quote:

Many new technologies are born with a bang: Virtual reality headsets! Renewable rockets! And old ones often die with a whimper. So it is for the videocassette recorder, or VCR.

The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corporation of Japan, said in a statement Thursday that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of “difficulty acquiring parts.”

The Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported on the impending demise earlier this month.

The news represented the death rattle of a technology that was considered revolutionary when it was introduced in the 1950s. It took several decades for VCRs to make their way into consumers’ homes, but in its heyday it was ubiquitous and dominant.

According to the company — which said in the statement, “We are the last manufacturer” of VCRs “in all of the world” — 750,000 units were sold worldwide in 2015, down from millions decades earlier.

In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.

“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”

At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. Pfost. “This represented an amount almost as great as a year’s gross income for Ampex,” he wrote.

The first VCRs for homes were released in the 1960s, and they became widely available to consumers in the 1970s, when Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS formats began to compete. VHS gained the upper hand the following decade; but Sony stopped producing Betamax cassette tapes only in 2016.

Photo

A Sony Videocassette player in 1970.

By the 1980s, the VCR was catching on with ordinary Americans. In June 1984, The New York Times wrote that analysts expected 15 million homes to have the machines by the end of the year, up from five million in 1982.

A consumer guide published in The Times in 1981 — when the machines ranged in price from $600 to $1,200 — explained the appeal:

“In effect, a VCR makes you independent of television schedules. It lets you create your own prime time. You set the timer and let the machine automatically record the programs you want to watch but can’t. Later, you can play the tape at your convenience. Or you can tape one show while watching another, thus missing neither.”

But only a decade after the technology became common in American households, the introduction of the DVD, in 1995, sounded the older technology’s death knell.

A Times article in 1997, when DVD players were first released to consumers, did not disguise its excitement for a new horizon: “Sound the trumpets, and roll the drums. The digital video disk, or DVD, is here.” Within five years, sales of DVDs had surpassed those of video cassettes.

But less than a decade after DVDs began their reign, the shadow of streaming video loomed. A 2011 headline in The Times made the decline of the hardware explicit, as technology’s circle of life continued its churn:

“Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future.”

BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:

jackyl posted:

was there a copy of the vcr thread?

Blue Train posted:

remember how every VCR always had a clock blinking 1200 op lol

Blue Train posted:

no one could figure out how to set them!

Hrist posted:

Remember the old commercials for ITT Tech or whatever where they offered a degree in VCR repair? Haha, good luck in the job market now, idiots.

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After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the movie. Apparently CBS's CEO had the same exact idea as me because as soon as Ghostrider first appeared we yelled out "HOW'D IT GET BURNED?" in our best Wicker Man impressions. The rest of the people in the studio loving lost it and the rest of the movie turned into a MST3K riff fest. Afterwards, pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes.

quote:

According to the company — which said in the statement, “We are the last manufacturer” of VCRs “in all of the world” — 750,000 units were sold worldwide in 2015, down from millions decades earlier.

Verily I Shat posted:

Autumn Angel posted:

Huh, I wouldn't have expected the demand to still be so high in 2015.

I wonder how long until VCRs become some kind of rare, expensive piece of retro gadgetry? It'll be kind of funny if they eventually command huge prices like so many old game consoles do now.

criscodisco posted:

I remember when they started making VCR's where you just had to tap the rewind or fast forward button instead of holding it down the whole time and it was like "holy poo poo why didn't they always do this?"

Autumn Angel posted:

It seems like VHS tapes lose fidelity upon further rewatchings pretty easily. I found this out the hard way when buying some older Disney animated movies on VHS a while back. I imagine that has something to do with the mechanism required to read the contents of the cassette. As far as I can tell, the only really stable data storage method today is flash memory which pretty much never degrades.

Wanamingo posted:

Who is it that bought 750,000 VCRs last year? I want names.

Wanamingo posted:

Who is it that bought 750,000 VCRs last year? I want names.

BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:

Crow_Rodeo posted:

goddamn are these videos loving dumb

Hrist posted:

I have an old Kool-Aid VHS tape I got from a KB Toy Store when I was really young that my parents got for me with Kool-Aid points.

Anytime I describe the video to people, they swear it sounds like someone on acid made it or something. My dream is to one day convert it to digital format and upload it online. In case someone already did, I think the title was something like, "Wacky Wild Kool-Aid Style" and featured a segment of a man blowing up a building with a cross walk button, which was pre-terrorism, so it was okay. Also it had the Kool-Aid Rap, and that might be cool still.