We got our first VCR in 84’. I think they had just started to hit the mass market as affordable at that time. Our local Kmart had a promo where if you bought one they gave you a free membership to a brand new video rental place next door. Otherwise membership was something like $100. I think the rental place had a total of less than 100 titles to choose from. And only 1 copy of each.
I think I made my Dad rent Dreamscape about a dozen times.
Believe it or not, every VHS tape ever made* was recorded at 1x time. A 60 minute tape took an hour to record. Look up “VHS Duplicators” - there were warehouses with rack after rack of these beasts - the largest, I believe had something like 10,000 of these machines, all fed the same signal (boosters in the distribution wiring). These initial order for Titanic was 40,000,000 copies. This was a two-tape set. Every duplicator in the country was churning out Titanic for a week or so.
To answer your question: they had auto loaders which would hold 5 blanks at a time. the machines could spit out the recorded tapes. Yep, people with carts going up and down the isles feeding the autoloaders. (don’t know if they had to pick up the recorded ones, or there was a track which carried them down to get labels). In the mid 90;s I got my hands on a single head and a dual head duplicators - got bounced from ebay, but did go a long way in getting the 11 Warner Bros cartoons not seen since 1968 into many hands.
Yes, they were set to ignore Macrovision - these were perfect copies - aside from the write-protect tab and the label, it was impossible to determine which was the master and which the copy.
*there were high-speed duplicators - their quality was unacceptable for a paying customer, but was good enough for salesman instruction (how to sell this new piece of crap) and motivational crap.
I bought my first VCR when I moved into my first apartment, in 1978. It was $1000, and it had a remote with a looooooong cord that connected it to the recorder. It usually ran all the way across the room.
When I was a kid in the late fifties and early sixties, my dad had an 8mm projector and we had a Felix the Cat cartoon and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon that he would show at birthday parties.
That was it for “home recordings” for us in those days.
The Cartrivision system was demonstrated on “What’s My Line?” in 1972:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEjhiOk2XI
One of the problems with Cartrivision is that movie studios were still leery of “selling” their product to consumers, so most movies could only be rented, not purchased, and couldn’t be rewound on home machines, so no second viewings either. Some tapes could be purchased outright (and rewound, I would presume), but public interest wasn’t there and the system was discontinued after about a year.
Bit of trivia: measure your VHS (or Beta) tape - it is 1/2" - NOT a metric dimension.
I believe it was Motorola who invented it. When the brass was told it would take 5 years to bring it to market, they scrapped the project and sold the rights to Sony (stupid Japanese will buy Anything - the suckers!).
Sony developed both Beta and VHS. Originally, Beta was a superior product, so they sold the rights to VHS to JVC - they really should have known better. It didn’t take JVC long to bring VHS to the same image quality - and they buried Beta by licensing about everyone to make VHS players.
The Cartrivision cassettes were also unusual in that the two reels were stacked top-to-bottom instead of side-by-side as in more familiar Beta and VHS cassettes and home audiocassettes
I remember renting a VCR in 1984 but I didn’t own one until 1988. Most of my friends were in a similar situation. With very few exceptions, the people I knew got their first VCR somewhere between 1985 and 1990.
It happened in the 80s. OP witnessed history in the making.
Well, the Sony U-matic cassettes were 3/4 inch, which isn’t metric either. Are any magnetic tapes sized in metric widths (I have no idea)?
But here’s another interesting bit of trivia. The Sony U-matic VCRs were later used for recording digital audio on their video channel via PCM adapters, the first of which was the Sony PCM-1600 introduced in 1979. The use of the 44.1 Khz sampling rate common to all CDs owes its origin to its compatibility with the horizontal video sync rate, since these machines were used in the early days of CD mastering. It meets the requirement of no more than 3 samples per line and direct compatibility with both PAL and NTSC. It works out like this:
For NTSC video, 245 active lines per field x 60 fps x 3 samples per line = 44,100
For PAL, 294 active lines per field x 50 fps x 3 samples per line = 44,100
Macrovision is a series of products. The original form, which dinked around with the AGC signal in the blanking interval, didn’t affect Betamax machines which didn’t copy that part of the signal anyway.
