Nope that’s not it. The cassettes were really weird by today’s standards. The two reels were situated front to back on the cassette rather than side by side as on Beta, VHS and the ones pictured in your link. They were deeper than they were wide. They were about two inches tall and there was a recess at the front on the top 1/2 of the cassette where you could grab it with thumb abnd fore finger to insert it. Total dimention would be about 8 in deep, 6 in wide and 2 in tall. I think it had one of thise pop-up modules where you put the tape and then the whole thing would be pulled down into the box.
I had the thing for years after it stopped working just for curiosity sake but I have no idea anymore who made it.
We have a Betamax! My Sleeping Beauty tape was on Beta, so were our Star Trek (original series) episodes and our Mel Brooks movies and a lot of others!
My family had a Beta when I was little (at least ~1987, probably earlier). We kept it for ages, even after we got a VHS player too, though we may not have used it as much after that. (I just vaguely remember trying to put a VHS tape in the Beta player and being a bit upset that it wouldn’t fit.) Once the thing finally bit the dust in the early 90s, my parents sold it and the tapes at a garage sale.
There was a third video system around in Europe for a while . This was the Video 2000 system developed by Philips. A very good system ( I owned one ) but like the Beta system this was killed off by VHS.
I bought one in 1987 or so when the wars were still raging. Everyone in my family had bought one in the early 80s, so that’s why I bought one. It was still in perfect working order when I bought my first VHS several years later. If it weren’t for lack of availability of rental tapes, I wouldn’t have done it.
We bought a Betamax before we bought a VHS. In fact, our Beta was about 5 or 6 years old when we bought our first VHS. The fact that three VHS machines broke down and our Betamax was still going, recording my programs every single day (the VHS machines were too) and it outlasted three VHS machines one after the other. It still works, we just haven’t hooked it up again. I’m using it on my film stuff now.
We owned one one when I was in high school back in the late 1970’s. It was very cool to actually be able to use it to tape television shows to “have” them to watch later. We timidly began rather timidly with commercials, I remember… maybe we were afraid we’d break the machine or something!
As we are not a gadget-oriented family by nature, the thing fascinated us. We held onto the thing long after it no longer worked and eventually unloaded it when we moved, if I remember correctly, at a yard sale years later.
my dad used to work for sony when i was younger, and instead of bonuses he’d get electronics. we still have the betamax, and tapes to go with it (a bootleg copy of ‘the little mermaid’ is somewhere in the house) but we never use it. i wonder if it works…
I had a neighbor in the early 90’s who had at least two Betamax machines. Never thought much of it, but I remember seeing blank Betamax tapes at the grocery store. I don’t know how long my neighbor held onto them; I stopped going over there when he broke my toys and lied about it. Kid was a compulsive liar, but that’s a story for another day.
A friend of mine has a betamax, which I have borrowed on occasion to watch a movie which is ONLY available on beta. There are a few which were put out on Beta, and then ended up in legal limbo before VHS was popular.
Beta is beautiful, but now in the same way as British TV.
