One of those factoids you often hear about Southeast Asia is that VCDs and Laserdiscs were more popular than VHS tapes. The cited reason is usually mould, on account of their tropical climates. But there was more to it.
For starters, what are VCDs and Laserdiscs? One of them is an initialism, and the other one is a word that sometimes employs camelCase. Initialisms are distinct from acronyms, in that you don’t pronounce them as a word. Laser is an acronym, and ATM is an initialism. camelCased words are so-named because the uppercase letter midway through a word bears a resemblance to the named animal and its distinctive hump.
I remember at UniSA I had a lecturer who insisted our variables and class definitions useCamelCase , and another lecturer insisted_on_underscores . Remembering which person wanted what was a constant struggle, especially when I’d have NetBeans open and I’d be working on both assignments simultaneously. NetBeans is also camelCase!
Where was I going with this?
Tapes in Singapore
VHS tapes were everywhere when I was a kid in Australia. Much like the US, it was how our parents handled “time shifting”, which was a fancy term meaning “skip ads and watch stuff later”. My parents would receive care packages from recorded Australian TV when we moved to Singapore, at least until we got The Australia Network on cable. It’s wild to me to think people can simply move overseas and interstate now and watch the same intertube programming, but that’s a different post.
VHS was definitely used in Singapore. You could walk into Sim Lim Square or a Best Denki and get your tapes alongside cassettes for your Walkmans. They came in all the same formulations and lengths as what you get overseas. I had local friends who’s parents had walls of the stuff, much as mine did. I remember being fascinated by the carts with traditional Chinese spines from Taiwan, mixed in with handwritten notes about English shows.
VHS tapes were also significantly cheaper than back in Australia, presumably in part because they were made locally, or at least geographically closer. Heck, I even saw Betamax tapes for sale, despite the heyday for the format predating when I lived there. Fun fact as those YouTubers say, Singapore was once the largest manufacturer of floppy disk drives! Not bad for a country smaller than most Australian farms. But I digress, again.
Hot fuzz
While VHS was used, it wasn’t as popular as optical formats.
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