Yet another reason why Beta Is Better.
I remember watching “scrambled” channels via my Betamax, tweaking the tuner just right to get a stable-ish signal.
Got my first Betamax in 1982. Extremely rare for me to rent anything so later disappearing selection at video stores didn’t matter. Odd that I rent more DVDs from RedBox in a year now than video tapes total. (Of course the price is right. Especially with all the discount codes available.)
Still have two working machines. I’ve been digitizing some old tapes. The capture software will all-too-often mistake a glitch on the tape (especially a brief blank spot) as Macrovision protected and halt the copying. Grrrrrr.
8mm was a standard for consumer use vodeo.
I remember a comic which came out after the Supreme Court decision allowing home video recording. It showed a character removing a bumper sticker from his car that read, “They’ll get my VCR when they pry my cold, dead finger from the eject button.” 
Sometime in the 60s someone developed the technology to record black and white TV on a cassette tape. I think a second tape was needed to record the audio, and the amount of video that could be put on a single tape was pretty limited. Unsurprisingly I never saw this commercially available. I knew someone who had acquired a small commerical reel-to-reel unit in the 70s. It was also black and white only. I saw what I assume was a Betamax being used in 1978. Another lack of surprise that the guy was playing porn tapes on it.
Just another 2¢: I seem to recall reading an old Billboard magazine from the late 1960s that had an ad for some kind of videotape recorder. The cost was $3K - $4K, so obviously not available for John Q. Public.
I vaguely recall hearing about those very early home recorders, which I think involved fast-spinning reel-to-reel arrangements. Also recall a TV Guide article about the challenge of building home videotape recorders because of the high bandwidth required by the video and hence the very high tape speed required. It’s as though nobody had ever heard about helical scan, which was in use in commercial studio videotape machines since 1956. Which was just how Sony developed it using cassette tapes, first for the U-matic, then in the Betamax in 1975. Incidentally, the U-matic was initially conceived with the idea that this would be the first consumer VCR, but it was just a bit too far ahead of its time and turned out to be too expensive, so it was repurposed as a business and commercial broadcast product and became very successful in that market.
My relatively recent VCR (made while DVDs were coming into vogue) did this on its own, without me doing anything. On the actual TV, you could sorta make it out, but when recorded on VCR, it was about as clear as a somewhat worn VCR tape or a (analog) TV channel that wasn’t quite clear on rabbit ears. Plus you could actually hear the audio, which you absolutely couldn’t just watching on TV.
I have always wondered why it was able to do that. I know the VCR didn’t have any advertized descrambling features.
(And, yes, the reason I a scrambled channel late at night while I was asleep is exactly what you think it was. I was a young teen, and it was the first I’d seen.)
The earliest known home video recording is from 1933, of a BBC special.
I split the difference with my parents and bought a VCR in October 1979 when they were pretty new and expensive. It was a Quasar top-loader VHS with a timer, and cost $1000. A friend of mine bought the same unit without the timer, and it was only $600.
Dang thing weighs about 40 pounds, but was trouble free. Early blank tapes cost about $16 a piece at the time - pre-recorded movies about $75.
A year or so later, many places started carrying VHS movies to rent, but before there were regular rental stores, you would often see a shelf or two behind the counter at your local gas-and-shop, and just pick up something there.
I still have the monster sitting under the old TV, and I guess it may still work, but it hasn’t been fired up since about 1995 or so.
We got our first VCR in 1982, just after son #1 was born. It cost a fortune (>$1,000) and the tapes were very expensive as well. We got a ‘deal’ on 10 tapes for $150. The machine itself weighed a ton and it had this stupid counter thingy which was supposed to allow the viewer to know where they were up to in a recording. Later on that counter counted minutes recorded - what a great idea!