Compact Cassette Tape Winders - From Bic to Sony
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- As requested - a video about audio cassette tape winders.
Featuring a guest appearance from LGR. Follow LGR on youtube at / phreakindee
The mystery of the origin of the pencil memes has been solved - see this video for more.
The clear tapes seen in this video were purchased from Tapeline a few years ago - they sell a similar white spool version now: tapeline.info/...
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Hadn't seen one of those hand rewinders before, an admirably simple solution. Reminds me of those wind-up radio/flashlight devices for emergencies. Though I suppose winding a cassette is its own form of emergency, heh.
And thanks again for having me on, this was fun!
It's Clint!!1 Hi Clint * waves*
There actually is a pencil out there that will wind a cassette tape, no longer made but I fondly remember using it because it fit the Sprocket in the center of the spindle.
The pencil was called yikes!
Ahh, Ticonderoga. A man after my own heart! 😍
LGR FOODS !
@@mattetch12 was it one of those triangular pencils? I vaguely remember they may have been better than the normal ones. maybe a visit to the pencil museum in in order.
I find that after I've listened to both sides, the tape has magically rewound itself.
Best comment!
How to get more music l, and don't even need to rewind
WITCHCRAFT
WHAT KIND OF SORCERY IS THIS!!??
NOOOOOOO reallyyyyyyy???????
sO cOoL I NeVEr kNeW tHat!!!
A techmoan/LGR crossover. My god that made my day.
the globe just like the tape is revolving.
Top 10 Anime Crossovers
For real I was pleasantly surprised
Bic and Cassette Together Again ❤ 😎
Loved this!
“That would mean it would cost you ... every time you charged it up.”
No!!!! Don’t give them any ideas!!!!
>don't recommend spinning it on a pen.
How dare you, that's a perfectly viable method. You either rewind the tape or get someone in the eye, win win.
Just keep the pen from the back, and let the cap on top, so the cassette won't get away from the pen!
LGR + Techmoan + 8-Bit Guy
The Holy Trinity
OMG!!! 😆😆
I remember when he was the iBookGuy, times sure change
I'm not a fan of LGR. He seems mean-spirited.
@@drmegaman seriously???
@Max Pain "hearing safety" *WHAT?*
Does TH-cam make woodgrain play buttons?
Time for a custom wood grain wrapped play button
Probably not but they should.
I'd prefer a chrome play button with neon accents.
Matte black, chrome strips and woodgrain for the interior, if I ever manage to get one, that is how it should look like.
Get the Stylus browser plugin and download themes from userstyles.org (all open source of course); it allows you to create/download customized CSS themes for about all websites; including lots of YT player retro mods, that (obviously) overrides the regular theming.
The people who made those memes probably never rewound a cassette
I used a pencil because that's what I HAD at the time. I wasn't in the habit of carrying around pens in school while tapes were a 'thing' - every teacher wanted every thing in pencil - so using a pen was a luxury I never really had. It looks a lot easier than using a pencil. I had a technique where I'd jam it in at an angle and, using the flat of my hand, I'd roll the pencil along a desk surface, pivoting the tape a bit. It was weird when I did have to do it.
EDIT: Admittedly, when I listened to tapes, I'd usually wear out the batteries backwards and forwards and then steal the household supply of batteries when I needed new ones. Yeah, I was that kinda kid.
Exactly my thoughts. And bic pens are so common in my country... You can find one in every house, office, everywhere!
… but probably saw someone rewinding a tape using a BiC and mistook it for a Pencil
There's a lot of fake nostalgia about these days... Certainly isn't what it used to be?
@@pumajlr in Germany we usually used pencils, because that's what we had. We didn't use bic pens in school. You either used pencils or fountain pens. Or you used a ball pen in later years. Even today you don't often see bic pens as much as in the US for example. Did it work great with pencils? No. Did it do the job... Yeah, kind of.
Please do DVD Rewinder, yes this product really exist.
I totally forgot about them! I've just dug my old one out and am happy to say it works on blu-rays too. This will save me so much time!
but... why... why does it exist
WTF do you mean DVD rewinder???
Works great with CDs as well
It works great with bs as well!
God this is bringing back some memories! Pencils worked but never well. I think you will find the people making the memes, have never laid hands on a cassette.
This whole pencil thin really winds me up (pun intended) every time I see it. It never worked for me back then.
The pencil only worked if you wrapped electrical tape or sticky tape around it.
But the Bic always worked.
So good to see the rest of the world was using the same pen and method as me in the 80's.
I was one of the fling it round at head height crowd and only flung the odd cassette across the room
I never understood it either, I was between the age of 4-7, at the time of cassette, so late 90s to early 2000s. always used my pinky or a pen, never saw anybody use a pencil
It does work, just not as well.
