Commpak - The queue-bothering proto-Powerpoint

Matt, back in the day, a pot that wouldn't stop scratching even when cleaned with switch cleaner, could be plied with a little CTC (carbon tetrachloride; dry-cleaning fluid). This doesn't just clean the carbon track but dissolves the carbon and can (if you're lucky) cover over gaps, curing the worse crackling. Obviously this only works with carbon tracks, but back then that's mostly what they used for volume & tone controls..

Loved the energy you had in this one, you looked so upbeat!

Matt, I salute you for your herculean efforts. I thought it sounded great!

FINALLY got round to watching this (I've had guests round!) I suppose it's vaguely similar to the Sound-On-Slide thingy, though maybe more durable. Incidentally, a book of eight 1st Class stamps cost me nearly £8 yesterday. And they're going up next week. I presume they'll have Charlie boy on them!

Loved this one, Mat.

Great video, Mat. Was that Troy McClure educating us about pipe handling? 😊

You're a good man to go to the effort of applying noise reduction to eliminate audio hiss, and then re-up. I wonder if the hiss-hearers can now recognize any improvement of the audio after your meticulous efforts (I hope so).

I did wonder about the projection side of this - how does the film advance and what keeps it correctly aligned? Is there a resynchronisation at the end of each loop in case it goes of synch?

I'd love to know if the Iron Maiden slide was real or a joke you dropped in?!?!

If the first projector was sent via eBay's Global Shipping Program, it may have fallen prey to the GSP's ability to arbitrarily decide that any item is uneconomical to ship internationally and declare it to be "undeliverable", in which case the seller keeps the money and the buyer gets refunded, but neither receives the item -- instead, Pitney Bowes (who runs the GSP for eBay) liquidates it for profit: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2018/07/31/public-service-announcement-do-not-use-the-ebay-global-shipping-program/

Great video! I am also a patron of Periscope Films, a group that restores and archives films of all kinds. I don't know if they archive this medium, but what you've played back looks exactly like kind of media they'd be interested in. If they're unaware maybe there's an opportunity to expand on what they archive. They'd probably be interested in archiving the cartridges you possess.

This video reminded me that I've been wanting to add a filmstrip viewer to my collection for a while now. The industrial design of these things is impressive. I just haven't come across a model that feels "right."

Another great video about a format I'd never heard about! The commercial need for a certain thing (such as mobile video) is often so strong that the market will support a super-shaky solution long before technology can produce something sensible. I'm always intrigued by that.

Your mention of this portable device possibly being used by traveling salesmen, plus the appearance of a cartridge titled "The ABCs of Pipe Handling," made me wonder if La Belle might have had a subsidiary company, under a different name. One which produced cartridges with content of an entirely different nature. After all, the traveling salesmen who lugged those cartridge players around had to endure a lot of long, lonely nights in offramp Ramada Inns...

Great video. I had no idea those things even existed. Though I did get flashbacks to the early '90s, where larger post offices would have at least one Commodore monitor hooked up to a hidden Amiga with a silent slide show promoting Australia Post products and services. IIRC there were even digitised stills from their TV ads on there. I could be misremembering, but those survived into the early 2000s. I haven't been to a post office in a while, but I suspect they now use a typical >= 50" LCD TV with an MP4 on a flash drive or similar.

Awesome video about a deeply unpleasant piece of technology :D

Lovely contraption. I think i saw a video of Databits or Vwestlife covering the same or similar device. It even could advance the 16 mm. film for a brief period that fast that it almost looked like a movie. Whatthe yethink of that lol.

The "reddening" of the film image reminds me of many advertisement posters outside places such as gas/petrol stations (on or alongside the pumps, out in the open sunlight), where after a while all colors except the red tend to fade out.

My favourite type of videos - old, uncommon formats! For some reason the screen grab of travellers' cheques amused me, the words 'The safe way' below, and 2 thoroughly dodgy looking guys holding the cheque like it was meant to be one of those giant ones for a press shoot.

Watching this reminded me of Fallout 3 and how that slides up the opening titles pages with the music playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PJFCTwz24w

Whatever hiss there was, I haven't noticed at all. Thanks!

i’m a film archivist. the company i work at is about to start a job of digitizing these for a client. i’ve scanned one already as a test. i had to break open the cartridge and scan the film on a film scanner and digitize the audio with a reel-to-reel. brought them into premiere and made a slideshow. the test cartridge i scanned was for a bank about spotting fraudulent checks. the actual job, i believe, is a set of mcdonald’s training slideshows.

