According to the National Day Calendar, today is National VCR Day. A day to celebrate that revolutionary device that not enough of us have any more.

I recall thinking how cool VCRs were when they started appearing in schools. And how I thought my friends must be rich when they started to have them in their homes. My first VCR was a giant tank, bought secondhand from a thrift shop.

Later, of course, they became inexpensive commodities, sometimes even built into televisions. It was an odd occurrence when someone didn't have a VCR, except maybe those old people who didn't seem to get new technology; whether that meant understand or participate is something I'm starting to learn is a difference I didn't understand as a kid.

Time-shifting became a thing, and we were no longer slaves to network television schedules. Before that, if you didn't catch something when it was broadcast, you had to wait for it to be rerun. After that, you could schedule a recording and watch it later, at your convenience. If you were ahead of the game, you'd record a series on a single tape, and watch them all together; the precursor to binging. Or share them with friends.

We've been doing some housecleaning. A box filled with VCR tapes was just shuffled around. Some time-shifted home-recorded, some purchased favorite movies. These are intermixed with DVD and Blu-ray disks. None of which we have the equipment to use any more. Well, I think maybe one or two of the laptops might have DVD readers in them, if they're not old enough to be just CD drives. There is a Blu-ray drive in one of my desktops (I just checked), but it functions as a server, and doesn't have a graphics card or software to allow playing any movies--it's strictly a storage device, not used since I got my big server (that doesn't boot via USB) configured.

Ah, technology gone by. So much as come, so much has gone. The kids don't know what they've missed.

Everyone is healthy.