What's the equivalent now?

The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 513 points –
76

For me it would be a new external hard drive for all my data hoarding

at their peak, a 5 pack of vhs would cost like 6 bucks, so the equivalent today would be more like a 32gb sd card.

Got some 18TB WD’s over Black Friday weekend for $260 or so a pop 🥰

Slightly more expensive than VHS then

Probably cheaper per recording. That HDD can hold a lot more shows than many, many tapes.

I remember getting a stack of blank CDs for christmas. Loved it. Burned so many CDs, made my own mix tracks, gave them out to people I liked and they returned in kind. Shit was cash.

Anyone is free to gift me HDDs or SSDs.

In fact, if anyone wants to contribute to my holidays present with random computer parts, be my guest.

Don't even have to be new parts. Just whatever you have laying around from the last few years.

I've built one working computer from the remains of three.

I'll take my chances.

Same, my media server has been ship of thesused out of my past few desktops.

How many leftover working parts were there, or was it a perfect fit with no surplus?

It was pretty much a junkyard special.

One computer donated the tower and optical drives, another provided RAM, CPU and one HDD and the final one provided motherboard and another HDD.

PSU I had already laying around from yet another junker.

the equivelent now is a 2TB ~ 8TB External Solid State Drive.

1 tape using SLP could hold 360 minutes.

LP it could hold 240 minutes.

So if you were poor there'd be tapes with 4.5 movies worth of terrible quality movies in order with one tape holding the first half of Hellraiser 2 and another holding the second half lol.

A five pack of blank tapes would be $20. So $20 essentially 700mb shitty cd sized video files for a movie. 4.5x5 = 30 movies at 700mb. 30x.700 = 21gb of storage.

A platter drive currently gets about $7/tb if you're going budget. $20 = ~3tb of storage.

142x the storage for the same price. And you can splurge on nice 1.4gb 1080p x265 rips instead. 3000/1.4= ~2143 movies for the same price lol.

E: Let's not even get into the cost of renting first, and owning two vcrs lol.

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so Scotch, the tape company, also sold tapes? 🤨

It seems weird, but makes sense. They already had the equipment to make long, thin ribbons of plastic, after all.

Scotch is more of a brand name. 3M is the parent company, and they make nearly everything

It's been so long since I have seen one of these that I forgot that Scotch was more than just an adhesive company.

Why get new tapes when one battered and war-torn tape is all you need? Especially the part where you guess (incorrectly) what's safe to copy over, angering your family. Make sure you set the record speed properly!

More storage for the media server NAS, which I then share with family and friends.

I'm buying you the cheapest used hard drives from ebay coupled with the SSDs from wish.com.

... I'll make sure to have enough redundancies 😬

That graphic design awakens some memories

The equivalent would probably either be something like external hard drives or thumb drives. That, or going online and finding blank VCR tapes, CDs, or DVDs for sale. I assume it's harder for VCR tapes, but I know you can still find CDs and DVDs at some stores.

I got lucky because towards the beginning of fall quarter at the college I attend, they were getting rid of an unopened stack of blank DVDs for free. Such a great gift, despite me getting them for free.

I'd still love to get an LTO drive and some tapes for christmas.

You got a 5 pack of VHS tapes? When I was a kid, I once got one VHS tape as a Christmas gift. And it was awesome. Because it had a plastic cover and everything.

Still sits on my childhood home shelf, with that Christmas episode of Garfield and Friends at the beginning. Can't remember what else I recorded on it.

My buddy gave me a VHS camcorder and VCR for Christmas in like 2015. My favorite thing to do with them was to buy VHS movies from the thrift store and record home movies over them, but each time I would start to record I would randomly fast forward a minute or two. It was kinda cool and trippy to watch goofy shit we'd do and then it phases into a random scene from Edward Scissorhands before going back into the next adventure of ours.

Break it out during the holidays and find out!

As long as they didn't also have one of those camcorders that connected to a full-size VCR on a shoulder strap, all powered by mains power. Who knows what's on that tape.

You'll never forget the Christmas you saw your own conception. Only fitting.

I recorded hours and hours of Headbangers Ball on mine

And I think I might have used the exact tapes in the picture

8/10 people in developed nations would love a 64gb SD Card, a lot would also be thrilled over a pack of USB Memory cards or even a 32 or 16 gb micro-SD with normal SD adapter card. Is it micro or mini? I get them confused but one of those works for a lot of stuff and the other hasn't been produced since 2009.

if youre a vhs enthusiast like i am its actually dtill a great gift lol

I was listening to a podcast and this older guy who used to tape trade, was saying that in the early 80s, VHS was new and a good player would cost like $2k in today's money. A blank VHS tape used to go for like $50+each. New Hollywood movie releases on VHS in those days were around $80

I got a 10-pack of 3.5" floppies at one point.

Man that's like 14.4 megs of storage!

More like 4.32 MB of storage and a spare.

You don't really have your data backed up unless you make 2 more floppies!

RAID-10 with floppies and a flotilla of whirring drives.

Still are, I'd love if my family got me some blank tapes for Christmas

A gift card? Like Play, Apple, Xbox, Playstation, etc.