The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corp. of Japan, said in a statement Thursday that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of “difficulty acquiring parts.”
A Japanese newspaper, Nikkei, reported on the impending demise earlier this month.
The news represented the death rattle of a technology that was introduced in the 1950s. It took several decades for VCRs to make their way into consumers’ homes, but in its heyday it was ubiquitous and dominant. According to the company statement, 750,000 units were sold worldwide in 2015, down from millions decades earlier.
In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Co. introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.
“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”
At the time, the machines cost $50,000 (U.S.) apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Pfost.
But only a decade after the technology became common in American households, the introduction of the DVD, in 1995, sounded the older technology’s death knell.
A Times article in 1997, when DVD players were first released to consumers, did not disguise its excitement for a new horizon: “Sound the trumpets and roll the drums. The digital videodisc, or DVD, is here.” Within five years, sales of DVDs had surpassed those of video cassettes.
But less than a decade after DVDs began their reign, the shadow of streaming video loomed. A 2011 headline in The Times made the decline of the hardware explicit, as technology’s circle of life continued its churn:
“Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future.”
https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/07/22/the-long-final-goodbye-of-the-vcr.html
A Japanese newspaper, Nikkei, reported on the impending demise earlier this month.
The news represented the death rattle of a technology that was introduced in the 1950s. It took several decades for VCRs to make their way into consumers’ homes, but in its heyday it was ubiquitous and dominant. According to the company statement, 750,000 units were sold worldwide in 2015, down from millions decades earlier.
In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Co. introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.
“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”
At the time, the machines cost $50,000 (U.S.) apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Pfost.
But only a decade after the technology became common in American households, the introduction of the DVD, in 1995, sounded the older technology’s death knell.
A Times article in 1997, when DVD players were first released to consumers, did not disguise its excitement for a new horizon: “Sound the trumpets and roll the drums. The digital videodisc, or DVD, is here.” Within five years, sales of DVDs had surpassed those of video cassettes.
But less than a decade after DVDs began their reign, the shadow of streaming video loomed. A 2011 headline in The Times made the decline of the hardware explicit, as technology’s circle of life continued its churn:
“Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future.”
https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/07/22/the-long-final-goodbye-of-the-vcr.html
