Days of future passed

Over at BBC News, a 13-year-old British teen, Scott Campbell, reviews a stunning piece of portable music technology: the Sony Walkman, which he carried around for a week for the article.

It's actually kind of awesome and worth checking out. Scott Campbell grew up in the digital age, cassette tapes becoming a thing of the past in much the same way as albums on wax cylinders, say. When I was his age, of course, cassette tapes were ubiquitous and I had a ton of 'em, mostly copied from LPs. Campbell discovers, among other things: that the tapes can be kind of warbly (he attributes it to battery life, but it's far more likely the problem is old and stretched-out tapes), that cassette tapes come with two sides, that "Metal/Normal" aren't EQ presets, that the thing has tons of metal moving parts. And of course it seems utterly huge to him--"It was the size of a small book," he writes with some evident surprise.

The piece, surprisingly, doesn't make me feel as old or sad or even as nostalgic as I might have expected. The kid really doesn't come off as a smartass or even terribly spoiled by his "future" tech. I found myself, upon reading young Mr. Campbell's piece, to be more impressed with the reminder that today's high tech is tomorrow's clunky relic-of-youth. And I found myself impressed with the reminder, too, that yesterday's trends aren't always dispositive, either: a few weeks ago I found myself in a local indie record store surrounded by 180-gram vinyl LPs (many of them new releases and not just reissues), today I'm reading an article by a kid who was given a portable cassette player as a relic--the point being that I'm not sure anyone would have expected, thirty years ago, for vinyl to outlast cassette tapes, and there you go. (Vinyl, whose demise has been imminent for twenty-something years now, has now also managed to outlast MiniDiscs and SACDs, and actually seems like it might be healthier than DVD-A, a format so troubled that it mainly seems to be released as bonus materials in conjunction with CD special editions. Again, go figure.)

More than anything, I suppose, I find myself humbled by Campbell's review, actually. There we were, with our miles of tightly-spooled iron-saturated plastic ribbon, and here we are now. And in thirty years more, assuming we still have improbably managed not to collectively off ourselves, there will be some kid, maybe, assigned the chore of carrying around an Apple iPod for a week: It's huge, and it has a big button in the middle of a sort of ring on it, which makes a satisfying "click" when you press it. For the first few days, I didn't realize that the ring was touch-sensitive (although it doesn't detect nerve-impulses, it's just some kind of electrostatic thing) and you could "scroll" through playlists and albums and even individual files, although it only holds 160 gig, about a tenth of what a music player holds now, and that's with lossy 128 kbps MP3 files instead of lossless 1440 kbps MP8s. The earbuds--which you actually have to stick in your ears--are huge and uncomfortable, although you get used to them after a while. The one I used was black--father said they used to come in all sorts of colors, but when you picked a color you were stuck with it and couldn't change it or set it to shuffle....

(H/T to Boing Boing!)