Off The Cuff

The Time Of The VCR Seems To Be Gone

Posted by: From Arkansas in Electronics on Oct 13 2008

Welcome back!

My high school days were in the early sixties. I graduated in ‘65 so to me technology has come a long way, Baby! Yes, that was a quote from an old commercial. I saw my Dad using a reel to reel tape player in the early sixties. When I grew up and left home to get married, we had some newer technology with us, a portable tape player. I remember it well. It had a green leather case. Have no idea what cow was green to get that color but there it was.

In the mid sixties on into the late seventies or early eighties, I guess it was, there was the 8 track tape player. I knew a couple of people who thought they would never go away. I thought they were unhandy and should go away and fast. During that time, we had that portable tape player. I always thought it would be a great idea to put commercial songs and music on tapes instead of those 8 tracks but no one that was in the industry was around to listen to me. Then we did get commercially taped music. Better. I liked that a lot.

In the late 80s, I was given a present from my sis and brother. It was a VCR. I found those to be fantastic! Now I could have some of the movies I wanted to see at home and not have to go out to the movies, pay that price. However, the price of the VHS tapes was pretty high then. I could get some used ones though. I can recall the very first VHS tape I ever got was Top Gun. I think I wore it out. But all good things come to an end eventually. The biggest problem I had, it took years to happen, was that the tape drives in the machines would get messed up and we would end up with a chewed tape. It usually happened to the one tape we wanted to keep too.

But we kept on getting VHS tapes over the years. The machine that didn’t give us a fit was our best one. It lasted the longest, I think. But one night, even though we had a power strip to keep power surges from happening, lightning struck close by and our VCR was fried. Bad news to a couple of people who have something like 250 titles on the shelf. By that time, we had a DVD player but the VHS titles were still going to sit and do nothing if we didn’t replace it. I did. Got it off of an online auction pretty cheaply. Unfortunately, the person who sold it to me had no clue how old the thing was. I have no idea either but it doesn’t have some of the things our old one did so I’m guessing that it’s older than the one that got fried. And did you know that there is nowhere else that you can buy a VCR? They appear to have stopped selling them a while back. When did that happen????

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