Last Major Supplier Calls It Quits For VHS

thefickler writes "The last major supplier of VHS videotapes is ditching the format in favor of DVD, effectively killing the format for good. This uncharitable commentator has this to say: 'Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly. But they ushered in a new era that was important to get to where we are today. And for that reason, the death of VHS is rather sad. Almost as sad as the people still using it.'" At least my dad's got the blank-tape market cornered.

Comments

Re:No players on the market

[drinkypoo]

Consider, for example, the letters and diaries written during the Civil War with electronic forms of communications related to the recent war in Iraq.

I suspect that relatively few letters written during the Civil War are related to the recent war in Iraq, and that even fewer of them were written with electronic means.

The former is housed in museums and is repeatedly poured over by writers and scholars of every sort

Usually, people try to avoid pouring things on historical documents.

while the latter is stored unceremoniously in Outlook and Yahoo inboxes, on transient blogs, and similarly transient backup tapes of White House email servers.

Or on gmail.

Riddle me this, Batman: how many of the digital data storage devices that we discard are destroyed when we are done using them?

In fact, using nothing more than electron microscopy and a lot of processing, it's possible to read overwritten data.

It is highly likely that some new branch of physics, or even one not yet fully exploited like quantum mechanics, will give us still further abilities in this realm, to the point where we are able to recover still more obscured data.

In summary: Pay more attention to what you are writing.