The Best Thing I Own Is My Tiny TV/VCR

The Best Thing I Own Is My Tiny TV/VCR

The idea came in a flash while I was on a barstool in Bed-Stuy’s Do Or Dive. The bartender snapped off the music to swap in the Jeopardy! theme, but I couldn’t find Trebek until I followed my fellow bargoers' gaze to the top of a fridge, where the smallest black and white TV I’ve ever seen rested. In no way was it an appropriate size to show anything, but for a show based mostly in audio it worked fine enough. I wanted my own right away.  I went…

The Quiet Panic Behind the VCR Boom

The first successful videotape recorders began appearing in the mid-1950s. These units were expensive, bulky, and geared toward a commercial market. As a product, they showed a lot of promise, and over the next few decades, several companies worked to bring the technology to the home market. It was Philips that coined the term VCR (video cassette recorder) in 1970 to refer to their cassette-based system. They began selling it to consumers in 197…