This is an IHeart podcast.

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh.

There's Chuck.

It's just us.

Neither Jerry nor Dave is here.

So it's short stuff, the bereft edition.

That's right.

I want to thank NPR, Capture.com, a website called PS Audio, a website called EverPresent,

and more for the research that went into the eight-track cassette player or eight-track cartridge itself.

April 11th is National Eight-track Tape Day, so we've missed that.

But if you don't know what an eight-track is, it preceded the cassette tape.

And we're going to get into what this thing was.

Yeah, you usually wedge it in between LP record albums and cassettes.

Because that's basically where it really popped up in the 70s is kind of where you really

associate 8 tracks, but it was way older than that. Apparently, as far back as the 40s,

it was essentially coming into development, right?

Yeah, which surprised me. You might be wondering, like, why did we need 8 tracks at all? And it's because at the time, dear listener, especially younger dear listener, if you wanted to play the music that you wanted to hear, you could play it on your record player in your house. You didn't have a record player in your car. You had a radio that played whatever the heck they wanted. So all of a sudden, eight tracks came along as a mobile version, a way to take the music

that you wanted on the road either via your car or via these awesome portable players of which

we had one of.

It was a Lloyd's.

We had a deck in our conversion van, of course,

...