alt Hacker News> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...]
I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of it in condescending way.
Replies
I've always disliked VHS. Broadcast TV was available for comparison at the time and it looked much better.
DVD resolution seemed fine to me at the time - it does not seem fine anymore.
Cassettes were not great, not terrible compared to CDs. That is still the case because stereo audio doesn't get much better than CDs.
Conclusion: Whether something seems good at the time depends on availability of something similar but better.
Most were enjoying not having to stop whatever they were doing at whatever time a show was broadcast to watch it live on air - time shifting recorded TV was a game changer.
Sure the first first ones, but hedonic adaptation happens pretty quickly. If you watched a movie in the theaters and then got a VHS copy to watch on your TV at home, you'd notice the difference, especially if it was a well-worn copy. I remember being so excited about laserdiscs because they overcame the VHS noise.
It was “good enough” for them at the time. Technology is and was always about something good enough for most people. But the Eno quote is about art and aesthetic.
Yes, they loved the compactness and convenience (well, I’m not sure anyone ever loved the rewinding/fastfowarding experience)
But the quality/color was always a noticeable downgrade from broadcast quality video (and that was a noticeable downgrade from film). But the sacrifice was absolutely worth it.
It is notable that LaserDisc only came out two years after VHS (and before it reached mass adoption), and it could produce (and often exceed) prefect broadcast quality video. Anyone could see the improvement.
Yet LaserDisc never had much success outside of enthusiasts, simply because it couldn’t match the convenience of VHS. Well… it was mostly the lack of recording, but that’s an aspect of convenience too.