it's all good til the little orange stick falls off

As I tuned my radio to a new station, I was just thinking: What the hell exactly happens on these newer radios when you turn the dial. I don't want to sound like an old fart but in the old radios (70s and back), I knew what was going on. I turned the dial, it turned a rod that went through a coil of wire that was the actual tuner. I know this because I tore apart more than one old car radio. Nowadays, you tear into a radio and all you get are a bunch of little parts that don't look like they do nuthing. Not knocking new radios, they work fine, just hard to figure out. I guess they're better than the old radios, you know why I used to tear one apart from time to time? Because that little orange stick behind the clear plastic that tells you what station you're on would fall off. If you want to know how that works, it was on a tiny little cable that wrapped around the dial/rod. So when you tuned it, the cable would move the little orange plastic stick from one end of the dial to the other. You could tune one of your presets to say 88FM and another to 106FM then push the buttons to see how fast you could make the little orange stick move. (Notice that I didn't say 88.5FM or 106.3FM, weren't no such thing, you couldn't tune them that close.) It was all fun until you did it one too many times and the little orange stick fell off and rattled around in the radio every time you hit a bump. You had to find a station and wait til the DJ comes on and tells you what station you got it on. I never did figure out how to put that little orange stick back....

FYI-At one time I had a 1978 Cutlass that had every factory option on it. Including a AM-FM CB 8-Track Tape Player. Yea, I said CB, not CD. The mic for the CB was about as big as your head.