Me an' my toys - Sharp VCR

Ah 1983 - what a year, and with it the portent of becoming a high school graduate! At the beginning of the year, I was working for Marvel Comics on Blip magazine (and that's about as long as it lasted!), so I was pulling in some serious dollars for a high school senior still living at home. I had a subscription to Video magazine at the time so I started to educate myself about VCRs and the wonderful technology they were introducing to consumers, albeit on a very small scale. I had just gotten cable at the apartment and wanted some means to record some of the programming I was watching.

A bit of history here - this was a period where Hollywood was very concerned about people recording broadcasts and keeping them. They had no control over the process, but the rules behind recording were very nebulous and made one wonder about the legality of video taping. Eventually this fell by the wayside and made the industry what it is today. Read more here.

Anyhow, the new mission was to get a VCR before graduation - and virtually any VCR would do. The major players at the time were Sony (with the Beta (read: superior) format), Panasonic, Sharp, JVC (the inventors of VHS), and a host of others. Back then, the real differentiator between machines was whether or not it was a top loader (Panny) or front loader (Sharp). I personally wanted a front loader simply because I had to put it on a shelf with not much clearance height-wise. I looked at the Panasonics based on brand name alone, and I almost bought one, a story unto itself.

Back in the 70s and 80s, Times Square was a squalid and generally unsavory part of NY that you didn't want to linger around for too long. There were some slight benefits to that in the sense that the streets were lined with electronics stores that competed heavily against each other. These were way before the major chains would be vast resources for consumer technology, although Crazy Eddie's and The Wiz were sources as well. I went to one of these stores that advertised a $350 Panasonic top loader in their window, but get this... they wanted to charge me $150 for coaxial cables! That's right, the cheap little cables that you get for free! That soured the deal, and I went to a competitor of their's right down the block and bought my front-loading Sharp VCR instead.

You wanna talk about basic functionality? My VCR had a wired remote that only had one function - pause/play. That's it, and if you think about it, did I really need much more than that? Well, FF and Rew would have been nice, and power on/off would have been nirvana! I still have all of the tapes I recorded with it, much of which were movies on HBO and Showtime. I had a little day planner that I used to schedule shows with - I think the recorder had single program functionality. The first tape I made was a 4-hour VHS with two movies on it - Star Trek II and Star Wars, and I can still play it to this day, but why would I want to?