We were fairly poor growing up and didn't have the nicest or newest
of anything. I wanted nice stuff and to impress kids and make them
jealous but with six and sometimes seven kids at home we had
sufficient for comfort but not much more. My one friend Cole was in a
much smaller family, just him and his brother, so he had a few nice
things that I coveted. They had a Nintendo with some games, he had a
TV in his room, a water bed and poster of Shaquille O'neal which
said 'FUTURE SHOCK' on it and looked awesome. When we were in junior
high though he got the coolest thing I had ever seen, a five disk CD
changer. It was part of a stereo system that still had a duel
tape-deck which was great for copying the best albums tape to tape
with speed dub but the best thing was that the five disk changer had
a program that would figure out from your selection of songs how to
best organize them onto tapes for a flawless mix tape. Up until then
my mixology was limited to quickly7 pushing record on the tape-deck
when a song I really liked came on the radio or I could dub a single
song off of an album and then que up another. The work was tedious
and often times error prone but that is what we did because that is
what we could do. This new system was amazing it selected the disk
you had programed stated the recoding paused it to go to the next
song and cut right in with robotic precision. This was the future we
were promised and it was as good as I could have hoped. It turned out
that a machine that could make really good copies of CD's onto tapes
had a very limited useful life and I have not listened to an audio
cassette for at least ten years, it has actually been about that long
for a CD for that matter. But there for a few glorious months I had
some really great mix-tapes, some real top shelf stuff that the
ladies really appreciated.
