Ahah. Oh boy. Here we go again. If you spoke to me on the phone, you'd be picturing a dude in his late twenties. Take one look at my face and you're immediately gonna think I'm around 18. I'm actually 22 (23 in just a coupla months, actually) and not offended by that stuff, so don't worry too much lol. I get that everywhere I go. Still got that baby face, guess. Buying analogs was always fun in that regard.
I heard told with great regale tales of the great beta crusades from the family elders, who had witnessed the carnage first hand. My aunt had a betamax player and I remember thinking it was way cooler than a VCR. I woulda been that guy who just had to have a betamax. VHS was great though. There's a lot of nostalgia for me with that particular format. We had more VHS tapes than anything else in my house growing up. Back then, I believe switching to DVD was still an expensive hassle and they didn't have recording capabilities. So we stuck with VHS till the bitter end.
These kids and their DVR's, man... ...they just don't understand what it took for things to escalate like this... ...all of the blood, sweat, and tears that came pouring out from these living, breathing companies in their decades-long toils just so that you could rewind in real time... They don't even realize how amazing it is that all of their movies and shows are generally stored in one easy to operate box that can take any format you can connect to your TV, or that a 3 hour movie can fit on one small, mm-thin disc and still look realer than than real. They don't even know what it means to have to change tapes between the recording of shows (just try taping a marathon on VHS--it actually took a certain degree of skill and organization depending on how crappy your VCR was!) or what "tracking" even is. Now they just stream your movies and shows literally right into the TV set in high definition and everything! This was all largely inconceivable as little as a generation ago.
And just think, I get to tell my kids about the war on high-def and the epic skirmishes which took place during the mid 2000's between Sony and Toshiba for dominance over the territory of hi-cap video formats. Or at least that's how I will describe it. By then, they'll be watching AND interacting with their 3d-augmented-reality-holograms (using their standard procedure cybernetic implants, I'm sure) and I'll just be an old man spinning dusty tales about the wild west as I remember it. Ohhh those were wild times children... this was way back when music players had more actual buttons and the cases flipped open, when we had mixtapes that you could phycially pass around instead of playlists you gotta sync, and when hairdryers were for more than just hair...
Me too, though not well because I was like, 9. I just wanted to watch my Pokemon (sooo glad I was alive and a kid for the golden ages of that all-enveloping franchise) tapes I had recorded. My older sister still has some of those deactivated rentals, though.
Okay, okay... I'll stop getting weirdly nostalgic about obsolete storage mediums now. I blame rocketpunk.
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