@@HappyBeezerStudios it's all in the angle. People saying no one did it....I did! 🤣
Techmoan video with an LGR cameo is like your favourite band covering your favourite song.
Toto - Weezer - Weird Al - Africa
..and "Bleach" is my favorite album of all time too
Yeah right, I smiled stupidly when I heard that "greeting..." 🤭
Bic pen also has a distinct sound when you use them. That slippy clack brings me back.
They clack rattle when you drop them. The sound is unmistakable. I would tap the pen in my cheek when thinking to make the rattle noise.
The pencil meme thing probably just stems from kids who never really lived during the cassette age pretending they did. I guess they overheard real adults talking about using a pen and mixed it up.
I wind cassettes with pencil
got to agree with this. BIC pen =rewind tool. and I can't imagine anyone who lived then associating a pencil with this activity as they just didn't work. I came here to basically say the same thing. some confused 12 year old said pencil to sound cool.
Lived back then. Used a pencil. Worked perfectly. I''m trying it again right now for the first time in years... still works great.
Just angle it slightly and the shape of the pencil makes it work almost as good as a bic pen. I can only assume the ones saying it doesn't work have the wrong technique or something.
Just like the other commenters, I used a pencil to wind my casettes during all of my childhood.
Pencil here as well
The fact that both of you can take a dry subject such as this and make it entertaining speaks to why you both deserve more subs.
what I REALLY hated was sometimes the super cheap portable tape players didn't even HAVE a rewind button. If you wanted to rewind, you had to flip the tape over, fast forward a bit, flip it back over, and play.
EDIT: I legit wrote that comment before watching the video. I can't believe you mentioned the EXACT same thing. That's so awesome
8:31 That poor switch. I, too, would get depressed if someone kept closing the lid on me and kept me in that pokey little box.
xD
nice one
It's quite like how everyone says "flammable" nowadays when we should be saying "inflammable". I remember reading manuals from the 1980s and early 1990s which still told you to "depress the switch". The abbreviation "press" just seems to have been universally adopted as a convenience which isn't easily confused with other words.
A similar phenomenon has been happening with "regardless"/"irregardless"; but in the opposite direction for some reason...
@@tiagotiagot now image you have learned english as a 2nd language but you have only learned the "old" words.
sometimes, I am confused ^^
@@tiagotiagot I get the impression that people tend to conflate "regardless" and "irrespective" in their heads and jumble the two words into one.
"Greetings" did giggle a bit hearing the Lazy Games Review intro. Nice guest spot.
Mat: "ask a friend who lives there"
Me: "so... Is it Clint or David?"
David = 8 bit guy? That was my guess
I guessed David, too.
7:12 Well, you just achieved that milestone, so here's hoping TH-cam didn't secretly discontinue the play button rewards.
When i was a kid in the 2000s I used a bic pen or pinched it with my fingers.
Great video, but now I'm hoping for a sequel episode about VHS rewinders. Deep down I still want that one that looks like a red sports car!
Nicholas Wertz my neighbour had that when I was young! Like 20 years ago young. XD
This is a bit harder to rewind with a Bic pen :D
First thing that came to mind.
My grandparents had one of those. They put Dale Earnhardt stickers on it.
Those however were a thing for the rental market, so you never wore out your VCR rewinding a tape twice (because the cnut who had it before you never was be kind and rewind) to watch your movie. Still have at least 2 of those in a cupboard somewhere, though they probably need new belts now, the ones they came with were not the best, but I did have a large selection of old VCR drive belts that were part of service kits that were useful in replacing them, or for some in at least splicing together a non stretched belt for it using some flexible superglue and sandpaper.
Hi i'm old! (47) No one in any school I attended used pencils to rewind tapes we always used the handy dandy Bic. The t-shirts and whatnots are likely using a generic pencil to avoid any issues with Bic legal dept.
You are not old you are the right age, we are children of the '80's, I just recently turned 47 as well!
No they arent. There are lots of pens and bic wouldnt be able to sue over that so long as they dont call it a bic. Its just a picture. The copyright isnt the reason. Lots of people just used pencils and angled them awkwardly.
From my experience, if a tape needed a full rewind I would use a Biro pen. However if the tape just needed to be rewound just a song or two back then I would often use just whatever was at hand, and often times that would be a pencil. I remember hardly ever having to patience to manually rewind a tape fully and would just sacrifice the batteries to fast forward on the other side if I was desperate, but to avoid this I would just play tapes where I wouldn't want/need to skip/rewind a whole side.
So 95% of my manual rewinding was done to just go back three or at most ten minutes of run time and in school or at home being a child, a pencil would always be at hand.
Also once with enough practice you could figure out the correct angle and do "power spins" (in short bursts) with a pencil, that would do the job very well.
