The last VCR was made in July......

[TremblingBluStar]

True, but that's a little different as it was an existing word for content that came to be applied to the medium, while tape was the other way round.

Yes, but people still refer to a new album, or collection of songs, as a "record". People still use the term "tape" to mean the act of recording. Interestingly enough, before records the term "record" meant to write out spoken words, as in recording court testimony.

It's more that most technology failure is in the first few years, so after a decade or so all the poorly-made ones have been long-since trashed.

True. However the concept of planned obsolescence is relatively new. Especially when applied to goods such as electronics, furniture, ect.

 

[USS Triumphant]

The first thing I ever recorded on any VCR (my parents' Beta) was the USA Cartoon Express. (For non-Americans, that was a string of reruns of Herculoids and Space Ghost and other cartoons that aired on the USA Network on Saturday mornings for a few years after the network started.) I would time-shift it every Saturday so I could watch it after the big network cartoons were over.

The first thing I ever recorded on my own VCR wasn't exactly on a VCR - I hooked a portable stereo cassette recorder's left and right channel input jacks into the video and left audio outputs from my TV and recorded a bit, and discovered when I reversed the connection to play it back into my TV that I had successfully recorded a REALLY crappy mono copy of the part of "Star Wars" where Threepio and Artoo are arguing in the desert toward the beginning of the movie. Very neat to me at the time as an experiment - but not very watchable as a practical matter, really.

 

[J.T.B.]

Yes, but people still refer to a new album, or collection of songs, as a "record". People still use the term "tape" to mean the act of recording.

Yes. The distinction I was making is, if a digital collection of music is called a record, it still makes some kind of literal sense because it's a record of what was performed. But "tape" doesn't make the same kind of sense if it's not on a long strip of plastic.

Interestingly enough, before records the term "record" meant to write out spoken words, as in recording court testimony.

And it still means that.

 

[m.lp.ql.m]

My first off-air recording was a broadcast, not sure what channel/network it was on, of a Journey concert during their Escape tour, on one of these monsters:

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1982 was it?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

My first off-air recording was a broadcast, not sure what channel/network it was on, of a Journey concert during their Escape tour, on one of these monsters:

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1982 was it?

That is a bizarre looking recorder.. Looks kinda cool.

 

[USS Triumphant]

But "tape" doesn't make the same kind of sense if it's not on a long strip of plastic.

I might be reaching here - probably am - but maybe it has to do with a slight confusion between tape media and adhesive tape? If people had it in the back of their minds that recording on tape was *sticking* the music or video or whatever onto the tape, then perhaps adhering/attaching content to media is still thought of as "taping" in that sense?

If that IS what is going on, I suspect the use of "taping" will go on for at least as long as adhesive tape is still a thing - even if there's no tape media around anymore.

 

[m.lp.ql.m]

That is a bizarre looking recorder.. Looks kinda cool.

My dad was in the TV/Appliance sales and service business. He hated the VHS format, saying the internal tape path was too convoluted and prone to the tape getting destroyed-which I'd never experienced. He thought the VX format was the best designed, but they didn't sell very well, and so we ended up with 5 or 6 of them things and their accessories laying around in various stages of (dis)use until the early 90s.

 

[tharpdevenport]

I can't recall ever using a VCR that chewed up a tape, and I was a frequent user of them; playing and recording.

The only real annoyances, looking back, were cases that got ruined easily, heavy collections, rewinding (hey, remember "Be Kind, Rewind"?), and limited recording space if you wanted to use the best quality setting.

How ever, while DVD pictures and sound were better, I had problems that were simply on par with VHS, so they kind of cancelled each other out:

* DVD's costed more. Still cost more, especially now that VHS tapes are near worthless.

* Expensive DVD players.

* DVD players that pixilated images or freeze them while the sound keeps going.

* Annoying DVD menus, especially ones that take forever to get passed.

* If a DVD got scratched up or ruined in some way, it was nearly impossible to sell, meanwhile that VHS tape that's been played fifty times or more, you could still sell that and make a dollar.

* On VHS you got VHS quality unless otherwise noted, but with DVD's some lazy assholes didn't even bother, and put VHS quality stuff onto DVD, because DVD = better in consumer's eyes. Then some assholes would lower the quality of something like episodes of a TV series, so you could fit more onto a single disc.

 

[Emperor Norton]

Somewhere, a hipster laments.

 

[RandyS]

I can't recall ever using a VCR that chewed up a tape, and I was a frequent user of them; playing and recording.

