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30 … or not … Happy birthday, VCR!
On Monday, the executive editor the Life & Arts section, Kathy Blackwell, cheerfully e-mailed me a little blip that had been sent to her claiming that today is the 30th birthday of the VCR.
Sounded like a terrific topic for blogging — until my dogged reporting determined the date to be slightly suspect. Actually, the VCR was introduced for use by the TV networks in 1956. Before that, all shows on TV were live.
In 1975 or ‘76, depending on which Googled source you believe, Sony introduced the Beta system of video recording. Almost two years later, the VHS format came along, thanks to RCA, and quickly bumped Beta out of contention.
So today might or might not be the VCR’s 30th birthday, but what the heck. It’s still a good topic for blogging.
Where would we be without home video recorders of some sort, whether they be VCRs, PVRs or DVRs?
I can tell you where I was in 1979, when I first started this job without this miraculous device.
Because VCRs still weren’t widely used at that time, I spent hours and hours, shivering in conference rooms at local stations watching closed-circuit feeds of TV shows. That was the only way to “preview” them at that time.
Some stations politely ignored me as I sat in the dark scribbling notes on a legal pad. Others felt compelled to pop in every few minutes to ask if I liked the shows and what I planned to write about them. Not good.
One thing I did like about watching closed-circuit previews was stumbling onto the messages that crept through the airwaves from the network honchos in New York to the station managers and programmers.
None of them was terribly secret or embarrassing, but it was funny to hear an NBC voice tell some poor soul at KXAN that the transmission was so rotten that day that it could break at any minute. Or that the show about to be close-fed was, well, not very good.
The next step in my professional evolution was the purchase of my very first VCR, which was roughly the size of a safe. I think the newspaper bought it for me used, from one of the TV stations. It was too heavy to sit on top of the TV, so it sat next to the TV on a separate piece of really ugly furniture.
And boy was that VCR slow. After pushing a button, the machinery began to chug-chug-chug, and finally the drawer lifted up for the tape to be inserted. More chug-chug-chugging followed, and finally the tape descended and started to play. It took as long to rewind a tape on that old VCR as it did to watch it.
In 25 years, 100 million VCRs were sold. Today nearly 80 percent of U.S. households have VCRs or some kind of recording/playback device. Soon those will be replaced by DVD machines that record for playback. I’m so ready for one of those.
So whether today is actually the VCR’s 30th anniversary or not, happy birthday.
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