technology keeps coming and coming and coming...

During Christmas Break when I was at home, I really wanted to see The Lion King, but since we do not have that on DVD, I searched for an old VHS. We had kept a lot of old "tapes" partly in denial that VHS would ever be obsolete, and partly because of the nostalgia factor. I pushed the giant plastic contraption into the VCR (that I had to hunt down out of the attic), and waited for the clicking and humming and all the other sounds associated with a VCR preparing to show a movie. So as I used the "tracking" button for the first time since the late 90's, I started to think about my childhood compared to today’s children’s childhoods...

Do you remember growing up with VCRs and VHS tapes? I have many vivid memories of these large tapes - whether it was looking through the movie cabinet at all those big plastic cases to pick out a movie, dodging them flying through the air when my older brothers threw them at me, or having to rewind before returning to the video store when we rented.

Did you know that the average VHS tape weighs about 7.4 ounces?

However, we now know there are much better options for home entertainment, but in the late 1970's and early 1980's people were ecstatic to own a VCR player. People were actually given the choice of what they wanted to watch on television instead of just normal television programs. People were offered freedom to pick out a movie and bring it into their homes and watch it on their own television set.

After only about 15 years of rewinding the film, hauling around these heavy things, and daring not to flip open the lever and touch the tape inside the VHS tape, DVDs hit the market hard in March 1997. Thank goodness!

Weighing just .58 ounces, movies on a disc were brand new to America and were so convenient that we kissed the days of rewinding goodbye and were allowed to just click the menu button and select the scene of the movie that we wanted to watch. This was such a big improvement from fast forwarding through the whole movie to watch the last 15 minutes or having to rewind through the entire movie to start it over.

However, researchers worked very hard to improve DVDs since many people ended up scratching the discs and then they were unreadable. So, in November 2006, Blu-Ray came out weighing about .34 ounces.

Blu-Ray overcomes DVD readability issues by placing the movie data on top of a 1.1 mm thick polycarbonate layer, which protects the disc from fingerprints and scratches.

Now that we have moved past large VHSs and skipping DVDs, we are currently in the Blu-Ray era. Except if this movie technology follows the previous pattern, Blu-Ray too will be gone by 2015 or 2020. What do we have coming to us next? I for one am still watching DVDs and occasionally Blu-Rays, but I understand that DVDs are on their way out, but I will be sad when the day comes when Best Buy no longer has DVDs on their shelves. However, my children will probably never even know what a VHS is and maybe even a DVD. This concept is very bittersweet to me.