Many new technologies are born with a bang: Virtual reality headsets! Renewable rockets! And old ones often die with a whimper. So it is for the videocassette recorder, or VCR.
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The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corp of Japan, said last week that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of "difficulty acquiring parts". According to the company – which said in the statement "we are the last manufacturer" of VCRs "in all of the world" – 750,000 units were sold worldwide last year, down from millions decades earlier.
The news was the death rattle of a technology that was considered revolutionary when, in 1956, the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company 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. Unknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice-president at the network.
After he replayed the speech there were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realised just what they were seeing and pandemonium broke out.
The first VCRs for homes were released in the 1960s, and they became widely available to consumers in the 1970s. In 1981, machines ranged in price from $1000 to $2000.
But only a decade after the VCR became an everyday appliance, the introduction of the DVD, in 1995, sounded the older technology's death knell. "Sound the trumpets, and roll the drums. The digital video disc, or DVD, is here," declared The New York Times in 1997.
But less than a decade after DVDs began their reign, the shadow of streaming video loomed. A 2011 headline as technology's circle of life continued its churn: "Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future."
New York Times
