Reflections from the Cichon Archives during Pandemic organizing

       By Steve Cichon
       steve@buffalostories.com
       @stevebuffalo

Among the 5 or 6 big projects I’m working on to keep myself from going (any more) crazy during this lockdown, is organizing and straightening up the Cichon Archives, which fills the third floor of the Cichon Estate.

I’ll share some of the interesting things I find as I find them.

The Iconic Memorex Cassette

Though I have far fewer now, through the years, I’ve had hundreds of these 90-minute Memorex cassette tapes.

For much of the early 90s, a ten-pack was $9.99 at Media Play, and I invested most of those Media Play Gift Certificates I’d get for birthdays and Christmas into these tapes.

Many of those cassettes I bought went right back out the door– creating mix tapes and recording “radio shows” for my friends in my bedroom radio station.

Hundreds of others went to recording the actual radio shows, hundreds of hours of which I’ve digitized through the years, first to CD and then to mp3.

The digitized wing of the Cichon Audio Archive is more than 600GB with more than 120,000 audio files. There are still hundreds of hours of cassettes, reels, transcription discs, DATs, and mini discs left to be digitized– it always comes in spurts.

Sorting through a pile of these cassettes today, it was like I saw them for the first time– even though thousands of them have slipped through my hands since this design was introduced in 1987.

As a child of the 80s, I love 80s design—but mostly the retro-look meant to inspire the 50s or 60s.

This design, however, is purely pop 80s.

If Max Headroom or that MTV astronaut was going to use a cassette tape, it would be the 90-minute Memorex cassette, with angular shapes in bright blues, pinks, and yellows.

Published by

Steve Cichon

Steve Cichon writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. His stories of Buffalo's past have appeared more than 1600 times in The Buffalo News. He's a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves. Since the earliest days of the internet, Cichon's been creating content celebrating the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives-- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.