Oh god, I just aged several years in a single second, a friend of mine sent me a snippet from a fic that read someone put a VHS into a VCR and took so long getting back to it to press play that the menu screen had looped multiple times

every time I think maybe I am putting too much effort into researching the details of technological advances I lived through, something like this crosses my dash

For the young whippersnappers who don’t understand the issue, VHS tapes don’t have menu screens. That is not technologically possible on a tape.

A magnetic tape works because information has been magnetically encoded on the tape. The tape is very long, and is wound around two little spools, one at the end, one at the beginning. In the middle is a part where it is flat and there is a thing called a ‘head’ and it reads the magnetic encoding on the bit of the tape next to it and converting it into sound and/or images. When the tape plays, the little spools wind/unwind so that new sections of tape are constantly being run past the head. Every single thing a VCR can do is a function of controlling which part of the tape is next to the head.

You put the tape in the machine and press play on the machine, and it plays. You press stop and it stops. You press play again and it starts playing right where it left off, because while it’s stopped the tape is not moving past the head. You can pause it instead of stop it, which will leave the frame you paused on on the TV (in contrast to stopping, when the screen goes dark). You can fast forward, and it will wind the tape forward towards the end. You can rewind and it will wind the tape back to the beginning.

in my experience it usually played automatically on being fed a tape, and you had to pause or stop it to prevent this, which was awkward sometimes when the tv volume turned out to be set way too high

unless of course the tape hadn't been rewound before being taken out last time. then, unless auto-rewind was a feature of the VCR in question, you had to push that button first to get back to the start so the movie was watchable.

also if you wanted it to rewind quickly instead of playing the entire film backwards, silently, at maybe double speed, you pushed 'stop' first and it lifted the tape away from the reader to respool at speed.

#reminds me of the fic#where they went to great lengths to make it clear pictures were being taken on film

#and then someone took the camera away and 'looked through the pictures'#to see what they were of and if they were Forbidden Content#and then gave the camera back like no harm had been done and i'm like

#so she...didn't rip the film out and ruin it? then what just happened?

#OH. OH THIS CHILD HAS NEVER EXPERIENCED. NOT DIGITAL.

Also with VCRs you could ruin a tape by pausing too long in the same spot, once pause became a thing (pretty sure pause did not exist on our first VCR when I was a kid). Or wear it out by playing it too many times.

Some VCRs would automatically un-pause after a set time to prevent this; from memory, some of them would just go to "stop" but others would resume play regardless and it was super annoying.
This would probably be the closest equivalent to the scenario in the original post - you started to watch, paused, then took so long to get back to it that it had started playing again and you lost your place.

I remember when I went to my friend’s place as a kid specifically because his VCR had frame-by-frame, and ours didn’t, and I really wanted to see the Enterprise-D blow up slowly.

Also marketed where VHS Rewinders, to help save wear and tear on your machine, but I was specifically thinking of this model another friend had.

I found 100 Analog magazines from the 80's and 90's at the Worcester Savers, here's some of my favorite covers.