Bye, Bye, VCR

Next week the last company in the world making video cassette recorders (VCR) will cease production.  At one time Japanese manufacturers Funai Electronics were selling 15 million units per year; that has fallen to around 750,000 although like me, you may be amazed that it is still that many. The last big name store stocking VCR's in the UK,  Dixons (a name that has since disappeared from our High Streets anyway), stopped selling them as long ago as 2004, although remarkably as many as one household in ten in the UK still had a VCR machine as recently as 2013. The advent of the DVD and streaming video services like Netflix, meant that eventually the demise of the VCR was assured.

The rise and fall in popularity of the VCR is an example of a phenomenon that has been a feature of technological change over the last forty or fifty years that is unprecedented in history. There can be no other era in which so much new technology has been invented, become popular and been subsequently superseded in such a short space of time. Although video recording machines have been around since the 1950's, it was only with mass production and technical innovation in the 1980's that the machines became a standard feature in most homes. Not that they were particularly cheap back then: I remember that the first one I bought cost around £350 in 1989; by the time I bought my last one, the average price of a VCR had fallen to about fifty quid. Looking back to the early days of VCRs, the original novelty of being able to time and record a TV programme while you were out to watch later has now become so ordinary with the new breed of hard-disk drive recorders that we take it for granted. And, whereas thirty years ago if you forgot to record a programme that was it, now there are the catch-up channels and the like that make recording shows almost redundant. One thing that has not been lost however -at least, not for my generation - is the language of the VCR. I cannot be alone in continuing to say that I have 'taped' a show, even though I have not owned a VCR for years.

And 'taped' is not the only example of everyday language that we use that harks back to older technology. Mobile phone users (including many too young to remember the old rotary dial phones) will still ask "What number did you dial?" and will 'hang up' at the end of a call, even though these expressions have become pretty meaningless in an age of push button phones and with the decline of the land-line.

At the same time as the VCR was becoming popular domestically, businesses were embracing the fax machine. Not all businesses, though. I recall that in the 1980's, while I was working at Midland Bank in Barking, a number of our customers had fax machines and wanted to send us instructions via that medium. Much to their surprise we had to tell them that we did not possess such a machine. It was not that the bank would not countenance fax machines, just that our branch was not deemed important enough to warrant one. Later when I worked at another branch, we did have a fax machine, but to illustrate the perils of such technology, someone (my late wife, as it happens) put the roll of the thermal fax paper in the wrong way round, resulting in lots of blank faxes and the need to phone loads of customers and ask them if they had sent us a message. The email and its attachments have largely supplanted the fax message, although some businesses still cling to the fax. Take sport; not only do the football authorities in England still hang on to using fax machines to conduct transfer business on deadline day, but just three years ago in America, gridiron footballer Elvis Dumervil missed out on a contract worth $30 million with the Denver Broncos because the fax containing the appropriate paperwork arrived too late, thanks to a poorly performing fax machine.

Some redundant technology is hard to mourn; some we remember with pleasure and lament their passing. On the one hand, the laser disc is not missed by many. They didn't take off in the UK, although they were popular in Japan, which accounted for 3.6 million machines sold in 1981, but once the DVD came along, LaserDiscs were doomed. On the other hand, many people - me included - recall Teletext and the BBC's version, Ceefax, with great affection. In the days before the internet explosion, Teletext was a great medium for finding news and sports results, even if getting to the one result you wanted might mean sitting and waiting patiently for a particular page to load. Anyone complaining nowadays about the wait for a webpage to load should remember that with Teletext, it was possible to go and make a cup of tea, come back, drink it, and still be waiting for the result you wanted!

Over the last half-century we have seen all sorts of technology come and go. The 8-track player, the audio cassette recorder, mini-disc player and Walkman all burst onto the scene, bloomed (relatively) briefly and ended up being largely replaced by MP3 players in general and the ubiquitous iPod in particular. And the iPod's days have long been rumoured to be numbered as music streaming services and the use of mobile phones as music players offer alternatives. At present the popularity of the iPod shows little sign of declining, but there again there was a time when there seemed little prospect of the VCR becoming redundant.

The average household now owns all sorts of technological paraphernalia, some of which has either become outmoded, or will in the not too distant future. Our digital camera (now into its second decade of faithful service) came with its own dedicated printer, which we used once and abandoned as it was slow, expensive to run (print cartridges were exorbitantly priced) and the quality of the pictures was inferior to what you could get having the photos developed at Boots or Snappy Snaps. But we wouldn't be without our all-in-one printer, which along with the PC, makes our study better equipped than many offices I worked in.

We also have a cross-cut paper shredder, which despite the fact that the internet means that bank statements and utility bills are largely online rather than in paper format, still sees a fair bit of use. Unfortunately a disproportionate amount of time is spent unjamming the thing. If there is one piece of technology in desperate need of an upgrade, it's the shredder.