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Someone has been watching Applied Science.
They probably would have gotten better sales had they marketed the product for audiophiles as a HD audio medium.
Being contact / stylus media they kinda skipped. My dad had a friend with one and it was interesting to hear about. Stylii (styluses?) were expensive and the disks very rapidly wore out so it would be a tough sell.

Its interesting that to the best of my knowledge nobody commercially tried digital encoding on a contact/tonearm media, at least on a serious scale. That might have been interesting.

Its amazing how "kid friendly" VHS tapes are compared to nearly anything else. Not too small, tough plastic, touch almost anything and nothing happens, an excellent UI.

> Its amazing how "kid friendly" VHS tapes are compared to nearly anything else. Not too small, tough plastic, touch almost anything and nothing happens, an excellent UI.

You've never fished toast or coins or keys or pens or raisins or breadsticks out of the machine? That slot was large and inviting.

We had one while I was a kid. It was pretty great, actually. We may have actually had two (an upgrade) now that I think about it. The funniest part was that it was a two-sided format, so you had to "flip" the movie over at parts. It got to the point where you knew the breakpoint was and instinctively starting walking to it just before the flip point. Longer movies took multiple cassettes.

For a kid, it was pretty easy to use.

Another great thing was the large crates required to store your collection. It was very satisfying to try to find your movie.

A short discussion about these on HN a month or so ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364797

FYI HN recently added a "past" link that takes you to previous discussions.
That's a nice idea, but it doesn't say until you click whether there are any previous discussions. Better to have someone point out the uncommon case where there's something interesting.