I remember our stereo ar home. It was a long wooden a of furniture about 6 feet long and 3 feet deep with a turntable, radio, and 8-track. I also remember my sister's boyfriend brought over some monstrous thing that was an 8-track recorder. I bought the converter but it just didn't work for me. So I went to cassettes just in time for the Walkman. Seeing those K-Tel titles brought back some memories of the great collections you could buy along with their commercials. Watching those endlessly helped me remember songs and their singers landing me my first record store job. The owner gave a test along with the application and I aced it having never worked in a music store or at a radio station!
Had them in my 1973 Impala and 1977 GMC truck. Even had a 8 track recorder to record my own tapes from records. The biggest issues that eventually arose were that the pinch rollers in the tape would soften and fall apart, or the silver tape that joined the ends of the recording tape dried out and came off. Good tech for it's time, but for convenience you really can't beat digital audio files now.
When I bought my last car, 2012, I noticed a USB hole on the stereo. No hype, no big announcement about this by the car manufacturer, but I found I was able to take a memory stick full of digital music and play it, even randomly. I suppose in forty years there will be someone saying "Remember listening to music on that 64 byte memory stick that have every song you ever loved on it? Boy, wasn't that clunky?"
You could get 8 tracks up till around 1988 usually through Columbia house and television offers and oddly enough there are some artists today putting out brand new albums on 8 track good video BTW
Quad8: The only discrete 4-channel commercially released 8-track version of some recordings. Example: true Quadraphonic recording of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."
