New Fangled or Old Fashioned?

We came across some old and no longer wanted DVDs and video tapes the other day. The DVDs we can probably sell (stores like CeX will buy them) but the videos will either be dumped or go to a charity shop, who will almost certainly have them on their shelves for some time. After all, who buys video tapes these days? And if you do buy a video tape, what will you play it on? Unless you have a vintage video cassette player you won't find one in the shops. Dixons (part of the Currys-PC World group) stopped selling them in 2004 after just 26 years on sale. The video cassette player is one of those bits of technology that has been and gone in a single lifetime. I accept that they aren't technically defunct, but they might as well be, they  are as relevant today as a mangle is.

Back in the 1980's when video took off a new machine might cost £500; the first machine I bought cost about £300 in 1989. By the time I bought my last machine the price had dropped to around fifty quid. It is true of a lot of consumer electronics that prices have fallen in actual and real terms over the years. Look around your own home and price up your TV, fridge, computer and hi-fi. Chances are that they were a cheaper than the models they replaced, and even if they weren't the spec will be a lot better. When I bought my first PC they weren't even that commonplace in many offices; at about that time I think we shared one PC and two dumb terminals between thirteen people at work. Now your average home has a better network, better hardware and better operating systems than we used at work less than twenty years ago.

An indispensable piece of office machinery circa 1995 was the fax machine. I recall that ten years earlier, when I was working at Midland Bank in Barking a customer of ours was dumbfounded that we did not have a fax machine in the branch. Fax machine? We barely had a photocopier! We had a Scotch copier, to use which one had to copy the original document to a piece of pink, shiny paper and then use that to transfer the image to a piece of normal paper. A single copy took a good couple of minutes. Think about the printer that probably sits next to your PC, a printer that also scans and photocopies and probably cost you a whole lot less than that Scotch copier that retailed for around £80 in the 1980's. Fax machines then did not use standard paper either, they used special rolls of paper and woe betide the person who put the paper in the wrong way round, resulting in a whole sheaf of blank faxes being printed. I know someone who did that (it wasn't me), and the fall out was a number of frantic calls to customers who may potentially have sent us the blank faxes we were receiving.

When the fax machine finally slips into oblivion the chances are the word will go with it but that is not the case with other things that have disappeared. The previously mentioned video recorder lives on in common parlance since we still say we "tape" TV programmes (well, we do in our house) even though what we are actually doing is saving them on a hard disk drive. That expression, together with the video tapes themselves that we have lying about, made me think about other words and phrases that we commonly use that now have little relevance but those of us of a certain generation in particular, are unlikely to ever give up.

Of all the areas of technology that have shown the greatest advances in recent years, the mobile phone is the one with which we are all probably the most familiar. Mobile phones have always had keypads and landline phones have had them for many years, even though phones with dials co-existed with them for a long time. Now I am certain that there are still plenty of phones with dials still in use, but even those of us who no longer have one still say dial, as in "What number did you dial?" when we get a wrong number. The younger generation, who have possibly never seen a rotary dial phone, will be used to their parents saying dial and chances are that the expression will live on way past the demise of the rotary dial phones themselves.

When Britain switched to decimal currency in 1971 there was inevitably a long period of time in which everyone was converting pounds and pence back to pounds, shillings and pennies but despite the passing of the best part of half a century (now that is a frightening thought to someone who was a teenager when we changed the currency), I find that I still sometimes do it. Take newspapers or chocolate bars. Despite the amount of time that has passed I still get the occasional shock when I realise that I have just spent eighteen shillings on a newspaper, or twelve shillings on a Mars bar. The price of a Mars bar is actually used as an index by some economists to illustrate increases in prices. Speaking as someone who can remember vividly when a Mars Bar cost just 2p (it was 1971) and a newspaper cost 3p at the same time, it makes me wonder if, just as my children look at me askance when I say "five bob" or "half a crown" whether their children will similarly look doubtfully at them when they mention pennies in years to come as the value of our bronze coinage diminishes all the time and will inevitably be phased out eventually.

Having said that video tapes and the machines to play them on are as outmoded as the mangle, I now find however that there are some people who believe that they are poised for a comeback, swept in on a wave of nostalgia. They have been compared with the vinyl record, which still has its adherents, except there is a world of difference between the two. Firstly the record deck never went away. It is much easier to go out and buy a good record deck than a video recorder. Secondly there is the aesthetic property to playing a record, the ritual of sliding it from its sleeve, cleaning it, placing it almost reverentially on the turntable and placing the stylus on the platter. Sliding a video tape into the slot in a grey box doesn't compare. And then there is the quality. Vinyl aficionados will argue that the sound quality of a record is superior to CD or MP3 or any other format for that matter, and their arguments have merit. It is difficult to make the same case for the video tape. Subsequent digital formats have knocked the picture quality that tapes were able to deliver into a tin hat. Can you seriously imagine watching a video tape version of one of the current blockbuster, special effect laden movies on a fifty inch television?

 Nostalgia is all very well, but some things are best left where they belong, in the past.