2023-05-19

Growing up I never understood the fascination that boomers and some
older Gen-X'ers had with Vinyl LPs and records. I was a millenial
of course and we looked to the future.

Audio CD's were cheaper and better sounding. MP3s on iPods were
more convenient and look how much music you could have. And now of
course streaming music gives you basically an unlimited library of
music at any given time.

Futzing around with finicky turn tables and scratched up Vinyl
records, just seemed like such a waste of time.

Of course now that I'm much older, I now understand the attraction
to just the tactile joy of equipment and physical "things" to do.
I'm still not a vinyl guy but I get the same feeling with a lot of
retro computing equipment. I grew up in the age of Zip disks and
MO media and all sorts of different storage mediums. LS120 super
disks, PD disks, and tape drives.

Nowadays, if you even bother to use physical media at all, it's
just an USB stick or a USB drive plugged into your laptop. There's
no drama, no sense of ceremony that you get with the older media
formats. Heck you don't even press any buttons.

Listening to motors spinning up in an MO drive or watching the
intricate ejection mechanism of tape drives just provides something
visceral that ejecting a USB stick doesn't.

Of course this makes me sound just like a boomer describing their
Vinyl obsession and their fondness for finicky turn-tables when I
was growing up.

That's just the circle of life I guess :-)