They came by letter, email and telephone, scribbled on postcards or yellowed prewar foolscap, transcribed from cassette recordings of Suffolk longshoremen made half a century ago, or taken from hand-sketched maps of Highland hill country and island coastlines.
Since cassette tapes helped when I was a kid, I might make an exception for quiet, non-light emitting podcasts.
Then my dad took me on one of our last drives into the Peak District and he slipped the Kinks into the cassette player.
I flip over a cassette of the most important album since Marvin Gaye's What's Going On (though I don't think such portentous thoughts then: just that A-Ha suddenly don't sound too amazing).
WHEN Akio Morita, the late founder of Sony, took home the small stereo-cassette player from which his engineers had removed the record function, he soon realised that this was going to be a popular item.
Attempts to unify the two standards earlier this year came to nothing, so a bitter standards war, akin to the battle 30 years ago between the VHS and Betamax video-cassette standards, now seems inevitable.
CBS rejected it, saying that it was not a proper representation of how a network operates.TiVo and Replay, another San Francisco company, sell personal video recorders (PVRs)—the same sort of thing as video cassette recorders (VCRs), only digital, and with a memory.
In September, for example, a video-cassette surfaced in which Jean-Claude Méry, a now-dead property developer, admitted illicit fund-raising for the RPR.
There were originally, for example, three different versions of the video-cassette recorder, and nobody knew at the time which was going to win.
IT LOOKS for all the world like a rerun of the video wars of the 1980s, when Sony's clever little Betamax cassette recorder was eventually trounced by the Matsushita camp's clunkier but more versatile VHS machine.
Big advances in the technological ability to copy works, such as photocopying and the video cassette recorder, have produced much debate but failed to upset this delicate balance.Perfect reproductionDigital technology, though, may shatter it once and for all.