Nice one Mat. The hiss mentioned in the update is from 25:55 to 28:45 and coincides with the slide show with no sound track. Is it possible, that in your edit, you overlaid that video with a no sound recording, just the hiss recorded at that time? Removing that audio track from the overlay might well clear it up completely.

The slowing of the audio once the unit got hot reminded me of Foster Brooks, with his trademark alcoholic slurs (although he played the part well, being sober all the while).

I really liked that the flywheel was so weighty that it had been balanced. I wouldn't have expected so much imbalance though, it's a symmetrical object made from one material but needed to be drilled three times to balance it.

Cheese flavoured hula-hoops! I was obsessed with those when I was a lad back in the 80s. Loved them! Don’t remember this thing though to be honest.

Great video. When I first saw the cartridge I thought it was going to be Movie film. At school in the mid 1970s we had a unit for playing what I think were Technicolor Super 8 Magi-cartridges. We would actually make short animated films ourselves in "film club" and then load the developed film into a cartridge to view them.

Thanks Mat, really enjoyed this one, as I suspect a lot of us do when obscure formats are covered. It really does demonstrate that sometimes even obsolete technology of the day can still have utility for the right purpose. I know this sounds silly - but what you are doing is archeological recovery of materials, which might seem bland to most people, but still forms part of our analogue to digital story. I know I always enjoy discovering old news films and promotional films via the BFI.org website, so preservation of the materials you demonstrated is important. Is there a national repository for this material? If not, there should be, just as your videos Mat, which will be ever more relevant in 50 years time when an iPhone will be considered legacy tech!!

10x 1st class for £1.70 now you can't get 2x 1st class stamps for that amount these days.

The quality of the footage captured is pretty impressive for being a video of a screen with an image projected on it. Thank you for the effort you put in those details. They don't go unnoticed!

What are Hula Hoops (other than plastic toys)? What's their texture? I don't recall ever seeing that particular snack in my locale. It makes me think of Fruit Loops for some reason.

Mat, where did you get the photo for the queue in the Post Office? It looks like some sort of AI generated image.

Now I want some Hula Hoops... from the Post Office.

I'm so very happy you covered this format - I was intrigued by it ever since I put it into the Potpourri: https://www.patreon.com/posts/74327879. I had not seen one of these in person, that I can remember - but in '85 I was 7 years old. I can see the appeal of this in schools and retail shops. I begin to wonder, could you create your own slideshow and put it into the cartridge and record dialogue (not a serious suggestion, but a fun suggestion)? • I like the 'swish' sound when the slide advances. • I especially enjoyed the Iron Maiden album 😋 referenced as the ideal gift. • Your little projection screen 💜 did you buy it just for this or did it come with the projector? • faded washed-out images give me nostalgia for old family photo albums

I used to have a device on my key ring which sent the infra-red code to turn off most TV sets. It came in very useful on several occasions when stuck in a queue

Loved the NSYNC "blipvert". Terrific work on getting this very dated system to work again.

I use to collect 16mm feature films the pink/red tint quite common with certain film stock, the smell of vinegar is a good sign print is going. The guy who brought the projector and films was retired bbc engineer

This is the real Techmoan stuff--forgotten AV formats. And I've got the perfect Techmoan meal to accompany it: Cup Noodles Korean BBQ Stir Fry. I seem to remember using a similar device in the 1990's as a job training aid, but couldn't swear that it was this particular format. There were probably loads of different AV systems for training purposes from the 60s to the 90s.

Only part I didn't see was how the film advanced. You showed a closeup of the little metal thing at 13:35 and 13:40, but was that piece connected to the same motor that drove the flywheel? Great bit of tech overall Mat. Amazing find!

I was convinced this was going to be something I had never seen before and then when I heard the sweep and beep I had a flashback. When I was a kid there was SOMETHING we did, maybe a hearing test or a reading or vision test, or something. Maybe it was a thing about safety or something. A woman had a self contained unit and showed small groups of us kids pictures with a narration. The narration was simple and had many pauses. I don't know what it was about, but it happened in Grade 1 and 2 in school. This is the mid nineties. I knew what a slideshow was; I had seen them, and I had seen tapes and projected films and computers, but this was neither. It reminded me of a slideshow but darker. I wonder if she had the white rear projection unit you almost got, and I had a late run-in with this format.

This is a fantastic video! I'm utterly amazed that those Post Office ads were from the 80s - they have the feel and "style" of a 60s/70s public information film, or a Pearl & Dean ad for the local Indian restaurant.

