My car was made the last year that cassette players were still standard. I chose not to get a CD player so that I could keep playing my old tapes.
We bought our current cars right when things were transitioning from cassettes to CDs so we got cars that actually take both. Still driving them 12 years and 200k+ miles later as we’ve been paying for BS and college tuition. We like to tease the kids about how many Porsches we could have parked outside by now in lieu of tuition dollars.
With you @doschicos…on the upside, insurance is a lot lower with those old cars!
I do too have a car that takes both casettes and CDs, same age as DS1 and 180K miles. DS1 is learning to drive on it and hopefully he will take it to his college and back (?!)
While traveling for BS tours/drop-off, I noticed that many rental cars now no longer have a CD player. They just have USB ports to plug in your iPhone/iPods and listen to your own playlists.
Punch buggy no punch back… which ( with siblings in the back of a Ford Country Squire ) always escalated into a brawl.
I don’t miss cassettes … or the pen I used to rewind them.
Remember Jarts? That wasn’t an innocent lawn game at my house. I had to go to the Emergency Room twice. I have scars.
My most cherished possession? My original Bongo Board. I love that thing and I still use it all the time. Don’t act surprised… I might be old but I still have a pulse. And I didn’t say it was pretty.
lol great throwbacks esp the Bongo Board!
I was just thinking about cassettes the other day. Really, they were inefficient. You had to listen to the whole thing or re-wind little by little to hear your favorite song. Records (LP’s) were much better… You could go straight to the place you wanted… just like that. As for pens: Papermate Write Bros pen caps were the bomb at rewinding.
I have, however, heard that cassettes (name rumored to be from the French for K7 - the format)… have made a comeback of sorts… for musicians to give demos on. No idea if it is true.
Cute, but doubtful. In Italian, which seems to have more loanwords than actual Italian words, an Italian word is actually used - cassetta (little case). K7 in Italian would be “kappasette.”
ski is so smart.
The best part about cassettes? (Besides planning and making mix tapes for your sweetheart of the moment, that is.) Having a parent/parent of a friend with one of those sweet Nakamichi auto reverse decks that literally flips the cassette over instead of merely reversing direction and shifting the playhead.
Behold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRSDp1JI5BQ
You can pick up a 202 for not much money these days…and probably should.
7dad, that is really cool 
A few years ago (close to 10,) we picked up a cheap cassette player for around $8 for language lesson tapes from library. We no longer had anything that plays cassettes at home except for the aforementioned car. The player came with only play, FF, stop, eject buttons. No auto reverse, no rewind buttons. You had to eject and flip tape and fast forward it to rewind.
Correction: we do have couple of Walkmans stashed somewhere but didn’t want little kids to use it.
Nakamichi was the best.
The only cassette player we ever owned was FormerCK’s FisherPrice red and yellow hand-held “toy.” I thought I’d shoot myself if I ever had to listen to another nursery rhyme or The Wheels on the Bus.
@photographermom, What the heck is/are Jarts?
What’s a bongo board???
Lawn Darts
A balance board. Think of a skateboard board atop a ball or a rolling pin.
Yeah, I really miss cassette tapes. It was so much fun when the tape somehow got loose and started getting chewed up in the machine and you could carefully try to unravel it and then try to rewind it on the spool with the eraser end of a pencil. Fun times. Actually, what was fun was losing patience and snapping the stupid tape and pulling it out of the player and throwing the darn thing in the trash. At least with a scratched CD you could play miini-Frisbee. Not sure what you do when a flash drive dies. Hmm, if you have carpets, I guess you could turn it into a doorstop. 
Alternatively, you could buff some toothpaste into the scratches and get a working CD again. 
Anything that had been played enough to get scratched, I was probably tired of …
Thanks, ski, did you google those? Or did you actually know that already? You’re starting to scare me…
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