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!
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!
@@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.
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! 😎
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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!
Good one. UA-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.
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!
No, your pencils are/were precisely the same as the ones we used in Bulgaria, neither thinner nor thicker. And my experience with them is exactly the same as yours. The BIC pens were the best for winding tapes. 😂 You are spot on, as usual...
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.
@@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.
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.
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!
God I've watched lgr since 2012. Longest I've ever consistently followed someone's content. Man's amazing and never puts out a boring video. Can't believe he's almost to a million. Deserves it, check him out. 10 years worth of great interesting content.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
When you wound that tape back in at the beginning, it went back in easily and was back to normal. In my experience, when a tape gets pulled out like that you have to wind it in slowly and watch out you don't introduce twists into the tape. I did that with one of my cassettes, and could never find the twist - it always played the other side backwards from then on.
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).
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.
Another triumph for Techmoan AND LGR! Great combination of like minded energies to thoroughly explain this beautifully minimalistic, DUI aspect of technology past; which is in itself beautiful. Archaic modes of rewinding archaic forms of media is why I tune into this channel. Thanks for existing guys, the universe is much more interesting with you both.
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.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 except that it's a simple cameo, and the average UA-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 🤷
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.
I see you are past 1M subscribers, and LGR is inching towards 1.5M. Congratulations to both. This was interesting in a quirky way, just like many of your videos. Thanks!
Thanks for the demonstration and the quick shoutout at the beginning. Radio Shack alkaline batteries were expensive, so I bought a lot of Ray-O-Vac's back in the 80's because they were the cheapest alkaline batteries you could get then.
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?
@@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.
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, 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?
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.
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 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.
Big up for showing my first personal stereo at 1:30 - mine was the "superb quality" one at 25 quid (had the luxury of built-in radio - wooh!). Quality wasn't all that great since I remember it would slow down and wobble significantly as the batteries drained (incidentally, I spent my pocket money on a Varta battery charger and set of AAs - no worrying about tape winding and Bics for me!). But I loved it - one of the best Christmases ever. I still have it somewhere in the "big box of assorted electronics, cables and other junk"... must be why I have an affinity for this channel...
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
Tape winding by hand was so ubiquitous in those days that Staedtler even made a mechanical pencil with slots in the plastic that fit perfectly in a compact cassette's sprockets. I still have mine and even after close to 30 years it still works like new, even still writes like new!
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.
I'm a tech junkie, you made a tape rewinder interesting. Also loved your editing when came to the audio from LGR. Made it seem like it was coming from a cassette. Keep up the awesome job your doing.
I saw the tape winders at the recording studios in 90s india. One studio had a dedicated winder machine similar to yours without the cover. Back in the day we could give the studio a list of songs and a blank cassette on which songs were loaded for a small fee.. like you own unique music album...
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
Saw this more than 2 years after you posted it, still nice entertainment. Loved seeing Clint in the video. And you yourself hit the 1.000.000 mark as wel I see. Keep up the good work!
Oooh! Another cross-over episode. I love the UA-cam Unified Tech Universe. And for the record (well cassette actually), I did on occasion use a standard HB pencil to re-wind a tape that had gotten chewed on by my portable stereo. The main reason being that those were the most useful implements I had at hand and the mechanical pencils I most often used for writing were round and thus even harder to use. I've never were much of a ball-point guy in my younger days.
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?
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.
Hey, you’ve made the million now!! Even if you didn’t think you’d have it in 4yrs… glad you got there before your feared discontinuation of the plaques!!
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!!!
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.
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!
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..." 🤭
"Greetings" did giggle a bit hearing the Lazy Games Review intro. Nice guest spot.
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! 😎
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! 🤣
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!
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.
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?*
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.
7:12 Well, you just achieved that milestone, so here's hoping UA-cam didn't secretly discontinue the play button rewards.
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.
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.
Does UA-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.
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!
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 :)
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)
Techmoan better be part of UA-cam Rewind
Good pun
Good one. UA-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" ......😁👌
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.
This is my favorite channel. I love this video. Who else could make rewinding a tape interesting?
not only interesting, but masterpiece.
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!
No, your pencils are/were precisely the same as the ones we used in Bulgaria, neither thinner nor thicker. And my experience with them is exactly the same as yours. The BIC pens were the best for winding tapes. 😂 You are spot on, as usual...
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.
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.
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!
God I've watched lgr since 2012. Longest I've ever consistently followed someone's content. Man's amazing and never puts out a boring video. Can't believe he's almost to a million. Deserves it, check him out. 10 years worth of great interesting content.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
Oh my word, the Bic pen rewind method really brought me back...funny how people from all over figured out that method!
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.
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.
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
LGR + TEACHMOAN?!?! Christmas came early to UA-cam, THANKS guys, you're both super awesome!!!
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
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.
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.
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.
When you wound that tape back in at the beginning, it went back in easily and was back to normal. In my experience, when a tape gets pulled out like that you have to wind it in slowly and watch out you don't introduce twists into the tape. I did that with one of my cassettes, and could never find the twist - it always played the other side backwards from then on.
