Today there was a thread over on Reddit "our children will never know the link between the two", showing a cassette tape and a no 2 pencil. It's a nostalgia thread, everyone repeats and solidifies their memories or misrememberings of the time.

What the original image seemed to miss is that in fact a no 2 pencil was the wrong thing to use to try and rewind or re-spool a cassette tape (you had to angle it against two edges, it really didn't work well), in fact what you were looking for was a pen with an appropriate cap size, specifically, ideally, a bic pen because it fit tightly in the cassette gear.

Most of you probably remember that, it wasn't that long ago. This isn't a post about the "good old days". In fact I hate the idea of the "good old days", they were never quite so good and now rarely as old. I was extremely glad to ditch both vinyl records and cassette tapes. As someone who loves the history of technology though, the cassette has its place. It's a weird in-between place, an interim technology, overlapping records, but with less quality, yet convenient, then dying off effectively the second the iPod was created (2001). And in a very very brief period, the cassette was a Datasette, which was a brilliant, cheap and slow solution bridging expensive storage to what later felt like ubiquitous floppies. (Also quite glad to get rid of those.) The cassette is notable because it was cheap and rewritable. It taught us how to become media.

What's triggering this nostalgia of course is not really about rewinding a cassette with a pencil, it's what the cassette was used for. It was, before we had common anything-machines around us at all times, used for what many describe as theft and piracy.

Mixtapes, recording radio, easily handing off tapes to someone (often with beautifully inventive notes and insets). Mixtapes could be a courting ritual. Recording concerts was par for the course. You may not have done it but someone did, and you listened to them. Sound was viral on a scale as small as a piece of plastic and some magnetic tape.

The specific technology is obsolete but the use then, and the need for the use now, is exactly the same. This is why I'm generally positive about the direction of technology and I don't want to return to the "simpler times" -- people are going to find the equivalent of blank tapes, or put some scotch tape over the the tab slots and record what they want, then embellish and annotate, that's what people do.