August 2015 - Filling the House and the Internet with Junk

Denver Darling, WWII Motivational Album (1939 / 1945)

Posted on August 30, 2015August 30, 2015 by hiramk

As a native Texan, I greatly enjoy old style cowboy music. So when I purchased a badly beaten Decca record by Denver Darling and His Texas Cowhands I was fully expecting standard country songs. Instead of country music, the album is a World War II motivation record sung in the old cowboy style. Since the album talks about fighting the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy), that should put it between 1939 and 1945. Listing of Denver…

Qualstar 9-Track Mainframe to PC Tape Drive (1988)

Posted on August 8, 2015 by hiramk

Ok, I now officially feel old. I was displaying this Qualstar tape drive in my office when one of my younger staff members came in and asked what it was. Without hesitation I told him it was a tape drive from 1988 used to copy data from mainframes to microcomputers (IBM XT, Macintosh). He earnestly asked why they would need that. Couldn’t they just copy the files to their local systems? Well, in 1988 we…

Victor Record, Single Side Record with Lengthy Patent Restriction (1907)

Posted on August 3, 2015August 3, 2015 by hiramk

With the digital revolution and the Internet colliding, the legal use and distribution of music is a particularly hot issue. I had not considered how long some of the more nuanced aspects of music distribution had been going on until I picked up a curious looking 78 RPM, Victor Record from 1907. The record was particularly odd in that it was imprinted on only one side and the back was dedicated to a rather lengthy…