I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, and strange thoughts seem to stick in my head. So here’s the bit from last night.

Over 20 years ago, my parents bought a VCR. It cost well over $1,000 (a Hitachi) and was probably as heavy as a microwave oven now. It picked up the usual 13 channels plus a couple of UHF (you set the frequency by opening the little door, flipping the switch to VHFL or VHFH and then turning the wheel).

That may seem limited, but our town didn’t have cable, and “cable ready” had not been invented yet. As far as I know. You could program it to record off the air. This involved a complicated set of button presses to confirm your programming choice. On screen programming? Ha. It didn’t even say “Play” on the screen when you hit play. It did have a remote. Which was nice since you had to adjust the tracking on every single movie.

Now the cool thing is that you could now watch movies whenever you wanted. It was fifteen miles to the nearest video rental store (down in Dallas) and you literally had to leave a deposit with them in order to rent a movie. This made sense, since a new movie (on VHS, not Beta, be careful or you’ll be embarrassed in front of your girlfriend) cost $80 or $90. I think you were allowed to keep the movies for two nights or so.

We had a friend from where my dad worked who would sell movies. He had a list of movies, and you told him what you wanted, and a week later or so you got the movie – actually, two movies on a four hour VHS tape. No, he didn’t have a web site. We didn’t have a web then, of course. (We DID have a computer, with 8″ disk drives and no hard drive and a built in monochrome screen, and a dot matrix printer. I had a modem with the rubber suction cups that you put the phone handset onto after you dialed the phone. 300 baud.)

I remember watching things like Arthur, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and yes – Airplane (this was how I met my wife, but that’s another entry). You know all the hoopla about “downloading is stealing” and all that? As far as I know all these bootleg copies of movies 20 years ago had a minimal impact on movie studio profits.

I remember watching “Last Tango in Paris” – and it wasn’t the “R” version you get now at Blockbuster. Yeah, I was a wild teen.

So why, I’m sure you are wondering, did these thoughts pop into my head at 3 in the morning? Because last night I sat and watched a DVD of a Pixar animated movie on a laptop computer with a wireless broadband connection while my wife (whom I impressed 20 something years ago with a bootleg copy of Airplane) sat in the other room and watched Harry Potter on DVD.

This is pretty high tech shit, I thought to myself. We’ve come a long way since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now I need somebody to tell me I’m not old.