It's sort of a curiosity today, but not worth much or collectible unless you happen to have some 4 track tapes sitting around. They were a pretty short fad that pretty much went away about five minutes after 8 tracks were introduced.
For those who have never seen one, unlike an 8 track where you stuck it into a slot on the front, a 4 track cartridge sort of sat on top of the player.
Muntz was the main brand, this is a picture of their player:
Quote:
Originally Posted by gto19
I found this ad on eBay . I’m thinking that device was mounted in my car in front of the 4 speed . ...I could be wrong though
One more thing I see . This product is from Massachusetts.. that’s where my car came from and was built in Framingham
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Besides the Gidget, the other things in the ad you posted actually would slide into the slot on an 8 track player so you could listen to the radio, if you didn't already have one in your car - back then most cars didn't have FM, and quite a few didn't have radios at all.
My Automatic Radio 8 track player looked like this. It mounted under the dash on a heavy steel bracket, and was removable; you'd take it out of the car so people couldn't steal it. I imagine they had other models that did mount on the trans tunnel.
My first job out of engineering school was at a company that built the recording and playback tape heads that went inside 8 track players. By the time I got there, 8 tracks were basically dead and they had moved on to building the heads that went in computer hard drives and floppy disk drives, but we still had a ton of old 8 track stuff sitting around. My job was designing and building the automated manufacturing and testing machines used to make the heads, and we would store the machine programs on 8 track tapes - when you walked through the production area, every machine or console had a 8 track player sticking out of the front panel. I always thought it was pretty funny.
