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Comment by nirav72 | Hacker News Reader

I bet the reaction was similar to what my teenage kids had when I showed them some VHS tapes I found in storage.

The initial reaction was - What is that? How do you play the video? I happen to have a old VCR in storage and a USB 2.0 capture dongle. Hooked it up and showed them some old family videos. So their final comment was - why is the video quality so bad?

What was their reaction like, for those of us who don't have teenagers at home to repeat the experiment on?

It might have been similar to your reaction when you saw (depending on your age):

a floppy disk (3.5")

a floppy disk (5.25")

a floppy disk (8")

I'm flattered, but you're only speculating, and at least for me this is not helpful.

It does not tell me what their reaction was, which is a little sad, because I am curious what happens when somebody for whom Facebook is ancient tech encounters video cassettes.

FWIW, I thought 8 inch floppies were weirdly big, but that's just a different form factor. It was normal to use floppies, tape or vinyl records for data and media storage. These days things are magically beamed through the sky in the most normal fashion. I think video tapes may seem a little weirder than just a larger box.

(The person I asked originally replied while I was typing the above. Their reply is in a sibling comment to my original question.)

There are reaction videos on YouTube, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kesMOzzNBiQ

It's generally "how do I dial?", followed by them trying to press the holes in the dial, and, when told to rotate it, they rotate it to dial before picking up the handset.

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