3 ms·

> really old hard drives (anywhere from 10G to 40G) VHS was already totally obsolete when 1+GB HDD came to consumer market...

actionfromafar 2y ago
VHS was obsolete, but not everyone grabbed a new camera every year. Before digital VHS-C was the normal home camcorder. The first Digital consumer camcorder came out in 1995¹. Digital 8 came out in 1999. So people were definitely using a lot VHS up to early 2000s. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000
- Clamchop 2y ago
  Video and Hi 8 enjoyed a significant fraction of the camcorder market as well. They were better in every way than VHS and S-VHS, respectively, but more expensive.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Late reply, but I agree, they were better. I had sort of forgotten about these. One drawback was this though: if you wanted your home video library to be on VHS tape (so you could use your VCR, and also more easily show your movie at friends and family), you dubbed from Hi 8 to VHS, with degraded picture as a result.
vel0city 2y ago
I don't think I agree with that. The first 1GB consumer drives came out in like 1993. I remember having a several GB (I think a little over 4GB?) hard drive on a home computer sold with Windows 95. DVD wouldn't come out for about another two years in the US and wouldn't have been widely used until at least 1998+. My 1998 desktop had something like 11GB of space. DVD burners and players wouldn't really be very affordable until about the 2000s. VHS was definitely still widely used for several years after multi-GB hard drives were common in the consumer market. Even then, in the late 90s flash media was horrifically expensive. I seem to recall my family buying a 16MB Smartmedia card in the late 90s (massive for the time) for ~$150 or so on sale. You'd be storing a few minutes of highly compressed video on a card like that compared to the several hours of video you could put on a VHS tape. Direct-to-DVD camcorders wouldn't be a thing until the 2000s at which point 40+GB hard drives were starting to become common and flash cards were starting to get to several dozen MBs at least for ~$100 or so.
- Clamchop 2y ago
  I wasn't really sure what OP meant by VHS being "totally obsolete". It would have been getting there for new camcorders by the mid 90s (replaced by 8mm and eventually DV), but VHS itself would remain relevant into the mid 2000s. Just going by pop culture, we had the 4GB base model iMac in 1998 and a hit film about a cursed video tape in 2002. Anecdotally, I remember my family getting a Windows 95 computer with a 1GB hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot, no less) in 1995 or 1996, and a really cool decorated box set of the Alien quadrillogy on VHS around the turn of the millennium from Tower Records.
- egorfine 2y ago
  Yeah. Memory failed me a bit here so i agree with you and stand corrected
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Understandable. Sometimes such a small window of history a while ago gets blurry. Sometimes I need to look things up as well to remember the order of things.

actionfromafar 2y ago

VHS was obsolete, but not everyone grabbed a new camera every year. Before digital VHS-C was the normal home camcorder. The first Digital consumer camcorder came out in 1995¹. Digital 8 came out in 1999. So people were definitely using a lot VHS up to early 2000s. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000

Clamchop 2y ago
Video and Hi 8 enjoyed a significant fraction of the camcorder market as well. They were better in every way than VHS and S-VHS, respectively, but more expensive.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Late reply, but I agree, they were better. I had sort of forgotten about these. One drawback was this though: if you wanted your home video library to be on VHS tape (so you could use your VCR, and also more easily show your movie at friends and family), you dubbed from Hi 8 to VHS, with degraded picture as a result.

vel0city 2y ago

I don't think I agree with that. The first 1GB consumer drives came out in like 1993. I remember having a several GB (I think a little over 4GB?) hard drive on a home computer sold with Windows 95. DVD wouldn't come out for about another two years in the US and wouldn't have been widely used until at least 1998+. My 1998 desktop had something like 11GB of space. DVD burners and players wouldn't really be very affordable until about the 2000s. VHS was definitely still widely used for several years after multi-GB hard drives were common in the consumer market. Even then, in the late 90s flash media was horrifically expensive. I seem to recall my family buying a 16MB Smartmedia card in the late 90s (massive for the time) for ~$150 or so on sale. You'd be storing a few minutes of highly compressed video on a card like that compared to the several hours of video you could put on a VHS tape. Direct-to-DVD camcorders wouldn't be a thing until the 2000s at which point 40+GB hard drives were starting to become common and flash cards were starting to get to several dozen MBs at least for ~$100 or so.

Clamchop 2y ago
I wasn't really sure what OP meant by VHS being "totally obsolete". It would have been getting there for new camcorders by the mid 90s (replaced by 8mm and eventually DV), but VHS itself would remain relevant into the mid 2000s. Just going by pop culture, we had the 4GB base model iMac in 1998 and a hit film about a cursed video tape in 2002. Anecdotally, I remember my family getting a Windows 95 computer with a 1GB hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot, no less) in 1995 or 1996, and a really cool decorated box set of the Alien quadrillogy on VHS around the turn of the millennium from Tower Records.
egorfine 2y ago
Yeah. Memory failed me a bit here so i agree with you and stand corrected
- vel0city 2y ago
  Understandable. Sometimes such a small window of history a while ago gets blurry. Sometimes I need to look things up as well to remember the order of things.