A closer look
Ampex Corporation introduced the first commercial video tape recorder in 1956, and this monstrous piece of technology known as the VRX-1000 was literally the size of a piano and retailed for an eye-watering fifty thousand dollars. Long before the era of sleek living room DVD players and invisible digital streaming services, early television networks had to deploy these massive, humming, heat-generating mechanical beasts just to delay live broadcasts for the West Coast. The magnetic tape it used was two inches wide and spun at blistering speeds that frequently caused it to snap and violently whip around the recording room. It is honestly a miracle of engineering that humanity managed to shrink a machine originally requiring its own dedicated ventilation system and a team of frantic technicians down into a tiny glowing rectangle in your pocket that streams cat videos on demand in full 4K resolution
