The first 8-track tapes came out in 1964 and gained popularity by 1967. They lasted until the late 1970's in the US.
7 I guess......
Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash" becomes the first eight-track recording to be pressed into a 45 RPM single.
Disagree that CD's only really picking up steam now. It was around 1987.
the 8 track was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear of Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola and RCA Victor Records(RCA). It was a further development of the similar Stereo-pack four-track cartridge created by Earl "Madman" Muntz. A later quadraphonic version of the format was announced by RCA in April 1970 and first known as Quad-8, then later changed to just Q8.
The Philips Company of the Netherlands invented and released the first compact audio-cassette in 1962. They used high-quality polyester 1/8-inch tape produced by BASF. Recording and playback was at a speed of 1.7/8 inches per second. The next year in the U.S. sales began of the Norelco Carry-Corder dictation machine that used the new cassette tape. The consumer's demand for blank tape used for personal music-recording was unanticipated by Philips. History of Sound Recoding
Where to start? OK, first, 8-track came out around the late sixties, they replaced the huge bulky reel-to-reel players. Their main attraction was that now you could bring your own music into your cars. The 8 tracks had almost no effect on records, as most of us bought records as our main album, and then bought an 8-track copy for our cars. If you loved the songs, you definitely bought the record, as 8-tracks were always getting eaten by our players. 8 tracks and records existed side by side for a few years until about the mid seventies, when this new thing called cassettes came out. They were small untrustworthy-looking critters that many of us did not take to immediately, until we got our first little cassette recorders and realised that we could record our own songs onto the cassette. Yeah, cassettes were good, but many were unwilling to rip that 8-track out of the dash and invest in a (then) expensive cassette player, so what we bought was a cassette adaptor. There were two basic types; the type you wired into your existing radio with a toggle switch to the cassette player. The other type was a little mutant thing that was basically a small cassette player with a power source/sound source shaped like an 8 track attached to it. You slammed this right into your 8 track player like it was a tape, and it looked like your 8-track was vomiting a cassette player. (Guess which one I had.) For many years all three formats lived happily together, but as the price of cassette players dropped, it became clear that they were the preferred format. They were smaller, so you could store more in your car, and our players ate them less frequently. So by the end of the seventies, 8 tracks began being phased out, by the eighties, they were gone. That left records and cassettes to muddle along until the mid to late eighties when CD's started becomming popular and cheap enough to phase out, first, cassettes, Then by the ninties the records themselves. You know the rest of the story. It was nice chatting with ya'.
He is asking about the 8 track tape player. The eight track came before the cassette which came before the CD player. 1970's technology.
Someone can listen to a car song using an 8-track system by purchasing either a standalone 8-track system or an old vintage car that already has an 8-track system.
I believe if I remember right a AM radio was standard and if you wanted AM-FM it was an option as was a 8 track player.
== == 8 track cassettes for music, which are now replaced by CD's. Typewriters, replaced by computers. Pagers replaced by cell phones. Records replaced by iPods.
well the person that came first