Throwback Thursday Memories

   It all started innocently enough with a post in a facebook group for radio people I'm part of. It was a roll of paper that, up until 1999 in Regina, was used to print news stories on for our newscasts. Prior to '99 there, analog was still more or less King. Yes, we used the rudimentary DOS based Word Perfect 3.1 program for writing stories, but all our audio was still analog, which meant we had to use these:

   Most of you will recognize the reel to reel machine. That's what was used for many, many years to capture audio from our news service providers. The machine below was for audio carts, which look a lot like old 8-track tapes. We'd use those to dub down any clips (soundbites they're called now) for use in newscasts. The machine would put a tone on the tape, which would stop the cart before the audio played again.
   In a perfect world, that is.
   And that's where the facebook group (and the TBT memories) comes in. The vast majority of responses to my post were from other old-time radio news people who remember, often not fondly, the now archaic equipment we used "back in the day". It got the job done, but it was far from perfect.
   The carts had a tendency to skip the stop-tone, and the clip would play again. Sometimes the tape would either stretch or break, and sometimes they wouldn't fire at all. Those malfunctions at times brought a fiery response from the newsreader. I saw many a cart flung across the newsroom and smash into a wall, shattering, when they didn't work. Usually accompanied by some very foul language. The reel to reel would sometimes also cause problems. All of which makes me and a lot of my contemporaries happy with the digital revolution.
   Not that computers are infallible (see my post "A Morning From Hell"), but I prefer them to the "old way" of doing things.

TTFN