Memes dont care about legal or anything, look at those stupid nokia 3310 meme
I'm not too old, but I remember when I was 8 I used some pilot pen instead and since it's the same as bic pen it works just fine
Also yes, I've never used pencil to rewind. It never fits.
I'm 50, the pencil was my preferred rewinder because pens were much less commonly used for school work. And I used it for the fast rewind, spinning the tape on the pencil, not awkwardly using it at an angle; you might as well just use your fingers if you are only rewinding a little bit.
I am from the US and I have never seen such a thing. I got arrested for stealing Duracell’s when I was 12 or 13. They said if you were going to still you might as well have steal the best. I didn’t get charged. The cops took me to the precinct and I have to walk home 2.5 miles. I didn’t steal anything after that experience. I just brought more batteries.
You stole batteries but you didn't get charged....
Your comment reminded me of the time I got busted at a department store where I'd bought regular and alkaline batteries, then came back and tried to return the regular batteries in an alkaline battery package. The cashier looked at me like "really?", picked up her phone and called security. My ex-Marine dad was shopping next door at a grocery store and security escorted me to him. He was not impressed.
So they never put you in a cell?
Lol...yeah, that IS a long distance for a 13 year old kid! I would definitely have learned from that too! I think I did walk that far once or twice when I was around that age, but it felt like a big adventure. My parents didn't know, they'd never have let me walk that far by myself.
reedyd you tried that too, I got busted because i tried to return a pack of dead rayovac batteries in the plastic of some new ones I had just purchased, they made my mom drive down to walmart to pick me up, all she said in the car was rayovacs really why didnt you by duracell, if your gonna cheat the system at least go full 9 yards.
I remember have used a #2 pencil tip re-spool a tape that had been eaten by a hungry tape player, but not to rewind a tape per se
Back in the mid-80's the Japan Yen was 250-300 per dollar, so that winder was a $20-$25 item. The WM-2 was $140 and most other Sony walkmans were $60-$110. Some people worried about burning out their cassette motors and so they bought a winder to keep the cassette deck alive for longer.
Would love to see you and Clint hit 1m. Great content from both of you. Love the cameos!
You wish me to get 1M? Oh thanks man!
Techmoan better be part of TH-cam Rewind
Good pun
Good one. TH-cam rewind is shit and if techmoan even gets in that's an insult to techmoan. He doesnt need his name mentioned in any youtube rewind ever.
Andrei Taran they used to be good but then they turned to shit
"Rewind" ......😁👌
Nope. Never used a pencil. All we really had were the standard No. 2s and they never did the trick, unless you did the swirly thing. And I, like you, have seen my share of flying tapes shot across the room. But the classic American tape rewinder was ALWAYS the Bic pen. They were cheap (you could steal them from anywhere) and fit perfectly. For us, back in the 80s, I remember a pack of 5 Bics were maybe $1 to $2, and my mother liked that price. I even kept empty Bics at my stereo for the sole purpose of rewinding tapes.
Great video and more interesting than one would expect. Thank you.
Pencils memes where made by kids pretending to be retro or maybe just trolls
That meme was obviously created by someone who looked with envy upon those bic toting peers and there superior winding capability.
People who made cassette and pencil meme, clearly never winded a cassette with a pencil!
Yup😂
I think you mean "wound".
I used pencils.
"Kids these days will never understand what it was like... and neither will we."
In Germany this was common since ballpoint pens were banned in schools. But you need a strip of paper wrapped around the pencil to make it work.
Canadian here - The pencil vs pen thing is because in grade school they did not allow us to have Ink Pens. Pencils only! it was not until Jr high / High school that we were allowed to have ink pens. And even then, it was black or blue only. Red was forbidden (yay teachers marking in red ink) and other coloured ink pens were only for Art class.
Ah, so it's sort of like how public schools here in Singapore don't allow students to bring any electronics (aside from a small list of approved devices for certain subjects), but when I moved on to college, I was able to bring such things with me.
All the people saying the meme is fake probably don't remember the 80s. Kids were not allowed pens, only pencils.
Don't assume that because this person mentionned he's Canadian that all Canadians in every Provinces were using pencil! As for me I've always used a BIC pen and I am Canadian too.
Same here in Sweden. No pens allowed, only pencils. And I do remember winding tapes occasionally with my pencil. It was awkward, but it did the job. In junior high we were given mechanical pencils and they were similar size and shape to BICs and they worked much better for winding tapes with.
At my first school we weren't allowed scissors. So they gave us a metal spike so we could perforate the paper and tear it. Not sure about the logic.
OMG
TECHMOAN FEATURING LAZY GAME REVIEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
😍😍😍😍😍
11:16 Yay for Nixie display tubes!
