> Its amazing how "kid friendly" VHS tapes are compared to nearly anything else. Not too small, tough plastic, touch almost anything and nothing happens, an excellent UI.
You've never fished toast or coins or keys or pens or raisins or breadsticks out of the machine? That slot was large and inviting.
We had one while I was a kid. It was pretty great, actually. We may have actually had two (an upgrade) now that I think about it. The funniest part was that it was a two-sided format, so you had to "flip" the movie over at parts. It got to the point where you knew the breakpoint was and instinctively starting walking to it just before the flip point. Longer movies took multiple cassettes.
For a kid, it was pretty easy to use.
Another great thing was the large crates required to store your collection. It was very satisfying to try to find your movie.
Its interesting that to the best of my knowledge nobody commercially tried digital encoding on a contact/tonearm media, at least on a serious scale. That might have been interesting.
Its amazing how "kid friendly" VHS tapes are compared to nearly anything else. Not too small, tough plastic, touch almost anything and nothing happens, an excellent UI.