Ah, it seemed only yesterday that the boat anchor of home entertainment, the beta machine, ruled in our living rooms. Beta was the first equipment that allowed us to watch movies whenever we wanted at home--without waiting for them to be broadcast on TV! It was a revolution in entertainment . . . and now it's over.

Sony Corp. recently announced that it will stop making its Betamax machine by the end of this year. The beta machine has certainly gone out with quite the whimper: Although lots of folks still have them lying around (and many still use them), beta has been living in quiet obscurity since VHS trounced its butt in the mid-80s. Now, in its last hours, it's only fair to give it a decent sendoff.

Cast your memory back to the mid-70s. Who would have thought then that we'd actually be able to record TV shows? There was no such thing, unless you perched on your knees in front of the console speaker of the TV (usually done up nicely in walnut, with a lovely gold threaded backing fabric) with your first and third fingers on the "play" and "record" buttons of your cassette deck. No, if you wanted to watch WKRP In Cincinnati, you had to BE there on Mondays at 9:30 ET, darn it.

Yet to actually be able to record what you saw on the TV! To be able to rent movies and watch them at home . . . and they weren't on Super 8 . . . and you didn't have to haul out the projection screen . . . and you didn't have to thread any film through any spools while your little brother made shadow puppets on the screen and threw Bugles at you! Why, it was a revolution, I tell you!

It certainly was an impressive piece of machinery, as well. Remember the size of it? The heft of it? The size of the tapes? The limited capacity of the tapes, so any movie was a two-tape job, at least? The ol' top loading action? It was actually kind of cool, in a techie-nerd kind of way.

Yet all too soon, the slick new kid in town appeared on the dusty main street of home entertainment and challenged our beloved grizzled beta machine to a duel. In a twinkling it was over, the sleek, shiny VHS machine blowing a wisp of smoke off the barrel of its gun. Not dead, yet wounded to the core of its really, really heavy inner workings, the beta machine limped off into the sunset, trailed by a few devoted followers who turned their backs on the "new guy."

Liz, a friend of mine who was a diehard beta fan, said she had all of her favorite movies on beta and darned if she was going to change them all to a new format. So it was at her place that I first saw the vampire/road house classic Near Dark on beta. I considered it the dawn of a new age when her friends managed to shame her into buying a VHS machine so we could have video marathons at her apartment--including new releases from the video store.

She and I lost touch over the years, and I forgot about the beta behemoth. Then, a few years ago, I got a job at a local TV station. I had never been in a TV newsroom before and so was in awe of the editing machines and cameras and other high-tech goodies. I hoped I could keep up with all the technology. Then the person training me plunked me down at a workstation and hauled out some very large tape cases.

I boggled. Before me was one of the biggest beta machines I had ever seen in my life! "Liz!" I thought, "I have found the mother load!"

Yes, the newsroom still uses beta. To this day I haven't asked why--it could be something to do with the video quality, or it could be that all the equipment is beta and it would cost a ton of money to change to a newer video format--whatever the reason, I found myself back in my beta days. It was quite a rush.

Last year, however, a tiny box appeared on top of the three-foot-high beta machine and monitor that I always used. It was digital. The tape is as small as the cassettes we used to watch our car tape decks eat only a few short years ago. Slowly the newsroom is being switched to digital format, while, at home, our VHS tapes are dying off as natural selection favors even smaller, sleeker, hardier DVDs.

Now the question is: When do we start seeing beta machines on eBay, going for top dollar as nostalgia items, alongside those cabinet-size Philco radios our grandparents used to own?

 

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Jayne Denker is a thirty something writer who will work on just about any writing assignment, anyplace, anytime as long as it's something nifty associated with pop culture--especially GenX, of course--and/or entertainment. She is actually employed full time as a web content manager but also fills any free time she may happen to find on her hands with freelance writing assignments to offset the "manager" nonsense. Jayne lives with her husband and three psycho kitties (qu'est que c'est) in quite a small lakeside cottage in western New York state. When she's not writing or "managing," she enjoys loafing/watching movies, cleaning up after the psycho kitties, designing web sites, reading, and making magic. E-mail