I keep a box of cables in the garage. Not even sure why anymore. VGA cables, SCSI terminators, a couple of those old parallel printer cables thick as garden hoses. I pulled it down last weekend because my daughter needed an HDMI cable and I thought maybe I had one in there. I didn’t. What I found instead was a box of old VHS tapes.
Not just that, but I found a video player too. Everything was dusty and hadn’t been used for well over a decade. But still I pulled it all out and cleaned it up as best as I could. The only problem was that the video player came with a SCART cable and I had nowhere to plug it into. Amazon reviews reassured me that the SCART to HDMI converter was a good buy, so I clicked the ‘Buy it Now’ button.
The next day after it arrived, I gathered the family to showcase the grand unveiling of the ancient technology. They stared at it. My youngest plucked up the courage to ask if he could push the tape into the video player and was amazed at how it was swallowed up.
A few moments later the tv screen came to life. Old scratchy, slightly deteriorated video. First of my wedding, and then when my first born came from from the hospital.
I won’t lie, it brought a tear to my face and my kids lost interest very quickly because the picture kept “disappearing” and the audio was terrible.
I knew that VHS tapes were going to last forever. So back in the day, I did the clever thing of converting most of the videos to DVDs… yeah, that didn’t work out too well, they were more unreliable than the videos.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I even have anything that could play a DVD anymore… no wait, I lie, the PS4 can I think. But otherwise all the tech from that era is probably in a landfill near Slough.
It’s funny what we trust. One day you’re holding a bright yellow disc that is supposed to last forever and realising it lasted exactly as long as the thing that could read it. Which wasn’t very long at all.
Are we still doing this with the cloud, by the way? Pretending it’s permanent because we can’t see it rot?