I had that problem enough that it inspired me to learn VCR repair and maintenence. Also VHS repair. I even started to earn a little money after fixing the VCR's of family and friends who referred my services to their other friends. I hoped to keep this going once I made the switch from VHS to DVD but failing eyesight (age, naturally) and the fact that DVD componets are alot smaller that a VCRs made this impossible.

 

[Idran]

I might be reaching here - probably am - but maybe it has to do with a slight confusion between tape media and adhesive tape? If people had it in the back of their minds that recording on tape was *sticking* the music or video or whatever onto the tape, then perhaps adhering/attaching content to media is still thought of as "taping" in that sense?

If that IS what is going on, I suspect the use of "taping" will go on for at least as long as adhesive tape is still a thing - even if there's no tape media around anymore.

It's simpler than that; etymology has nothing to do with meaning once a word is coined in general, and it never has. It's not people having a false metaphor in their head, it's people associating the word to the concept rather than the origin because the origin doesn't really matter mentally, how they've heard it used does. Same reason filming doesn't require using film, pens don't have to be made of feathers, pencils aren't fine-haired brushes, and books don't have to be printed on beechwood tablets; all those examples were original etymologies, and only the first one is something that people might insist on nowadays, and only because it's within living memory.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Hell even in Star Trek they referred to recordings as "tapes" .. I think that word was used a few times in the movies.

 

[Spot261]

Who ever insisted on colloquialisms making sense?

 

[Anna Yolei]

I could watch my favorite movie any time I wanted! I could record shows right off of the TV! Yeah, the VCR was awesome, and is a part of some really fond memories for me.

Late to this party, but it became good times once I got a VCR recorder in 2002 (family was too broke to buy one before then). This was right when I was new to Trek, so I recorded Enterprise and Voyager, which was in syndication by then.

What I really wished I'd kept were my soap opera recordings. The Bold and the Beautiful especially, because being the most popular serial in the world it is surprisingly difficult to find clips in English.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Late to this party, but it became good times once I got a VCR recorder in 2002 (family was too broke to buy one before then). This was right when I was new to Trek, so I recorded Enterprise and Voyager, which was in syndication by then.

What I really wished I'd kept were my soap opera recordings. The Bold and the Beautiful especially, because being the most popular serial in the world it is surprisingly difficult to find clips in English.

Oddly you can watch that show and miss whole months of it and still catch up....

Brooke Logan Forrester, the walking used car.

 

[Amaris]

Late to this party, but it became good times once I got a VCR recorder in 2002 (family was too broke to buy one before then). This was right when I was new to Trek, so I recorded Enterprise and Voyager, which was in syndication by then.

What I really wished I'd kept were my soap opera recordings. The Bold and the Beautiful especially, because being the most popular serial in the world it is surprisingly difficult to find clips in English.

Yeah, I remember getting my first VCR. It was like I had moved up in the world! By the time I got one, almost everyone had one, but still, it was like owning a brand new car.

 

[Anna Yolei]

Oddly you can watch that show and miss whole months of it and still catch up....

Brooke Logan Forrester, the walking used car.

Heh. She's barely even on these days, having been replaced by Steffy, Taylor's daughter, who is more Brooke than her daughters are

 

[Anna Yolei]

Yeah, I remember getting my first VCR. It was like I had moved up in the world! By the time I got one, almost everyone had one, but still, it was like owning a brand new car.

Same here. I used my TV/VCR combo for recording well into the 2000s, when the TV gave out or I broke the screen in rage over something (I honestly forgot which). Then I tried DVD recording, which....no. not for live recording, anyway.

 

[Amaris]

Same here. I used my TV/VCR combo for recording well into the 2000s, when the TV gave out or I broke the screen in rage over something (I honestly forgot which). Then I tried DVD recording, which....no. not for live recording, anyway.

DVD recorders were just the worst idea.
I remember working at Sears, and we were trying to sell these things. I mean, they were these bulky, slow, unreliable $400 machines. Plus, the commission percentage was like 0.25%, so it was pointless to sell one.

 

[Anna Yolei]

I did get a VCR/DVD recorder for Christmas after the horrendous cheapy one and it managed to last about a year before it gave up the ghost. But in that time, I would autorecord to VHS, then remaster onto a DVD-R disc to remove commercials.

Eventually, I got a computer that had an adapter that allowed me to record directly from cable. That was good times.