Vintage

Today, I've decided to finally bid farewell to my Toshiba VCR. When it cranked up, it made the same loud whirring noise it always did, but tapes would not play. It also started to smell pretty funny. Time to send it to that big electronics warehouse in the sky.

As you can see from the photo below, it's an older model. 1989, to be exact. At the time the M-7900 was one of their better models. It tipped the scales at around 20 lbs., and was gosh-awful expensive at list price. In 1989, I had just entered the working world, and earned what was (at the time) a pretty good salary. I was happy to have finally escaped school, and I decided to splurge and buy a VCR - my first VCR. I picked this one up at a scratch & dent sale - there was a big scratch across the top, but it worked great. It was able to play "Hi-Fi" sound, be programmed on the TV screen, and and had a host of other features that were pretty spiffy back in '89, but are now found in VCRs (where you can still find them) that retail at 10% of the price (not to mention 10% of the weight!).

Compared to later models, it was very noisy, hot, and slow. It had a ton of editing features that probably nobody in their right mind would use. It had cool-looking but unnecessary features like sound level LEDs. But it was a graduation/"I got a job" present to myself, and I was pretty happy with it.

Actually, there was another graduation/employment present I bought myself - my first 35mm camera. Up until then, I had a crummy 110 (anybody remember those?). I went out and bought a Minolta X-700. Though I now shoot a lot of digital, the X-700 is still my only 35mm, and gets pretty frequent use.