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Postby Jack Bennest » Tue May 16, 2006 6:18 am

Long before he set down to work on the famous Learjet, William Powell Lear had made a name for himself developing instruments and communications equipment for airplanes. In 1946, Lear Inc. became a licensee of a Chicago-based R&D laboratory called the Armour Research Foundation allowing Bill Lear access to Armour's successful wire recording technology, bits of which made their way into his own design for an endless loop wire recorder . While this machine hardly even made a ripple in the marketplace, it was the genesis of Lear's interest in the endless loop. But Lear's early experiments did not result in a line of investigation that led directly to the 8-track.

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Endless variations on the endless loop cart appeared during the 1960s and1970s.The best known, of course, was the Playtape, a tiny cart introduced in the fall of 1966 which later re-emerged in slightly modified form as the basis of a Dictaphone Corp. telephone answering machine in the 1970s. Answering machines, in fact, were a major source of new endless loop variations from the 1960s on. The success of the Fidelipac in radio spawned a host of imitators, including both the well known Audiopak, the Aristocart made in Canada, the Marathon made by some Massachusetts firm, and the Tapex.
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