I asked a friend what she thought about the idea of VHS dating. She looked at me blankly and said, “What’s VHS?”

“OMG, never mind,” I said, rolling my eyes as my mind did a quick whiplash back to the late 1900s. To the family room of the house I grew up where a plastic woodgrain cable box with exactly 42 channels and a Betamax video player sat on top of our Sony Trinitron television.

“It’s state of the art,” our father told us long before the term itself became a cliché.

Our father bought in to the technology so hard he even got himself one of the early Betamovie camcorders, a contraption he hauled around on his shoulder like a pet chimp.

“This is what the pros use,” he said. He pooh-poohed VHS despite the fact that the format cost less and had a longer runtime than Betamax. Which, of

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