Classic Cars

AM-only car radios
with mechanical preset push-buttons
Push-button AM car radios

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There are 6 comments for this item.

Posted by GlenEllyn at 9:50 pm (PDT) on Sun April 18, 2021   
@Bob Matthews - I loved how easy it was to program those radio buttons.  They were so simple and intuitive.  Nowadays, I get a little frustrated at all the technology...

There's so much I miss about simpler days when we didn't have to wade through so many options.
Posted by LoyalTubist at 5:11 pm (PDT) on Thu July 21, 2016   
Where I grew up, FM radio was for snobs and fundamentalist zealots. The local junior college had classical music and boring monologs about life in medieval times. AM radio, on the other hand, had everything: Top 40 music, nostalgic music from World War II, country and western, all news, all conversation, and a few of the snobby, Christian, and classical stations that were rebroadcast on AM. The neat thing about AM radio then was that, except for five minutes of news on the hour on network affiliates, every station was different. And at night AM radio could go hundreds of miles. Where I was in the Southwest, I could get stations in Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Denver, Reno, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, as well as the border blasters from Tijuana, Juarez, and Ciudad Acuna, which all broadcast in good old American English. Today, all AM radio seems to be the same anywhere in America. Whatever happened to individuality?
Posted by paktype at 12:15 pm (PST) on Thu February 18, 2016   
I had an AM-only radio on my 1980 Oldsmobile when I bought it used as a school car in 1987. I immediately took it out and installed a Pioneer stereo that I had purchased at Crazy Eddie's in Brooklyn.
Posted by Bob Matthews at 4:14 pm (PDT) on Sat April 27, 2013   
"radio buttons".

How many kids today even know what that is?
Another anachronism: "T.V. set."
Posted by Pete O at 5:12 pm (PDT) on Tue July 28, 2009   
I remember to set the stations, you had to pull the buttons out then push them back in again.
Posted by Duff at 7:03 pm (PDT) on Sun May 24, 2009   
The push-buttons on these radios used a clever mechanical system to remember the current position of the tuning condenser and return to it when you pushed the button. Only one button could be pushed at a time, and this design lives on today in certain "form" elements on the Web and in graphical operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. When the user is asked to select one of several choices, the elements used are called "radio buttons".

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