Why taping Radio 1’s Essential Mix back in the mid-90s was a whole lot easier than trying to stream it online…
Having started broadcasting in October 1993, BBC’s Essential Mix has been the benchmark-setter for dance music radio for close to a quarter of a century, with its helmsman Pete Tong showing no signs of stopping just yet…
During the 90s and early 2000s, it was de rigeur to get the C90 ready and set the timer on the hi-fi to tape each week’s mix (nine times out of ten, you would be on a night out when it was broadcast), and Mixmag used to print handy tape inserts in each month’s issue to ensure your collection was labelled appropriately.
But for those more technologically minded, the Internet (then very much in its formative years) offered the opportunity to access the previous week’s mix, albeit at a shockingly low bitrate, given the capacity of dial up modems back then.
But even then, things weren’t all that simple, as this Mixmag article from a couple of years back indicates, which featured a snippet of Pete Tong back in 1995.
In the days before Google, accessing that week’s mix took a lot of patience, and a smattering of ‘forward slashes’…
That’s enough to give anyone a headache…
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