GoKawiilI recently started thinking about VCRs, as you do. I'll spare you the train of thought that led me to this, but it started with a conversation about worsening eyesight and then it escalated from there.
Anyway, VCRs. I still remember the first VCR my dad bought when I was a kid. And in fact, I remember many times when my dad (and later me, once I had some money of my own) bought a brand new tech device that was state of the art at the time and that we'd never seen or used before.
I remember the first VCR entering our home. And the first microwave oven. The first cordless phone. The first PC (running Windows 95) and a few years later, the Internet. My first CD player. The first time I saw a video being played back from a DVD and how much better it looked than one on VHS. I remember when we had a satellite dish installed on our roof and all of a sudden we had something like 30 TV stations to choose from instead of the five or six we received before that via terrestrial broadcast, and the quality was better, too.
I remember the first wide screen TV my dad bought, and later the first flat screen TV. I remember my first laptop and my first mobile phone. The first mp3 player.
In the first 20 or so years of my life, dozens of new technologies and tech devices entered my life, and I was incredibly excited by all of them, because they all represented progress and they all were an improvement over what we had before.
The cordless phone was better than the one wired into the wall, because now you could go to your room or sit down on the couch and have a phone call there, instead of having to stand in the hallway where the phone was.
DVD was better than VHS. Better quality, no rewinding, the discs didn't wear out and you got tons of extra features on each disc.
CD sounded better than Cassette and Vinyl records. No rewinding, no pops and scratches, no tangled-up tape.
An mp3 player was better than a discman. Smaller, lighter, holds more music. Doesn't require lugging around a bunch of discs.
But in the following 20 years of my life up until today, these instances of discovering some brand new tech that was better than what came before became rarer and rarer. In fact, I only remember two things from the past 10+ years that I started using that were really a brand new product category for me: Smartphones and noise canceling headphones.
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