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Originally posted by: Yoda Is Your Father
I am ten years younger than greencapt, but I do remember that our family VHS player was a toploader and it came with a remote control that connected to the unit via a wire. It also had an analogue wheel counter and no other display of any kind. It was cool.
Our first VCR was probably bought in 1984. It was a General Electric, a top loader. It too had the wired control, but we hardly ever used it because it hardly ever worked. I was the only person who could ever get it to work, but once I did, I could never remember afterwards what I had done to cause it to work. Don't you just hate when that happens? The tracking adjustments were done with dials. You had to push in Play and Record at the same time (those cool silver buttons) to record. You could set to record a channel by pressing little buttons on the front. These buttons corresponded to a little interchangeable faceplate with light-up numbers on it. I assume they were interchangeable because the plate would slide out. If there were any plates with other numbers on it, though, I could never find them, so I was usually stuck only being able to record channels 1-13. There were some notable exceptions, but I couldn't tell you how I was able to do that. There was a flip pannel below that with all these little clicky switches, and I have no idea what they did. You had to hold in the rewind or fast-forward buttons to scan while watching a tape, but the image was so distorted that it really did no good, and it was probably damaging to the tape. Finally, the only images it would show were distorted and fuzzy, and we finally replaced it in 1998.
Ah, fun times. I think we still have it around somewhere. I'm going to have to go look for it now!