Throwback Thursday

Last week we presented a selection of iconic ’70s-era advertisements from long-forgotten brands with names that fall in the first half of the alphabet (A–M). Our favorites included the Carver ad showing a young Bob Carver hamming it up, Garrard’s “Improve Your Hearing for $200” turntable ad, and the iconic Maxell ad depicting a listener getting “blown away.” Here we pick up where we left off, starting with classics from Nakamichi, Nikko, and Optonica. Watch for Part 3, our final installment, next week.

Few products have the power to single-handedly change the course of history. Thirty-seven years ago this month Sony introduced a portable cassette player that would forever change the way we experience music on-the-go.

Electricity. The force behind everything readers of this magazine cherish. Try to imagine a world without it. Impossible. 264 years ago this month Benjamin Franklin—inventor, entrepreneur, and one of America’s founding fathers—hypothesized that lightning was an electrical phenomenon that could be transferred to another object and set out to prove it by flying a kite during a thunderstorm.

Napster, the notorious Internet-based peer-to-peer file sharing service made its debut 17 years ago this week, forever changing the way we discover and share music and (ultimately) forcing the record industry to face the music: The Internet wasn’t going away and (with the help of Apple) would radically transform music distribution.

Stop for a moment and try to remember life before the Internet. Typewriters. Trips to the library. Looking stuff up in the Yellow Pages. A different world, right?

When New York City’s Carnegie Hall opened its doors to the public 125 years ago today, it was known simply as the Music Hall. The historic opening night, which kicked off a five-day music festival, featured guest of honor Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducting his Marche Solennelle.