Here is another blast from the past. This is eighteen minutes and forty-four seconds of radio dramamercial for TM Productions of Dallas (Texas.) If you were involved with radio programming during that time you are likely to recognize the characters and situations from the scenes scripted here. (If not the production might be quite boring.) Tomorrow Radio is where the radio format “punk country” was first described.

Things were different in 1978. The Harris radio program automation system was powered by an Intel 8080 processor. Cetec Schafer had introduced their terminal operated system a little later and were using the Zilog Z80. MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) was not to be established for another ten years. Program sources were largely reel to reel tape decks loaded with music tracks on 10 – 1/2 inch reels. Start and stop of tracks was marked by “sub-audible” tones. Commercials were aired from tape cartridges that had a separate cue track for start, stop, and EOM (end of message ) tones. The microprocessor controlled switches that started and stopped these mechanical players and placed the audio on the program output bus.

TM Productions/Century 21 was one of the major players  in programming for this sort of second generation radio program automation. They shipped the large reels of recorded music to stations around the country – replacing them as material was added to or removed from the playlist. It all seems so incredibly inefficient now.

Tomorrow_Radio_TM_Productions_1978_18-44

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