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 except that it's a simple cameo, and the average TH-cam viewer gas trouble with videos over 10 minutes, let alone having the drive to find out who that other face was that popped up for 30 seconds. I think it's kind of cool to hear another familiar voice unexpectedly 🤷
It's something inherently relaxing in watching old tech working as it should. Good job!
Fun video! I'm 54 years old and from San Diego California in the USA and can confirm that my school mates and I mostly used #2 pencils inserted at a slight angle to rewind tapes because we usually didn't have a bic pen at hand. 😎 note that really good tape play and record decks when rewinding and fast forwarding will sense tape end and will slow down just before the end to avoid tape stretching or snapping. Cheers! 😎
I used number 2 pencils because when I was in primary/elementary school. We were not allowed to have pens. So that is all I had avilable.
This is exactly what I was going to say. The closest thing that we had to a Bic pen were the stacked cartridge pencil. I don't remember if those were the correct size though.
And the pencil fit perfectly if you could twist the rubber band off of a newspaper around it. I usually got them at the corner newsstand.
This is my favorite channel. I love this video. Who else could make rewinding a tape interesting?
not only interesting, but masterpiece.
The pencil meme was made by young'ins like me. I am 25. Old enough to remember cassettes being the standard, too young to have actually owned a portable cassette player.
My first portable music device was a cheap convenience store MP3 player filled with pirated music from Limewire but I vividly remember my older siblings lying in wait in front of the boombox, tape in deck, waiting for their favorite song to come on the radio.
Basically missed it only by a few years then.
Between by portable cassete player and my first mp3 player I had like 2-3 cd players, some of which also played mp3's. Still had my walkman around, because trying to get the decayed audio from there somehow into mp3 was quite the act.
But I quickly switched over to rechargable batteries, they worked fine, and you only had to buy them once!
My first mp3 player was filled with yt to mp3 music. (2016)
Second was iPod, with cd ripped music (2018)
My German pencils always worked, but there is quite a variation of sizes in the stores. I remember the natural looking pencils (unpainted ones) working perfectly.
Your collection of consumer electronics is on par with a museum - in a way, I think of you as an archaeologist mediating all these things to us. Thanks for showing of all these romantic machines :)
Ballpoints (e.g. Bic pens) were not allowed in school here in Germany. Teachers claimed that they will spoil your handwriting skills. We had to use first pencils and then fountain pens until we were 18 years old.
So we did use pencils but used a stripe of paper wrapped around the pencil to make it work. If the paper stripe has the correct length, the cassette is also somewhat secured and can't fly through the school bus.
And by the way, Bic pens were not common in Germany at all. All common ballpoint pens in the last century were the retractable kind which were round and couldn't work with a cassette.
I definitely used a pencil to wind a cassette. I hooked the pencil POINT into a tooth on the cassette reel and turned it round that way. Certainly not the best for the cassette or the pencil, but I was just a kid, using cheap blank cassettes to record copies of my Dad's stuff or music from FM radio.
27-year-old Canadian. Used Bic pens as well; never pencils.
37-year-old Brazilian. Also always BIC. Pencil only if desperate.
The fact that money was wasted on shirts showing a wrong meme.
11:20 when the timer starts, the writing under the timer is Polish, can you elaborate on that? I’m curious why ? 🤔
he showed that timer i one of his other videos, and believe or not but this timer was manufactured in chech republic
Man, gotta love those kind of videos!
Taking a apparent pointless subject into a well made 14 and a half minutes video and with LGR collab.
Just great
Keep the good work mate!
£2 a week pocket money? Posh!
I was about to write that comment too, I got 50c AUSD and it was enough to fill up a shopping bag full of lollies at the time(late 80's - early 90's), imagine what I could have done with 2quid, probably have more than 2 Nintendo games per year.
£2 was like, 400 Black Jacks, or 600 Mojos, 40 Caramac bars!
Exactly! 50p a week here. Brilliant until Corgi in Tesco went from 45p to 55p.
The BIC pen likely has more of a trademark associated with them.
That's never really stopped memes in the past, though. I think the pencil thing is more because, at least in my case (as an American in elementary and middle school when tapes were still A Thing) you generally didn't carry pens - we didn't use pens for anything at school, they were never on the list of school supplies you needed, etc. Everything was centered around pencils, presumably because they're easier to remove from surfaces when the kids inevitably scribble all over their desks or whatever. Maybe that's different in the UK?
And yeah I totally remember kids whirling the tapes around on the bus too, just with a pencil instead of a pen :)
@@GiddeonFox Agree with your statement totally. I used a pencil all the time too cause my school didnt have pens really . I dont rememeber using a pen till like high school and i thought it was the greatest thing ever.
Felt like an adult.