Yep, that was worth waiting for. :-) Really interesting, Mat, well done. I do remember screens at the final turn point in the post office snake queue. What the technology was though evades me so this fills in that gap. Thanks.

Just when I think you've covered every old tape format, you find another. I love that Royal Mail ad has the kid with the Iron Maiden LP. Bet Mary Whitehouse wasn't impressed. Has that possum at 18:56 left some droppings, or is that a well placed piece of grit on the film?! I would love to hear about your early Hong Kong VHS bootlegging days :D

Happy Friday, That was great, I mean, that guy with the travelers cheques could not have looked more "English man on the continent". Add NSYNC and a stuffed meerkat, great stuff.

Great video, as always. Let me drop my little local knowledge on the LearJet 8 part of this: I grew up in Wichita, Kansas. As it happens my father was an attorney, and, in fact, was the person who convinced Bill Lear to bring his LearJet facility to the area. At the time Dad was on the City Commission, (I think he was also elected Mayor around that time), and he lobbied Bill, offering the usual tax incentives, securement of site, ect. As a result, Bill hired my father as his local attorney in Wichita. His specialty was contractual law. I don't know whether he worked on patent applications, but looking at that paperwork, it reminded me of some of the stuff he did for Bill. Bill pretty much invented the concept of the personal 'executive' jet, and wanted to have systems in it that would enhance the owner's experience while keeping it as simple and compact as possible. He leased the idea of a cartridge-based sound system, from Muntz stereo, but wanted to make it easier to operate in the cockpit of the jet. Of course, I was under 10 years old when he invented the LearJet 8, but I remember going over to his house for cookouts and looking at home prototype 8 track system. Dad had one installed in our car. For an eight-year-old, it was frickin' awesome.

Very good video. Quite interesting.

Fascinating video. I no doubt watched that format at my Post Office without realising what it was. I want some Hula Hoops now...

I vaguely remember there was some controversy about the Post Office showing adverts. Maybe it was just me hating adverts (as I do now), maybe it was a fellow queuee (made up word for someone else in a queue), but I think it might have been public disdain about being forced to watch noisy, repetitive stuff while queuing for almost a whole lunch hour to buy a stamp.

I've never really thought about it before, but you're absolutely right about post offices being oddly hush like a library!

Interesting video as always! Would love to hear the Kev story -- I've been curious how pirating worked pre-internet. I assumed it was always people selling stuff in person, I had never thought of mail order haha

Really interesting video, and appreciate the editing style to keep it lively while going into depth to explore how it all works. I'm off to eat some Hula Hoops while listening to N-SYNC now.

9:58 - Frank Bough there before he...ahem...woke up. Or perhaps after a busy night of "extracurricular activities".

Regarding the part at 26:25, that reminds me of how the employees must feel at GameStop stores here in the US. They have constant advertisements playing that loop after about 10 to 15 minutes.

Reminds me of what was played prior to the start of the feature at the movie theater in the 80s and 90s.

An absolute treat to watch this one Mat! Loved hearing the multiple steps you took from first learning about this format all the way through getting the final unit to play them on. Love the 70s design of that projector. Laugh out loud moment about losing one's fingers! And what was that animal they were modeling to show the ease of use? A ferret?

Very cool video and old tech, although I feel unworthy of the expense/effort you make on some of these recently... I used to work at a drug store in the US in the late 80's, right when they started trying to sell videotapes. They had the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie playing constantly on a little TV by the register, and to this day lines and scenes from that movie haunt my dreams.

I don't know why, but I have a strong compulsion for a bag of hula hoops.

Again an interesting format I'd never heard of 😃. I cannot remember such a machines, only the Kodak carousel projectors, also shown in one of the cartridges, synchronised to an audio source. Film projections always have such a "magic" quality in them, the imprecision... But very nicely reproduced on my iMac 5K screen!

I’m always torn. I want to watch it now, but what will I do on Sunday morning?

I once gave an old girlfriend a book of stamps as a present... I don't have that girlfriend anymore...

You’ve got to love these old “what do we do before PowerPoint existed” systems. You can be sure that the ones I remember from Manchester post office in the late 2000s (which was a DVD playing on a TV screen) won’t have been preserved at all. Good job. They were almost as annoying. But it does make you feel that everything is ephemeral these days.

That awesome moment a new Techmoan post appears 😁😎

Emmedale or a new Techmoan upload. Hmmmmmmm 🙈 No competition, Mat it has to be you👍