bought cassettes, too, as for years as a student I only had a 'boombox' for playing music. I keep meaning to rip the ones I wouldn't easily be able to replace.
re: 42
When I worked a for a BBS [circa '89/90, YTS-trainee] we used to get a DAT sent from New York every week or so, with all the latest shareware, dodgy files, and so on. Pre broadband, there wasn't anyway to get the stuff easily, and it gave us an edge over many of other UK competitors.
44. Yeah, that sounds about right. There was always some elderly finance guy around who couldn't get his head round putting data on an audio tape...
TRS-80 put data on ordinary cassette tape.
Commodore 64s had a tape drive that used audio cassettes.
re: 46/47
Standard on all early domestic computers, I think. ZX81s, ZX Spectrums, etc. My earliest computer used a cassette.
I think you could get a 5 1/4" disk drive for a Commodore 64, but not the TRS-80.
46. All that generation did, but firstly ordinary cassettes didn't have "audio" in the name, so it wasn't confusing like that and secondly elderly finance guys didn't have TRS-80s or equivalent.
Wikipedia says TRS-80 had a floppy drive but not until it had been on the market for a year.
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Mark Bauerlein trolling humanists again: "The Research Bust."
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Is "I have no notion why" a nod to A.E. Housman? It's a common enough phrase, except when I say it I'm always quoting, so I thought perhaps.
I should have known "The Research Bust" wasn't going to be what I first thought it might be.
I never saw much in Hope Sandoval, I admit. But I am far more pitiful, because twice yearly I indulge my very intermittent obsession with Sophie Auster, an overdetermined person.
circa 1999... [y]ou didn't find Husker Du, Replacements, Throwing Muses, The Chills, Mission of Burma to be hip signifiers?
Wow, uh... my freshman year was a bit earlier, but these are more the signifiers I remember from college. But I had no actual friends at college, so I'll defer to people with more knowledge of human behavior.
I'm always certain I listened exclusively to classical music between the ages of about ten and twenty five, but I was mad for Mazzy Star so it can't have been true I guess. "She Hangs Brightly" takes me viscerally back to, um, 1992? Right, no, it didn't exist then. One of those multi-sense medias, in an overheated car on a rainy non-warm day in Austin driving north on Lamar. Probably entirely invented.
53. Me too (always quoting when I say it), but where are you referencing here?
To 31, you've successfully baited me, but I can tell you that you are ludicrously, almost laughably wrong about what drives what at Sony. As a careful reading of your own posts would reveal!
I like Stella Stevens better for Butterfly Mornings in the movie (Cable Hogue, of course), but always smile when the Hope Sandoval version comes around on the iPod.
44: you worked for a BBS? Big time!
I... ran a BBS from my bedroom. I think there were probably about four people in this country who actually made money running BBSs.
57: The well-nightingaled OP.
If anything trapnel undersells how completely the music industry had their heads up their ass with DAT and (around the same time) the DMCA. Way to fuck yourselves, guys.
But while winding Halford up about this is kind of fun, arguing with him about is terribly boring, so instead I'll talk about BBSs more.
43: you shouldn't dally too long; casettes fail pretty thoroughly. (I have the same problem; need to find a cassette deck and rip all the recordings of my old band.)
Hope Sandoval is a picturesque village in the Cotswold Hills, n'est ce pas?
63. Supporting what Sifu says here. Lost a lot of irreplaceable music through degeneration of tapes and bad decks.
re: 60
The company [which was 4 people] built PCs and did consultancy type stuff for a big chemical company, and ran a BBS. The BBS made some money, but it wasn't the main earner. It could probably have paid one person's salary, maybe two. However, as soon as you could get any kind of internet access we started selling it. So we were providing dial-up net access before the web even existed. I even remember my boss setting up a web server, and then not knowing what the fuck to do with it.