Did not have this restriction in Italy. Always had pens and pencils at school so the bic one is the real meme for us.
Dumah Brazorf esatto, non c'è storia qui, la BIC regna
Jeez I have been enjoying your content for years now but never hit that sub button until now, you'll hit a million sooner than later.
Fun video. Interesting that Beverly is spelled "Beverley" on the cassette you used as your demo.
This video really wound me up... 😂
Still better than TH-cam Rewind.
I know why the cassette-and-pencil meme is around and I can add my two cents from an Italian standpoint: there is indeed a big wave of nostalgia going on that is all based around the same (wrong) bits of pop culture, unoriginally and repetitiously thrown about and perhaps augmented with the same couple bits of info copied and pasted from Wikipedia, by people who most probably weren’t born at the time or never actually experienced what they go on about.
In Italy, the slogan they associate with all of this is “what do the 2000ers know about this?” and the decade they yearn for is the 90s...BUT mistakes abound: I have seen a video where a nostalgic and stereotyped recreation is made of downloading movies from 56k in 1992...which would have been impossible since the Internet didn’t hit our shores till 1995 and there certainly weren’t any good video download possibilities at the time.
Likewise, a common object that pops up with these nineties italo-nostalgics as a symbol of the decade is the Nokia 3310 mobile phone and how indestructible it was.
Only problem is...the 3310 actually came out in the year 2000.
Musically speaking, stuff such as Eiffel 65’s “Blue” or Gigi d’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours” (blimey I hope I spelt that right!!!) are amongst the recurring tropes, as if the 90s only started in 1998 and euro-dance was the only thing everybody listened to...I mean, grunge was a thing too back then but nevermind (pun absolutely intended)
So...you mention the Mandela effect, I would say that what is behind the cassette-and-pencil meme can be summed up in a similar way.
Let’s call it the “Nokia 3310 effect”.
Maybe you should resurrect Zack Gobshite from your brief “I don’t remember the 80s” segment from a few cassette videos back and do a series of episodes of badly commemorated things from the past 😄
It's the Millennials doing that. The same thing is happening here in the US. Millennials are jumping on the bandwagon and trying to be "retro" but they are completely clueless and have no idea what they're talking about.
@Proscriptus That wouldn't make any sense. That would be 20 years before the turn of the millennium, basically a whole other generation. It's people born around 1990, at the turn of the millennium, hence the Millennial name.
Well...I was born in 1987 and still I don’t wanna consider myself a “millennial” just cos I don’t like that word very much, especially since it’s used in a pejorative way more than anything.
I am a sucker for things of the past, but I do my research better than just the same scattered bits of wrong info and if I happen to come across bits of tech or everyday gadgetry from before the 90s (which is the decade I should tecnically be a “kid” from 😄) I try to experience using it in the most personal way possible.
For lack of having lived through certain things back then, I almost approach them as if they just came out on the market...that’s the spirit these pretend nostalgics might want to embrace, rather than going on about how they miss certain years from which the only thing they can actually really remember would most probably be learning to walk or training for the potty 😂
He should definitely resurrect Zack Gobshite!
My favourite 90s nostalgia from italy are Rexanthony and Doris Norton! Though i only got to know them in the late nineties and tenners (or how do you call these?)
@@celestinocamicia I just wanted to say too that I really like your writing style, even in a comment. That is especially impressive if English isn't your first language.
"Made in England" - that IS old.
LGR + TEACHMOAN?!?! Christmas came early to TH-cam, THANKS guys, you're both super awesome!!!
Whoever made that meme, clearly didn't live it.
LGR Cameo! No wonder why there was no video this monday.
That was largely due to Red Dead Redemption 2 ;)
@@LGR You Lazy Game Reviewer !
I definitely used a pencil and not a pen. All it takes is a little practice and patience.
I wouldn’t say that no one ever used a number two pencil to rewind a cassette tape. It could’ve done the job in a pinch, especially since it would have readily available, especially to a kid. I never thought people would actually wind a tape in that manner to get to a particular song. The only time I ever used a pen or pencil to wind a tape was to fix it after it got jammed in a cassette player.
Did it while watching the video :D
About the pencils... here in Austria, the usual black pencils are too small as well, but there are color pencils made by Jolly which were at least widely used at school back then... and those are a bit thicker and do fit in perfectly so you can indeed use them to wind tapes. I didn't do this too often though... I got into rechargeable batteries early, and I never had voltage problems with them powering portable cassette players or recorders big or small... except for one data recorder belonging to a friend which just wouldn't load the data properly if powered by rechargeables. But other than that, next to no voltage problems... the only problem was that they only gave a fraction of the playing time of a set of alkalines, but I could get used to that and always took spares with me. ;-)
I remember using pencils and the spin technique ( 0:45 ) on most of my cassettes, this worked quite well actually.