It was most satisfying to see my preferred method twirling around a Bic pen.
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...
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.
27-year-old Canadian. Used Bic pens as well; never pencils.
37-year-old Brazilian. Also always BIC. Pencil only if desperate.
Another triumph for Techmoan AND LGR! Great combination of like minded energies to thoroughly explain this beautifully minimalistic, DUI aspect of technology past; which is in itself beautiful. Archaic modes of rewinding archaic forms of media is why I tune into this channel. Thanks for existing guys, the universe is much more interesting with you both.
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.
Techmoan, I still cry when I see a tape.. My granddad recorded over my collectible "Moody Blue" Elvis Presley album tape.. :(
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 !
God!!!! A Cassette tape hand winder!!!! Unbelievable!!! I haven't seen one of these in almost four decades!!!
AN EXCELLENT VLOG. BROUGHT BACK MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD DAYS, FIDDLING WITH CASSETTES TO REWIND. THANKS.
Your videos are therapy to me. I'll watch anything you post up.
OMG
TECHMOAN FEATURING LAZY GAME REVIEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
😍😍😍😍😍
11:16 Yay for Nixie display tubes!
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 except that it's a simple cameo, and the average UA-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 🤷
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
When i was a kid in the 2000s I used a bic pen or pinched it with my fingers.
I see you are past 1M subscribers, and LGR is inching towards 1.5M. Congratulations to both.
This was interesting in a quirky way, just like many of your videos. Thanks!
Thanks for the demonstration and the quick shoutout at the beginning. Radio Shack alkaline batteries were expensive, so I bought a lot of Ray-O-Vac's back in the 80's because they were the cheapest alkaline batteries you could get then.
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.
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
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.
Thanks for the video. I was in the 90s a heavy walkman user myself and I was not aware, that manual tape winders existed.
It's something inherently relaxing in watching old tech working as it should. Good job!
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.
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.
Clints voice took me by surprise! Once I recognized it I jumped for joy!
Well played.
Big up for showing my first personal stereo at 1:30 - mine was the "superb quality" one at 25 quid (had the luxury of built-in radio - wooh!). Quality wasn't all that great since I remember it would slow down and wobble significantly as the batteries drained (incidentally, I spent my pocket money on a Varta battery charger and set of AAs - no worrying about tape winding and Bics for me!). But I loved it - one of the best Christmases ever.
I still have it somewhere in the "big box of assorted electronics, cables and other junk"... must be why I have an affinity for this channel...
Pencils memes where made by kids pretending to be retro or maybe just trolls
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
LGR on Tech Moan is like a crossover episode of The A-Team with Doogie Howser.
Tape winding by hand was so ubiquitous in those days that Staedtler even made a mechanical pencil with slots in the plastic that fit perfectly in a compact cassette's sprockets. I still have mine and even after close to 30 years it still works like new, even still writes like new!
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.
The fact that money was wasted on shirts showing a wrong meme.
I definitely used a pencil and not a pen. All it takes is a little practice and patience.
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.
I'm a tech junkie, you made a tape rewinder interesting. Also loved your editing when came to the audio from LGR. Made it seem like it was coming from a cassette. Keep up the awesome job your doing.
I saw the tape winders at the recording studios in 90s india. One studio had a dedicated winder machine similar to yours without the cover. Back in the day we could give the studio a list of songs and a blank cassette on which songs were loaded for a small fee.. like you own unique music album...
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.
4 years after and I DID NOT EXPECTED THAT LGR CAMEO
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
Saw this more than 2 years after you posted it, still nice entertainment. Loved seeing Clint in the video. And you yourself hit the 1.000.000 mark as wel I see. Keep up the good work!
Oooh! Another cross-over episode. I love the UA-cam Unified Tech Universe.
And for the record (well cassette actually), I did on occasion use a standard HB pencil to re-wind a tape that had gotten chewed on by my portable stereo. The main reason being that those were the most useful implements I had at hand and the mechanical pencils I most often used for writing were round and thus even harder to use. I've never were much of a ball-point guy in my younger days.
"Made in England" - that IS old.
This video really wound me up... 😂
Still better than UA-cam Rewind.
Fun video. Interesting that Beverly is spelled "Beverley" on the cassette you used as your demo.
I remember that catalogue. Ahh. Many happy hours looking at all Tandy’s special things 😁
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?
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.
Whoever made that meme, clearly didn't live it.
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
An unexpectedly good video! Subscribed to LGR, thanks for that. Looks a great channel!
Hey, you’ve made the million now!! Even if you didn’t think you’d have it in 4yrs… glad you got there before your feared discontinuation of the plaques!!
The same types of people who couldn’t set the time on their VCR used pencils to wind tapes!
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
I'm glad other people specifically used their PINKY to do the winding. :-)
The hint on when the Sony tape winder was made, is the Sony sticker on the top. They applied those on Sony products in the mid to late 1980s.
I have one of those rewinders, bought it from Radio Shack back in the mid 70's, mine is red.