I was muttering curses at my computer the other evening and it occurred to me that life was slower, but rather less annoying, when the word “megabyte” meant as much to me as the Cyrillic alphabet.

The computer, obstinate as only a machine (or a teenager) can be, repulsed my efforts to dislodge whatever was clogging its clever little circuits.

Among the myriad ways in which digital devices differ from analog, perhaps the most frustrating, it seems to me, is that the latter generally fail to respond to the sort of forcible repair techniques that hamfisted people (me, for instance) resort to when more sophisticated tactics fail.

A carburetor, for instance, is a crude way to introduce the fuel-air mixture to an internal combustion engine, at least compared with modern fuel injection systems, which have as much computing power as an Apollo capsule.

But sometimes you can wrestle a carburetor into submission simply by giving it a hearty whack with a hammer in just the right spot.

Start thumping around with a blunt instrument under the hood of a new car, by contrast, and you’re apt to end up with a hefty repair bill.

And perhaps a hand wound from a shard of plastic, which is the predominant material visible under most hoods these days, the greasy bits being mostly concealed.

The problem that prompted my softly uttered profanity involved not cars but music.

These two things go together nicely, of course.

Who among us hasn’t had a long and otherwise boring road trip suddenly enlivened by a particular song blaring from the speakers?

(We all have our favorites, of course. Mine are too numerous to list here, but a couple that never fail to rouse me from a freeway-induced stupor are U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name” and Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love A Rainy Night.”)

Indeed, the portability of music is to me one of its greater attributes.

For more than half a century, since the advent of the affordable, handheld transistor radio, we’ve been able to bring music pretty much wherever we go.

But not whatever music you wanted to hear.

With a radio you’re limited, of course, to the stations the antenna can pull in, and further, by whatever songs those stations choose to play.

Turntables put you in control, but they’re hard to balance when you’re walking — and downright dangerous to try to bring along on a bicycle, what with the extension cords — so it was hardly feasible to bring along your personal collection once you left home.

Until the cassette tape arrived in the 1970s.

This milestone, and the subsequent debut of Sony’s Walkman and its many imitators, marked a true milestone.

Now people could not only buy their favorite albums in a truly portable format, they could use blank tapes to create their own unique concerts.

Thus was born the mix tape, the analog version of what we know today as a playlist.

This flexibility made it possible to compile eclectic collections of songs that not even the wizards at K-Tel would deign to put together.

Have an affinity for Iron Maiden as well as The Carpenters?

No problem.

You can follow Bruce Dickinson’s feral yowling on “The Number of the Beast” with Karen Carpenter’s syrupy smooth tones on “Superstar.”

Or inject a dollop of Air Supply between helpings of The Ramones and The Clash.

The possibilities, as the saying goes, are truly endless.

But the digital wave has inundated music just as surely as it did internal combustion, and today the cassette tape is as dated as shag carpet.

We measure music in megabytes rather than in minutes.

For sheer convenience, this progress is miraculous.

Most cassette tapes had the capacity to store 60 or 90 minutes of music. A digital music player the size of a pack of matches can hold several thousand songs.

But even those players have been supplanted, to a considerable degree, by the immense capabilities of the smartphone.

Which brings me back around to my tussle with a computer.

I was trying, and in the main failing, to transfer the thousand songs or so stored on a player to my phone.

This task, as with so much else these days, is accomplished by manipulating a mouse and dragging various folders across a virtual desktop.

In theory.

What struck me, as I clicked and dragged and cussed — mostly the latter — is how impersonal the procedure is, how utterly lacking in tactile sensation compared with the way I used to make tapes for remote listening.

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, the apex of the cassette tape’s reign before it gave way to the compact disc in the ’90s, I recorded music onto those cunning little plastic cases from multiple sources — my dad’s LPs, other cassettes, even the radio.

(For the latter, this mostly involved waiting for the awesome block party weekends on KGON, the great classic rock station at 92.3 on the FM dial in Portland. There was no easier, or cheaper, way to amass a collection of Zeppelin and Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd classics than to wait for rock blocks with three straight songs from the same artist.)

The recording process was laborious but I don’t recall, even though impatience tends to be a hallmark of the teenage personality, that it ever felt like toil.

I would get annoyed occasionally when I missed a cue, as it were. I mainly used my boombox — with detachable speakers, naturally — to record from radio to cassette, and you had to simultaneously deploy both the “play” and “record” keys. These were not, in the sort of egregious ergonomic gaffe that makes you wonder what the designers were thinking about, next to each other.

This process was the antithesis of the immediate gratification we’re accustomed to today.

There was no way to speed the recording — “Stairway to Heaven,” which runs a tad over eight minutes, had to play in its full and complete glory to transfer onto the cassette.

I got frustrated with my computer because, whenever I tried to move more than 100 songs in a single swipe from player to phone, the microprocessors balked.

But the computer would transfer 75 songs or so without a glitch, and do the job — I kept track — in less than 90 seconds.

For comparison, that’s enough music to fill about three 90-minute cassette tapes. In the distant, pre-digital days, moving that many songs would have been the work of about five hours.

And that’s presuming I didn’t have to ride my bike to Radio Shack to buy another tape.

I preferred TDK even though Memorex had cooler commercials. And also that iconic poster of the guy sitting in a chair in front of stereo speakers, his hair and necktie blown back as though the volume — thanks to the crystalline quality of music on a Memorex tape — was so powerful that it created its own artificial gusts.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.