Almost all radio is automated, has been for the last twenty years or so. The oldest systems used some form of clock and maybe a micro to play a spot set that would be loaded by the programming or traffic department and usually had multiple cart decks or one or two large 48 slot cart machines and often one or two reel to reel transports.
The computer or other control hardware did not store the audio files but instead relied on external analog audio systems like cart decks or open reel tapes. Also it’s not uncommon for one or two network sources like satellite feeds to be incorporated into the mix along with a feed from the local on air operation if the station had one. At first such systems were common for use where you would have several properties co located in the same building and low value operations like legacy AM broadcast operations that would be relegated to just running a satellite feed and using automation to run spot sets during avails. Often the satellite networks provide contact closures that can trigger your automation and you know what the length of the spot set so you would build up preset blocks of spots to play during avails. Poor stations would just use reel to reel decks with there group of spots all edited together and play that cluster when the avails came around and you would put a 30 cycle stop tone at the end of the set and use an external tone decoder to stop the deck after the spot set. The thing that makes this all possible is that in the seventies the FCC allowed broadcasters to run in unattended or automatic mode so you no longer needed to have someone there 24/7 and that’s the start of automation in radio. The large markets wanted something to start automating weekends and overnight right away and several systems were brought into production including the one listed on EBay right now. It was not until the mid eighties that hardware got available for the mid to small market size stations and you saw the wide spread use of such systems but by that time everything was DOS base on PC chassis. Scott Studios and ENCO Dad is a couple of the systems that were real popular. Most of the PC base systems did the jump of allowing you to record you audio files or elements directly on the systems and with the availability of larger and larger drives it started to become practical to not only store production (spots) but also music and programming. As systems evolved things like use of Windows NT, integration with traffic systems and reliance of a central server for storage became fairly common. Another item is that all modern systems will include at least two to three sound cards allowing you to play one element and cross fades that into a second element and that to a third for what appears seamless smooth operation. The state of the art systems today are almost all windows base and work so well that the majority of broadcasters run full automated all the time with live air staff doing there stop sets before broadcast and saving them just like any other element as opposed to doing live on air stuff. The other big change has been a migration from network stuff that use to be feed by satellite now being distributed by corporate WAN and many small to medium market stations being totally automated. The FCC still requires you to be able to do live broadcasting but with the exception of the top markets not much of that goes on these days except for a small amount of hold outs. Lots of stations still do there mornings and afternoon stuff live but will still use there automation in manual assist being that no radio stations have things like cart machines or things like that, we still try to keep things like a couple CD players in the studios but I can remember a while back when I had one stations system die and although we had a complete studio with two CD players and a local microphone none of the air staff knew what to do beyond just play CD tracks. So long story short that system is more important as a symbol of what was to come in radio then just as a PDP-8, not to discount the 8M but that’s one of the first examples of what’s become radio today. Too bad they don’t have the multiple cart system that was once part of it and that it’s on the wrong coast for me.