Ironically, when I later worked for a big group of ISPs [owned by a utility company] we bought them. Or rather bought their customer base. The sad thing is, I just googled their website, and it's exactly as it was in 1995. Frozen in aspic.
re: 63
I still have a decent newish tape-deck. It's in a cupboard. There's even a place I could connect it to our hifi and leave it out of sight [the power amp and other bits and bobs live in a cupboard that -- handily -- the flat owners had cut a hole in the back for cables to exit]. That might be a thing to do on Saturday, to test the condition of the tapes.
66.1: ah, okay. Yeah, I remember working at a summer job in the IT department at a law firm (I specialized in sneaking to the supply room for naps) trying to convince them they should get a T1 by showing them, like, gopher. I wasn't particularly convincing.
The place from whence I got my first email account (which was also the first commercial ISP in the world) I think still doesn't have actual normal internet and does PPP over dialup or whatever the hell that was called. I still kinda wish I'd hung onto that email address, though.
I also remember the big land rush (and shocked dismay) when they announced they were going to start charging for domains (and just letting whoever get 'em).
Hope Sandoval did at least have a thing for awkward looking Scots.
You all ought to write a joint memoir giving a worm's eye view of '90s IT.
It could be called I Was A Teenage Microserf or something.
I totally read the first word 71 as a verb rather than a proper noun.
Yeah. There was a time when we/I used to write Hayes command set init strings and do all that kind of ancient-nerd stuff.
I think that place I worked for was one of the first dozen or so in the UK. They aren't on this list [too small probably], but looking at the dates they'd have been 3rd or 4th, I think. We had a leased line to Janet some time around '91 but didn't start selling on access for a little while.
44 and others - The original Apple ][ used an ordinary cassette deck for storage. The programs came on a short tape, and you had to mess with the volume and tone controls to get the darn things to load. If you listened in they would sound like the old phone modems (MOdulators-DEModulatorS). I think I loaded "Leisure Suit Larry in the land of the Lounge Lizards" from a cassette tape.
72: it would be fair to say that the interesting parts of my computing life in the late '80s/early '90s did not happen at work (or school).
And my personal BBS was, if I'm being honest, pretty stupid. First of all it was TAG, which was shitty software, and second of all I disliked most of the poeple who called it. My favorite things I can remember were that all the forums (which I supposed I called sub-boards? O BBS lingo, you recede into the distance) were named for famous communists, and dicussions in the V.I. Lenin (Technology) section were conducted exlusively in limericks.
re: 74
This list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_ISPs_by_age
78: I remember demon.co.uk, certainly. My email was through these guys, who stuck with the domain "std.com" (it means "Software Tool and Die, darn it!") for an admirably long time (just checked: they still have it! Totally frozen in time web page, too).
I think that forums were called forums, even on the BBS groups, but I really did not participate much, so I could be wrong about that. If somebody asks I'll re-tell my olden days computer game story about the natural language parser and the bear.
re: 79
The big utility I worked for bought Demon shortly before I left them. I was head of support, running a big call centre team, which was a thankless and unpleasant a job as you might imagine. I think we covered something like about 40% of the then UK market [as we were contracted to provide support for a bunch of ISPs other than just the ones we owned].
In the Greater Boston area, Argus was the big deal. I think at one point it had something like 60 dial-in lines, although not all of them were hooked up to the faster modems. When you got the solid 9600 baud connection, you knew you were about to kick some ass in Tele-Arena.
I'm exaggerating, of course; I always sucked at TA, fast connection or no.
OP footnote 2: so the superscript s's are some kind of neo-twee quotation marks there?
83: yeah, I was on Argus until they started charging. All I ever did was chat, though. Or wait, I played some door or other. Not Tele-Arena, though.
I still mourn the loss of "foolishmortal@fatchicksinpartyhats.com."
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I almost want to buy a Kindle just to be able to read Bill Clinton and the Dead Gigolo.
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I can't decide what to get on my subway sandwich. Are olives "cool"? I want you guys to help me decide, because you all are THE BEST!
