This brought back memories

The other day I walked past the building in the picture above and I felt a little sad. The reason I felt sad is because I have great memories about this building. When I first came to the US from the Netherlands I was amazed at how big this store was and how they had so many things on display. In Amsterdam where I arrived from, you didn’t really have a store like this. The story was named J&R, there was a J&R Music World store and a J&R Computer World store. J&R stands for the founders Joe and Rachelle Friedman.

There were several items I bought at this store

The first camera I ever owned I bought in this place, it was a Minolta but I don’t remember the model. I later sold the camera because a co-worker needed the camera while he went on vacation to Equador. So I only had it for 2 or 3 months.

A couple of years later I replaced that camera with a Canon 50E  I think this Canon camera might have also been known as an Elan. The E in the model name stands for eye-control, this was an enhanced version of the 3-zone eye-controlled autofocus system that was first seen on the EOS 5 camera. This was very high tech back then.

Another item that I have fond memories about was the first MP3 player that I purchased; It was the first MP3 player that was available to buy. It was the Rio PMP-300 portable MP3 player. I believe it was around $200 and you could hold about 10 songs or so since it only came with 32 MB of memory. You could store more songs if you inserted a smartmedia card. But even then you could not store hundreds of songs. I remember encoding the songs in WMA 64k format so I could store even more songs…… lol  1^st world problems.




I bought many other things at J&R like camera lenses, filters for the camera, a tripod, RAM to upgrade the PC, I even purchased Plus! lol  Plus had themes and utilities for Windows

The nice thing about J&R was that they had prices unlike 42 street photo or whatever those stores were called where you had to negotiate the price. Also unlike at the Nobody Beats The Wiz store, they did not try to sell you insurance with every item you bought.

These days I guess you would have to go to B&H to get a  similar experience, just be aware that they are not open on Saturdays.