I have a silver National RN-Z600, wouldn't recommend getting one though. Incredibly hard to get to the belt, plus the circuit board is basically a one giant ribbon cable, and we all know how crumbly 40 year old ribbon cables are. Additionally, Panasonic/National was horrible at making capacitors and they leak over the weird circuit board, which has such thin traces of copper any corrosion eats them away easily. I've condemned my Z600, there are no schematics available anywhere and my unit has 2 variable resistors on the board that have desintegrated when I touched them.
IBM, what can you say? They ruled the computer world for a long time and for a brief period were chasing mini-cassettes, yep mini-cassettes, not micro-cassettes. I believe these are rim-drive so the sonics are meant for dictation, the hubs are about 1/2 the diameter of microcassette but overall they look pretty close. I picked this one up a few years ago just to remember the good old days, when the IBM PC was everywhere and IBM Mainframes were the best chess players around. I don't think IBM has any consumer footprint these days, laptops were the last thing I remember but they sold that off years ago. I'll post the model number when I get a chance, these are neat little gadgets, the design is modern and if it were smaller might actually fit in nicely today. These were made in Japan and there's very little information or advertising that I can find. That's the microphone next to the record light, the mic has a screen over it. I don't have any minicassettes so I can't try it out.
Wow, so they had actually made a prototype to display? That's really cool, I wonder if it still exists somewhere in the world. I'd kill for a stereo microcassette player/recorder with auto reverse, I don't think there have been any models with that feature.
There's very few photos of the promised microcassette car stereos. I'm sure the US was the largest market, it seemed everyone had an aftermarket stereo system but they had to fight the same stigma the full-size component marketers ran into. We just wanted our stuff bigger.
Good morning everyone I know it has already been published ... but not in these conditions ... as soon as it arrived it oozed with oil ... whoever had it before me did not do a good job indeed it seems that he had fun ruining it .... I have searched the net for a service manual but I have not found ...
I'd say a kid was messing around with it, I can kind of forgive the pinched wires but the broken wires is weird. I'd attach everything back and see if it works, sometimes owners didn't have tapes to use, maybe it was a science project for a kid. The belt looks too large. I've never seen a service manual for the M-1000, maybe one of the members has a paper copy?
Fellow members, I think I have uncovered something nobody on the internet was previously aware of. There were not 6 microcassette albums. There were at least 17, and there is this previously unknown device that was indeed sold by ELEC, as well as those albums.
What's even more interesting, according to Japanese Wikipedia, ELEC Records was a record label that existed since 1969 *but* they went bankrupt in 1976. And that's a completely correct and true statement, the company did not exist again until 2004. https://www.discogs.com/label/84821-Elec-Records That brings a question: If that company went bankrupt in 1976 and did not exist until 2004, who the hell released this device and those albums? This couldn't have been ELEC, but the logos of both companies are identical. Contact info as well - this is the same company. The booklet clearly mentions metal tape formulation, which did not exist until 1979. All of this makes completely no sense.
All this is making me wonder if I should stop selling my micro stuff and have some fun Do you know about the Japanese year system being based on the year of the current emperor's reign? So "Showa" 5-8-59 would be 5th August 1984. Still doesn't fit entirely, the deck has the look of a garage factory and 1,500 Yen was cheap for a pre-recorded cassette even in '84.
I wonder if there were two separate companies "ELEC Records" doing the licensing side of things and "ELEC Technologies" doing the hardware, just a thought.
It's most likely that the ELEC name was bought out by someone and for a brief period of time they operated under the name ELEC Records and Industries. But the thing is, there is no mention anywhere on Japanese internet of that ever happening. Completely undocumented.
It might surprise many that although we think of Japan as being very technologically advanced, in many ways they are but even today their government bureaucracy is still in the Shogun era, so I can believe what you've experienced.
Great find! The deck has kind of a kit feel to it. We've got a lot of companies that go bankrupt here but keep chugging along. General Motors might be the most famous, in 2008 they basically told all of the stock-holders to get lost and they kept the company going without them. JCPenny and Sears were both huge nation-wide department stores that declared bankruptcy years ago but I think they are both operating but at very limited capacity.
I heard some evil tongues saying that GM should have been rebranded to "Governmental Motors". This name would much better reflect the truth.
One of our dear government leaders said they had way too many models so they trimmed off about 60% of them, she used BMW and Mercedes as examples of companies with only five or six models. I'm not sure what planet she lived on but she also fully embraced the CFL bulbs, she probably still has them in her office.
