Re:Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were ...
by zerocrates on Thursday May 20, 2021 @06:00PM
(#27227970)
The detachable faceplate for anti-theft reasons was (is?) a very common feature for aftermarket radios/head-units/whatever in the US. Built-in ones have just increasingly moved to not being a discrete, accessible, interchangeable component, another way around.
I still remember when my dad had bought an aftermarket tape-deck-only radio, a Sony I believe, well into the era of the ubiquitous CD player (he just wanted a working tape deck). Someone broke into the car at some point and stole it and I can only assume they were very disappointed after looking closer.
Re:Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were ...
by toyg on Friday May 21, 2021 @02:55AM
(#27231232)
Italy, mid-80s, early summer. My primary school organises a day trip to a city nearby. During the trip, a classmate from a “difficult” background ends up getting slightly hurt, banging his head against a wall. When we eventually get back to our hometown, his parents don’t come to pick him up, and somehow that means everyone else has to wait on the bus. Eventually, his dad shows up, drunk and high (on heroin, we’ll found out later) with a car radio under his arm - and everybody knows he doesn’t have a car, he’s literally just stolen it…
Btw. in the 90' I used to detach each-single-time that I parked the car the front panel of the car's radio to then carry it with me (leaving the storage box in front of the passenger seat open, to show that I didn't just put it in there) to discourage people from breaking into the car to extract the radio (front panel & main car radio were individually coded to only work together, that's at least what I believed).
What a silly thing to do, hehe, but to be fair the price of a fancy radio at that time was similar to today's phones ("Pioneer" and "Sony" were high on my list - some models had quite complex display animations/colors/equalizers/etc & sound modes).