Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.
But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.
DVDs too. If I never burn another DVD again, that will be A-OK with me. I hate having to babysit those. Give me a hard drive, USB, or server to move data all day.
Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.
Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC's hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.
DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.
Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.
I still see it in the courts, both criminal and civil. It seems to make more of an impact on judges and juries, because all the lawyers love whipping out the cd and sticking it in the ancient little laptop they plug into the tv on the cart like the teacher rolled out in the 80s and 90s.
Honestly I really miss being able to record live TV with a VCR. I still watch tv with an antenna, mainly for football games, and it would be really nice if there was a way I could record them. Whenever I've looked into making my own DVR it just seems too expensive and confusing.