When, towards the end of last year, we included 8-track cartridge in our list of 11 heroic tech failures, it seems we spoke too soon.
Perhaps riding the wave of the none-more-fashionable vinyl revival, 8-track cartridge is back - and in what looks quite a big way.
One source told us "the thing is: there's so much uncertainty around at the moment, people take a lot of comfort from the familiar. Even if they're not old enough to remember it, or if they are they'll have forgotten how shoddy it was in the first place. 8-track is the perfect format to take advantage of this feeling: it's clunky, inconvenient and entirely backward-looking. And when the new breed of 8-track players hits the market, they'll ruin the cartridges after one or two plays. So the user will have replace them. Over and over and over again."