The centrifugal force provided enough friction between the cassette reel and the slightly too small pencil. I've also never worried about ripping the tape, so that might also have been a benefit of using a pencil.
I also used to rip CDs to cassettes and give them to friends in around 2001, those were the days...
I was in China when I was a kid and remember using pencils to wind cassettes. I remember the best sold pencils (Zhong Hua) are just a bit thicker than being too skinny for it.
I think I used the 2B version of Zhong Hua pencil, which had no eraser end. Ended up with dents at the edges of the pencil and damaging the tape (forced way too hard into the hole).
Hui Rong let's hope that you learned the lesson for not forcing pencils too hard into holes...
The 1.2V is a lie!
Well... not quite:
You see, rechargeable batteries are rated differently to primary cells (i.e. alkaline). The V rating on a primary cell is the typical voltage supplied by a fresh cell. Naturally - 1.5V batteries start at around 1.5V (give or take a 10th...). They then discharge quite happily down to 0.9V or less before the supply current drops off more or less completely.
Ni-Cd and Ni-MH cells on the other hand are rated by their average voltage, which on a cell which starts off at about 1.5V and discharges down to 0.9V sits at 1.2V. It's confusing, I know, but it's supposed to make it easy to calculate the energy capacity of a cell (i.e. 500mAh * 1.2V = 600mWh).
The chief disadvantage of Ni-Cd and Ni-MH cells over an alkaline primary cell is capacity. The chemistry typically does not allow for the same amount of energy storage and there is a healthy amount of self discharge going on. A typical cheap Ni-MH cell sold today has a rated capacity of around 2Ah (1.8 - 2.2, occasionally 2.5), which can drop somewhat at very high discharge rates and is no use at very low discharge rates due to self discharge of the cell. A modern primary alkaline cell on the other hand (I've found a datasheet for the Duracell Ultra Power AA) can deliver over 3.5Ah at ridiculously low discharge rates (7mA they tested at), while maintaining a respectable 2 - 2.5Ah at something more realistic (i.e. 200mA, etc.). The 1A test appears to drain the cell in about an hour (going by the Mk.1 Eyeball, they only put bloody lines on the graph at 5 hr intervals!!!).
It should be noted that the Panasonic Ni-MH I found a datasheet for appears to deliver about 1.2Ah from 240mA all the way up to the 2.4A test, thus it appears modern Ni-MH cells are more consistent in their energy delivery, albeit having a significantly smaller capacity than alkaline cells.
Yes, but shitty products just work down to 1,2 or 1,3V (so rechargeables would not work properly) and people blame the rechargeables. Thruth is, the device is poorly designed and the alkalines you use with it get thrown out half full. So you don't just use wasteful non rechargeables, you use double the amount you would need.
i used rechargables i had 8 sanyos that were a whopping 500 mah so i could play a tape for approx 2 hours switching batts 4 times i could listen to joshua tree all day in high school
so many memories...
so many memorex.
So many memories that I wish I could have experienced :(
@@jamescollins6085 Don't feel too bad; you missed out on everything smelling like cigarette smoke everywhere at least.
It's frustrating that people reference garbage memes about eras they have never experienced. It's more frustrating than winding through an entire tape with a Bic and that says a lot. Probably stuckup hipsters doing all this. They can never meme right anyways.
Pencils work, but Bic pens are better for the job.
Digging up. In some coutries there were no BIC pens and you had to use alternative ways :)
ah, see you could use a pencil, you just need to angle it, holding around 45 degrees the tape will hang off (also the perfect angle on most sports games of the day when doing long jump) and with fast small movement of the pencil it'll spin the cassette like a hula hoop, ideal for fast rewinding! ;)
I remember using a standard pencil when lacking a proper pen to rewind a cassette and I live in Europe. It was a bit sloppy but it did the job eventually.
This is why I love your channel. Videos on niche stuff I never knew I wanted to see, but now that it exists, it's exactly what I want to see.
I used to use pencils because it was what we had. Even if we did have a pen there was only a small chance that it was that particular one. Pencils are almost all the same size and do the job.
Having watched this “later in the day” I’m so heartened to hear Matt’s very very modest “if I ever get near 1m subscribers” observation. So pleased that he got there and so deserving of the figure.
Techmoan, I still cry when I see a tape.. My granddad recorded over my collectible "Moody Blue" Elvis Presley album tape.. :(
I swear I remember using pencils to wind tapes. In fact I remember them being a really snug fit and sometimes the paint would get scraped off the pencil from the teeth on the reels.
