The Father of the Cart Machine

This one is strictly for my radio geek friends. Saw this item in Tom Taylor's column this morning, and thought it was certainly worth mentioning. The photo is a "cart machine," something that was in every radio station in America when I started in the early 80s...

Bill Moulic, dubbed “the father of the cart machine”, by his friend Bill Rogers, died last Friday at 94. Rogers says “Bill was building background music players using endless loop ‘carts’ when the GM at WJBC, Bloomington Illinois came up with the idea of using them to play spots and jingles. Moulic later changed the name of his company to SMC and made the familiar Carousel multi-cart player and the familiar mint-green automation units for stations like KOST in Los Angeles.” If you grew up in a hard-drive world, you may want to stretch your imagination on this observation from Bill Rogers – “With the advent of the computer, the cart machine only lasted half of Bill’s life. But for those of us who grew up playing acetates [replaced by the convenience of a cart] he was a god.”