In the days before DVD

Not so many years ago, people didn't have DVDs. We had videocassettes. We had the Betamax vs. VHS wars, which are chronicled so thoroughly on the interweb. And people who wanted something better than videotape had Laserdiscs. They were big -- like the size of records -- but they had great picture quality, fantastic sound quality, and often had extra stuff... the kind of extra stuff we take for granted now on DVD.

This is a clip I found on an old VHS tape when I was doing some transfers at home. It's a clip from Buffalo's NBC affiliate, WGRZ-TV, Channel 2, on their evening newscast. It's a consumer segment asking whether it's a good idea to invest in a laserdisc player. I figure this clip is from early 1992, several years before DVD was introduced.

I get a kick out of past predictions of the future, and old-time fascination with technology that we now view as archaic. And I'm looking forward to the days when the stuff we consider high-tech is considered embarrassingly out of date. Hell, look at how far cell phone technology has come in just the past ten years.