Author Archives: Steve Mays
Reel-to-reel
Got a nice jolt of nostalgia from this flickr photo of a reel-to-reel tape. Particularly the reference to speed (7.5 ips = inches per second). The on-air studio at KBOA had a portable Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder wired into the board and one of the requisite skills was “cueing up” a tape while reading the weather or news or whatever.
“Originally, this format (reel-to-reel) had no name, since all forms of magnetic tape recorders used it. The name arose only with the need to distinguish it from the several kinds of tape cartridges or cassettes such as the endless loop cartridge developed for radio station commercials and spot announcements in 1954, the full size cassette, developed by RCA in 1958 for home use, as well as the compact cassette developed by Philips in 1962, originally for dictation.” – Wikipedia
Advice from Kevin Kelly
On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly offers 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice from Kevin Kelly. My two favorites:
“You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.”
“When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.”
HBO Intro (1983)
Lots of folks reading this weren’t born in 1972 when HBO launched. Hard to explain why it was such a big deal. If you wanted to watch a movie on TV back then, you waited for one of the networks’ “Movie of the Week” or something from a local affiliate. A cable channel that just showed movies (in those days) was a big deal. Met with a lot of skepticism (“Why would you pay for movies when you can get them for free?!”)
In 1983 HBO introduced a new logo that was revolutionary for the time. I share it because one of the people who worked on it (David Bruce) was from my little town. He did the Stargate effect which would be no big deal when computer generated graphics came along but was very cool in 1983.
Un dead?
This might be the best subject line ever. There was some kind of Kim Jung Un meme going around on Google+ back in the day and I created the image above to send to my friend in Bisbee, AZ. He recently resurrected it and it went viral (in Bisbee) under the subject line: “Un Dead?”