Set the wayback machine to 1984. Your author, once a young and scrappy cadet with a full head of hair and a cocky attitude, had the dream job of every movie fan of the time. That’s right folks, I worked at a mom and pop video store. The kind of store where they really didn’t mind you taking movies home at night as long as you brought them back in the morning. Oh, the late nights I spent bingeing the masterpieces of the day: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Dreamscape, The Outsiders… oh and I actually watched some classics as well now and again.
To make a little extra cash, I would also repair broken tapes. People would bring in broken tapes all the time. Sometimes they would return rental tapes broken, but more often than not it was a tape they’d bought themselves. VHS tapes cost about $80 back then, That’s about $275 today. Would you pay $275 for a movie? When people did, if the tape broke, they weren’t just going to throw it away.
Fake it until you make it
I had some experience with cutting audio tapes, so when my boss asked me if I could splice video tapes, I lied. I said yes. Fake it until you make it, right? I borrowed a little cash and went to Radio Shack and bought a VHS tape repair kit. Back then, you did these things with razor blades, tape, and a metal block that helped you align everything. It looked like this:
Oh yes, the 1980s were a modern time, let me tell you.
Once the VHS repair thing was going on, my boss asked me if I could repair VCRs. I couldn’t lie my way out of this because I knew I’d need specialized tools. I told him I could take a correspondence course if he wanted. Kids, a correspondence course was what we did before YouTube. You sent away for something in the mail and you got a book and a test you could take. Good times.
While I took that course, he had me unjam VCRs that customers brought in. This involved opening them up and carefully pulling out the tapes. I used coffee stirrers, the plastic ones you can get for free, because, well, they were free. It was then that I realized the complex miracle that was the VHS video cassette recorder.
Yes it had all this stuff in it
Before computers, things were done with gears and ingenuity. It was a less precise way of doing things, but there was a certain elegance. You could really see the thought that went into how things worked. Someone with a mechanical mind could actually see what was going on, unlike today where it goes into a computer chip and then comes out.
Here’s what I’m talking about. Back in 2017, YouTuber “Technology Connections” came up with this video which shows the process:
Yeah the video’s old but has anyone actually changed anything about VHS in five years? I doubt it.
The brilliance of it
The real brilliance of VHS video tape comes in the way the recordings go on the tape. The recordings are laid on the tape slanted, so that you can fit as much information as you could on a 2″ wide tape. Just that idea is pure genius. Then, engineering the heads so they spin while the tape moves, so the tape doesn’t have to move so fast is incredible. If they hadn’t come up with that, a VHS tape would probably have been about the size of a pizza box.
I completely admit that I miss things that were manually engineered like this. There’s a different kind of skill to creating things purely digital, and it’s harder to see sometimes. When you see a VCR actually work, it’s pretty amazing that it does. At least to me.
