{"id":2081,"date":"2008-12-27T16:15:57","date_gmt":"2008-12-27T20:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=2081"},"modified":"2008-12-27T20:44:02","modified_gmt":"2008-12-28T00:44:02","slug":"vhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=2081","title":{"rendered":"VHS."},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/span>ver the Christmas days, I read that the last (US) VHS supplier bailed out from selling VHS tapes<\/a> and if I believe The Register, this effectively means that VHS<\/a> (Wikipedia article) is no more. VHS literally became a standard after it won in that (frequent) mentioned ‘videotape format war’<\/a>, and despite generally lower quality audio and video, VHS was quickly adopted by the consumer market.\n<\/p>\n

So, yes, JVC<\/a> was the original developer of the VHS system and on one day in the early 80s, our dad ended up buying a brand new JVC VHS player and recorder. It was so brand new (and obviously expensive) that Dad explicitly told us not to tell our fellow-classmates. From then on, I remember frequent visits to a local video store and being introduced to the concept of ‘renting movies’ and ‘rewinding rented video tapes’. This didn’t last too long though: If you’ve lived in a large family, you’ll probably know that picking a movie that everybody likes is harder than simultaneously pressing the ‘play’ and ‘record’ button on the video player1<\/sup>.\n<\/p>\n

Those early days, I also remember seeing the giant video discs (“LaserDiscs”) created by Philips: these were the predecessors of the current DVD type of discs. I thought these were amazing things but I could never imagine people actually buying these particular devices for their homes.<\/p>\n

Additionally, this reminds me of the terrible slow adaption of CD-ROMs<\/em> in the computer industry: The very first CDs proudly showcasing Grollier’s Encyclopedia<\/em> ‘On One CD Disk!’ were so totally not popular. I’m certain that it was Microsoft (and the games industry, of course) that managed to convince consumers to adopt the CD as a new storage standard. The rest is history.\n<\/p>\n

\n

1<\/sup> As an alternative to the “three-finger salute”<\/a> (SFW, honestly), I’d like to introduce the ‘Two-finger salute’, which is the gesture of simultaneously pressing the ‘Play’ and ‘Record’ buttons on an Eighties video\/audio tape recording device. And honestly, why did you have to press two<\/em> buttons to start recording?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the Christmas days, I read that the last (US) VHS supplier bailed out from selling VHS tapes and if I believe The Register, this effectively means that VHS (Wikipedia article) is no more. VHS literally became a standard after … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,14],"tags":[357,358,356],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2081"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2082,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081\/revisions\/2082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}