The VHS Recorder Brings Digital Media to the Home

This seemingly benign event marks the beginning of what I argue is one of the most significant shifts in the history of human thinking: our love affair with digital devices. These devices, made for the home, ushered in an era marked by a new relationship with digital devices and computers. VHS (Video Home System) allowed for the playing and recording of analog video on cassettes invented by the Japanese company. The technology set off the maturation of mass media, enabling digital media to enter people’s homes on a mass scale for the first time. As these devices entered homes, society’s perception of computers significantly altered, as an inscrutable, blackbox, previously associated with war became as close to use as family and friends. VHS machines would be followed by similarly tectonic events that continue this progression of mass media entering the home, including the 1977 release and widespread success of the Apple II, igniting the personal computer era. This was instantly followed by the introduction of the video game console the same year with the Atari 2600. In 1976 Shugart Associates introduced the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive and diskette. This would become the vital storage device for computers in general as well as computer art and digital art in the 1980s. Finally, the same year would see the introduction of the LaserDisc, the first commercially successful optical storage device, which would also store digital art such as Lynn Hershmann Leeson’s Lorna.