VHS

“Be kind, rewind: thirty years of Friday nights on half an inch of tape”

Introduced on September 9, 1976 by JVC, VHS was the standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, and it dominated home video throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s. People loved it because it put the movies in their living rooms: the format's popularity was intertwined with the rise of the video rental market, when films were released on pre-recorded videotapes for home viewi

By 2006, VHS had been discontinued, its place gradually taken by newer formats, including improved tape standards like S-VHS and whatever came after the extract's final sentence cuts off. What it left behind was a generation that knew the ritual: half-inch magnetic tape wound between two spools, at least two hours of capacity, and a trip to the video store. It retired as it lived, on its own terms, as the format that

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