It's very convenient now, true, but there's so much nostalgia in there for me, and there are a few things we've lost as a result. You can't crank up your cell phone and blast the bass for a room full of people like you could with that boombox (unless you wire it into something else), and all that wonderful ca-chunking of the buttons is gone in favor of lightly tapping glass. Where's the power in that? You can't throw a baseball across a room to turn off your snoring loop when your parents come home after an adventure-filled day of pretending to be sick in bed.

We still have CDs, sorta, but there was something pleasant and visceral in the rattly old tape cassettes in their rattly plastic cases. Some friends had walls of tapes, and when you went over, it was like you were in a room literally made of music, because the media itself lined the walls. Multiple friends could look through it, pointing at things, pulling out tapes and reading the song lists and lyrics in the liners. It was very hands-on and interactive.

I still have a bag full of cassettes, and there's something very real about it. These were the tapes I was listening to in 1983. They have stains, fingerprints, and DNA on them from me and others from 30 years ago. They're historical items, in a way. Media was so physical back then (in '81 we even "got physical"), that we still run into remnants of it in drawers, attics, boxes, storage spaces, and in cubbies around our houses. People of today will find their old phones, but it's definitely different than finding discrete items bound to singular memory sets, like that particular old Weird Al tape from the early 80s.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying all of that extra oil-derived plastic is a good thing. It's actually much more efficient and green going digital, but I still greet it with a sigh, a longing for the 'real' things that are gone. Every new thing you get on your phone is another set of backlit graphics giving you another iteration of touch-enabled abilities. I like them, too - it's all pretty incredible, especially held up against older tech - but there's no real new sensation with each thing beyond the visuals.

These products had smells - like new car smell - and weight, and sharpness, and smoothness, and clicking and clacking sounds. They were their own little symphonies of expression, even before the media came out (arguably a bad thing, but also the stuff of nostalgic onslaughts). I can't recall how much time I spent taking apart walkman radios and cassette recorders, grokking the gear trains slowly over time, pondering read-write heads and speeds, watching the greased-up partial-gear responsible for slowly lowering the tape deck door so you could put a tape in. They had "throwability" - you could throw a tape to your friend to look at while you were looking at others and putting one in the tape deck. They were very clever, visual, beautiful machines. They were pretty complicated, though, because of that physical side. It keeps me from really being able to call it "a simpler time."