April 11th Is 8-Track Tape Day

April 11^th is Eight-Track Tape Day – Really?  They actually named a day for Eight-Track tapes?  I’m going to take a gamble and assume that most of my audience know what these things are.  For my younger audience, let me explain…the 8-track tape, as you can see from the picture, is about the size of 1 slice of Texas toast.  Inside of the plastic casing is audio tape.  Many moons ago, there things called 8-track players (just like cd players and DVD players).  These were state of the art at the time, why?  Because the players were much more portable than record players and they could easily be installed into your vehicle.  Some of the cons were that they were bulky, takes up the space of about 15 cds or DVDs.  Secondly, if you bought one for maybe a couple of specific songs, you had to listen to the entire track in order to get to that song.  Each track would have 3 or 4 songs.  No rewind, just click through the tracks to get to the one you want.  If your favorite song was last on that track,  you would have to listen to the other tracks first.

So where did these things go?  Is there, somewhere out there, a 8-track depository?  Every now and again, I may come across one at a garage sale and I have to laugh.