I did it while watching the video. Actually, the same yellow/black-made-in-germany pencilshe showed around 4:00
I did it, but there was typically frequent slipping and eventually it would wear down the pencil enough to be useless and you'd have to get another pencil.
i too remember rotating cassettes on a pencil (like at 0:45) in around 96. but now that i think of it, i'm not sure if it was a pen or pencil. or even a sharpie. damn, 20 years passed, i can't even remember faces of people i loved back then, how could i be sure about fucking pencil?
@@swancrunch sometimes memory betrays you, but sometimes its funny about how crystal clear it is.
I also remember it but I do remember that I had to keep most pencils at an angle to get any kind of grip. It just depended on the brand of pencil.
Awesome...I remember doing this
those purple radio shack rechargeable batteries are my childhood
Lol...yeah, this is going to sound really weird but Nickel-Cadmium rechargeable batteries back in the 80's had a really distinct smell to them when you first took them out of the charger and they were still warm. Modern Ni-mh batteries don't have it.
I had Millennium batteries. They recharged fine, but they’d eventually corrode.
I've still got some & they still work 35+ years later!
Richard (UK)
I had the GE brand rechargeable batteries. I never used them much and I don't remember why. Maybe it was because they didn't last very long, or maybe it was because of a simple lack of batteries.
I grew up in the end of the cassette era. I remember to use my small grey jumbo grip pencils to wind my cassettes.
These pencils are triangular but large enough to fit.
Bit late to the conversation here, but I was taught to use a pencil by my grandparents, not a pen. But I have no idea why.
Typical Sony:
$60 for a tape winder.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 With proprietary Sony batteries, which were really AA alkalines but in a slightly different metal shell at 5xs the price.
In 1985 it was ~250 Y to a dollar. Still a rich kid's toy, but not half the price of a Walkman.
Still working properly a quarter of a century later, though.
Andrew Gwilliam Yeah, but that's why people tolerated old Sony: They lasted and were reliable. My last Trinitron lasted almost 30 years.
My last 3 Bravia TVs made in Mexico lasted 2 and 3 years. Horrendous EPROM and other board issues. Minor panel issues but the faulty boards made them and Sony dead to me forever.
Apple would price it at $600 and make it compatible only with iTapes.
Funny thing I'm a subscriber for both channels :)
Sheppards1984 I would say a good majority of the subscribers are, actually. At least the active ones.
oh yes, "retro" tech channels, along with the 8-bit guy too. Which I really recommend checking out if you haven't. There's just something about these tech stuff I really missed out on/have a real strong sense of nostalgia towards. Hard to explain, but these 3 channels are like the tech national geographic for me. You can't really find quality documentaries so to speak in TV, or on youtube even.
Same!!!
VHS rewinders yes, but audio cassette? i didnt know such things existed. o_O
I didn’t either. I either had a dual deck stereo and would use one to rewind the tape or if it was a good tape listen to it all and when you’re done with the B side it no longer needs rewound. I only ever used pens or my finger nail if a tape got fucked up and needed rewound back in the case
Radio Shack/Realistic/Tandy had a winder back in the day that was blazing fast--like 30 or 40 seconds for a C-60. Haven't seen one for yonks.
LGR on Tech Moan is like a crossover episode of The A-Team with Doogie Howser.
The same types of people who couldn’t set the time on their VCR used pencils to wind tapes!
Another great video. Any chance you could do a video on DVD rewinders one day?
Actually, I can't remember the size standard here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but I used to wind the cassettes with pincils, it was a perfect fit here.
Seriously I remember using a pencil too. Pens and market tops too. Whatever worked I used it lol.
Bent Bobby pins and needles too. 😂🤦 IDC I just needed to fix my tape
@@RadioForYahweh lol, good memories indeed
Behind the iron curtain you had different pencils... some were round and thick and wouldnt fit a casette hole... some were also thick and had like a rectangular shape with two sides being quite wide... again wouldnt fit
Growing up, I always used a pencil as they were more handy. I have used a bic pen also, but mostly I used a pencil. Yes, you had to tilt it a bit to be effective, but after figuring it out, it was never a problem to continue using a pencil. I personally associate a pencil with that function over a bic pen. Obviously I am in the USA and I never knew anyone that did not use pencils most of the time. I also remember wrapping some masking tape around a pencil to make it easier.
God!!!! A Cassette tape hand winder!!!! Unbelievable!!! I haven't seen one of these in almost four decades!!!
I used a pencil, but used the tip to engage the teeth of the spools and wound and unwound by drawing a circle in the air.
_Is this a wind-up?_
I wonder if there are any winders that use a flywheel or a coiled spring. I can imagine pulling one of those plastic strips with the teeth on them to set a weighted wheel going and getting a tape wound very quickly, even if you had to set it going more than once.