Remember when Microserfs was going to be a movie?
Is there some significance to when trapnel is trapnel and when x.trapnel?
As has been said of Western civ in toto, it's just too early to tell. Fashion trains us to be conscious of changes, indeed, to declare things important that used to be invisible -- the intricacies of selvedge jeans, for instance. If the overall spectrum were reduced, we'd attack the narrow band remaining with greater resolve, so being able to see differences in our era's clothes doesn't say much about the absolute variation, if there is an absolute scale.
Contrariwise, fashions we aren't paying attention to all blur together; I see this all the time in people talking about anything pre-WWI, especially anything from the long nineteenth, since I'm on the fringe of reenactment and have learned to see those differences. Well, also to feel them: my topology for 'are these clothes different?' is 'Do I need another body, jumps or corset? And if so, how long would I have to wear it to have my shape and posture come out right?' (By which standard, there's an enormous shift in the late 1960s when the girdle dies: Spanx are dire but I don't have to get my body used to them.)
...There's a neat transition somewhere between Bay Area social dance and SCA and get-a-real-computer-kid network history, but I expect someone else has written it.
Well, God damn it, wrong thread.
I had a wild conference week last week into this, including backchannel news that I was about to get copy-and-paste scooped and had better write and submit toot sweet. Mostly done; damn, that was tiring. And this weekend is all grading.
Is there some significance to when trapnel is trapnel and when x.trapnel?
Not as far as I've been able to discern, but those with real data-analysis skills might be able to tell you differently.
Lots of mid 90s non-professional live music taping was done on DAT, at least for the Dead. Not sure when the technology became common though.
Ah, BBSs. They really drove home the innate unfairness of telco pricing, as I was only ever able to reach the two or three at a time that the same crowd of nerdy ne'er-do-wells were running out of ever-changing phone numbers and software from their bedrooms, since anything else racked up long-distance bills at $0.25/minute or so.
Also, here at the end of 2011, I'm again writing software manipulating Hayes-style AT modem commands, which I thought I was done with in the mid-1990s. It's for multi-megabit wireless broadband modems, but even so, ATZ and ATE0 are still useful and important.
I wish neb would friend me on facebook. I've sent 100 friend requests! Oh well, I guess I'll just keep obsessively re-reading all his posts from the archives.
They really drove home the innate unfairness of telco pricing, as I was only ever able to reach the two or three at a time that the same crowd of nerdy ne'er-do-wells were running out of ever-changing phone numbers and software from their bedrooms, since anything else racked up long-distance bills at $0.25/minute or so.
Hence the entries of many of my friends into the world of phreaking.
Demon is famous in journalistic circles for being the defendant in the first big English libel law ruling on the internet (and what a terrible ruling it was). I was on Pipex, however.
for a while every british friend of mine was @demon.co.uk, I wondered what ever happened to it.
I so hope that ToS is actually just a Mr. Hyde to the Dr. Nosflow.
Huh, I thought Hayes model commands were definitely on the dustbin of history.
That list makes no mention of Planet Online, the UK's first commercial transit provider and the firm that was providing most of them with their routes. At one point 45% of UK Internet traffic went through Leeds. Eventually the founder sold the company to Freeserve, and now spends his money on rightwing politics.
Our first Internet service came because my mum (from the other thread) had a job at B/radford Uni that came with JANET privileges (i.e. the UK equivalent of NSFNet). Still dialup, but dialup -> LAN across the computer centre -> the SuperJANET backbone beats dialup -> xISP -> British Telecom X-25 -> Kent Uni CC(who Demon got their transit from originally) -> Internet.
101: no, not only do the 3G and beyond wireless dongles, and quite a lot of smartphones, use them, I used to use wvdial to get online via cellular while running Linux. That went away in KDE4.4.4 if memory serves, when knetworkmanager got the ability to manage them automagically.
I've got the wvdial.conf if you need it.
