Talk:1745: Record Scratch
Misleading alt text
Note: this is a ridiculous pedantic rant. Tl;dr: the xkcd alt text for today is misleading, and I read a lot about the history of music storage to back up that claim.
So, this alt text is actually pretty misleading, because he's misusing the "whoa! Event A was closer to Event B than to today" meme by implying that 78s were vinyl, when in fact they were largely shellac -- and also I would argue that he's just got the facts wrong about when the 78-rpmera ended. The 78-rpm era arguably began as early as 1898, and arguably ended as late as the 1950s. In became the standard in 1925. So, ok, we could say, "Yeah, 78-rpm era should be considered to mean some time before 1940. That's reasonable, because the 1940s is really when the age of the 33 1/3 begins. So, OK, Randall, the 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today. But here's the thing. You implied that the 78-rpm era was a vinyl thing. That's not really true. Vinyl is what ushered in the 33 1/3 days. So while it's maybe a cool piece of trivia to say "we first started using 33 1/3 rpm vinyl records in earnest only slightly closer to today than to the Civil War," it's not really a "wow, compare these well known events! Look how old this record scratch reference is!" Because tapes didn't start to seriously compete with vinyl until the late 1970s, and didn't overtake it until about 1985. So it would be fair to say, "the vinyl era ended closer to the start of the Vietnam War than to today," assuming we treat the Vietnam War as beginning in 1954 or later. 108.162.219.66 05:04, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