I had that Saisho personal stereo- bought for me at Christmas 1985 when I was 9. It lived into the early 90's when my dad declared it "brown bread" (electronics engineer) as apparently it pulled 3× more out of the batteries than it should of done and they lasted just minutes.
I still have my Saisho midi system from 1989 stored away in perfect condition.
Dont know of anyone ever using a pencil to wind a tape. I'd bet the people that made the memes have never used a cassette.
I tried to do it once to tighten the tape. Ended with a dented pencil end and a damaged tape...great.
Used casettes all my childhood and used exclusively pencils to wind them.
I used pencils. Just to wind a few inches of tape, mind you. You just held the pencil at an angle.
The "classic" Bic pen IS patterned after a standard pencil (compares favorably to a usual #2 pencil in the US.) Now, here in the US a Bic pen WAS the default tool for cassette take up, Most cassette devices manuals did show a generic pencil being used for the task., I'm guessing that would prevent any legal (or favoritism) issues. Also I think it's humorous that many of the same instructions would show a screwdriver for removing the record tab. If you had to resort to your tool kit for this... Well I have no response.. lol 😂 I should have finished the video first, I my my self used a Bic for this, So I still maintain the pencil bit IS derived from the instruction graphics from recorders / tapes. I myself DID havta use a Ticonderoga #2, but an angled approach!
is recommended!
James Slick I would use a knife instead of the screwdriver.
the classic bic is the one you can take off both ends and use the tube to shoot spitwads the bic crystal so named because its clear and faceted
I did find a pencil that fit PERFECTLY in a tape the other day. However, the ones in the memes look waay too thin.
Pencils also happen to be far more common which is the real answer here
My theory about the pencil thing is that, that meme, like most "90's nostalgia" memes were made by people too young to actually have lived with cassettes.
As such, the information get botched akin to the "cassettes sounded terrible" thing from your other video.
Only the Japanese version of the pencil does the trick, and guess what? The Compact Cassette was redesigned in Japan according to the original Philips patent. What we all use is not the original Philips audio cassette, but the finalized Japanese version!
I'm glad other people specifically used their PINKY to do the winding. :-)
I bet the people making those pencil memes are teenagers who've never used a cassette before. They probably saw someone use a pen and thought a pencil worked just as good without actually trying it. Either that, or they're some top tier trolls.
It's air-headed Millennials trying to be "retro." They're clueless.
@@ct92404 Maybe it is just stupid Millennials who grew up with tapes but don't remember them well enough to know if it was a pen or pencil, or maybe it's Gen Z. Millennials are all adults now.
@@PollyBonanzas Well yeah, generation labels are sloppy and poorly defined. Every source lists a different time frame for Millennials, it's all over the place. I define real Millennials as people born from about 1990 until maybe 2002 or so - at the turn of the Millennium. The term "Millennials" wasn't even used until the early 2000's. In fact, I remember in the early 2000's they started calling kids the "Millennium Kids," and then at some point it was changed to "Millennials." But one thing you can tell about them is that they were ALL emo kids when they were teenagers in the mid-2000's. They constantly whined about how "no one gets them" and took pouting pictures of themselves in front of a bathroom mirror. They also thought it was "cute" to be stupid, and think they're little kids when they're 20 years old. The older ones were old enough to have caught the very tail end of cassette tape usage and SHOULD remember them, but the weird thing about Millennials is that are in their own little world and don't seem to know anything about things that they SHOULD be familiar with. Maybe it goes with them trying to be cute by acting stupid.
Typical Millennial:
tristanhanson.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/emo1.png
@Proscriptus I never even heard or saw the term "Millennial" until the early 2000's, and they were specifically referring to kids at that time. I clearly remember people even called them "Millennium Kids," and then at some point it was changed to "Millennials." The dividing line is basically whether they can clearly remember a time before the internet. Millennials don't.
Or there are people who did use pencils when they were available. Especially in school, where it was much easier to find pencils than pens.
The people who say they used pencils are probably just younger people who may have seen tapes being rewound with pens really early in their childhood and are posing >_> im pretty young but I used cassettes until the early 2000s and I always used a pen very similar to a BIC crystal pen when the tapes were messed up.
Its people like me who only had pencils in school to rewind their tapes in class.
I had at least two of the rewinder pictured at 3:38. Radio Shack carried them in the US. I don't remember if they had the "one hand & gear" notation though.
I do seem to recall they worked well on Coleco Adam data packs too (they were cassettes with stiff Lexan bodies and holes in different spots to thwart cross-use)
When I was a kid, I used Stabilo Fineliners - it was a bit tight, but once pushed in, its hexagonal body never slipped. Luckily they are still available, so I don't need no fancy cranking machine.
On an unrelated note: I like your videos - who else can make an entertaining video about rewinding a casette with pen?