My Origin Story — How I First Got Interested in Tech
• bigDoodR
Not long ago, my kid borrowed some DVDs from our local library. We have streaming subscriptions — several of them — and most of what they picked up could probably be found on one of them without much searching. But they wanted the discs anyway.
Honestly? It warms my heart. There’s something about physical media that clearly resonates with them, and watching them browse titles and come home with a stack of cases scratches a very specific nostalgia for me. Our library has quietly become the thing our video rental store used to be — the place you go to pick something out, take it home, and watch it over the weekend. That ritual meant a lot to me growing up, and I didn’t expect to see a version of it come back around.
The library doesn’t charge late fees the way rental stores used to — unless something goes unreturned for over a year, at which point you’re just buying the item to replace it. Low stakes by comparison. But it still got us talking, and somewhere in that conversation I found myself trying to explain the era I grew up in — the one before streaming, before DVDs, before any of this — where the economics of watching a movie at home were genuinely strange. And that navigating those economics was, without me realizing it at the time, the beginning of my interest in technology.
So here’s the origin story.
The World Before You Could Just Watch Something
If you wanted to watch a movie at home in the 1980s, you were working within a system that had a lot of friction built into it.
A new release would play in theaters for a few months. Then it would disappear — not to streaming, not to DVD — just gone, into a kind of commercial purgatory while studios maximized their revenue at every tier. You might catch it at a cheaper second-run theater. Eventually, maybe 6 months to a year after the theatrical release (sometimes longer — E.T. didn’t hit home video until six years after it came out in theaters), it would show up at a rental store.
And then, a few months after that, you could finally buy it.
VCRs themselves were a significant investment. Early in the decade they ran $700–$1,400 depending on the model. By the mid-80s competition had driven prices down to the $200–$400 range — still real money, but suddenly within reach for a lot of households.
The tapes at rental stores were priced accordingly. Studios charged stores $50–$90 wholesale per tape, so if you lost or damaged one, the store wasn’t just charging you $20 — they were charging you $100, sometimes more, to cover their cost and then some. (And yes, those same tapes were available to purchase in stores for $20. The math was intentionally uncomfortable.)
This was the landscape. Expensive hardware, limited availability, punishing fees. Not exactly a golden age of consumer-friendly media.
The Part Where It Gets Interesting
Here’s what people figured out.
VHS tapes had a small tab — a notch on the spine of the cassette — that, when intact, allowed you to record over the tape. When you snapped that tab off, the tape became “read-only.” Studios used this to protect their rental copies: break the tab, and no one can accidentally (or intentionally) record over their copy of Back to the Future.
Except that if you placed a small piece of masking tape over the opening where the tab used to be, the VCR couldn’t tell the difference. Recording enabled again.
That was it. No soldering, no software, no special equipment. Just a piece of masking tape and the knowledge of what it was doing and why.
Combined with a second VCR — which, yes, meant having two of those expensive machines — you could duplicate a tape. Record OTA broadcasts, cable movies, whatever you wanted. Fit three or more movies on a single tape using the extended play modes (SP was 2 hours, LP got you 4, EP/SLP pushed to 6 or 8). A little degraded in quality, but watchable.
I was a kid, and this felt like a revelation. Not because of what I was recording — though that part was great — but because of what it represented. A system with rules, and a completely simple, obvious workaround hiding in plain sight. The rules weren’t laws of physics. They were just… assumptions. And assumptions could be questioned.
The Thread
I didn’t think of it in those terms at the time. I was just a kid messing around with tapes. But looking back, that curiosity — why does this work the way it does, and what happens if I do this instead? — is the same thing that eventually pulled me toward computers, toward understanding how systems work, toward a career in technology.
The masking tape trick wasn’t hacking in any meaningful technical sense. But it was the same instinct: find the seam in the system, understand what’s actually happening underneath, and see if there’s a different way through.
My kid listened to some version of this story and seemed mildly entertained at best. That’s okay. But I think about those Friday evenings — picking up a new release after school, watching it that night, rewinding it, watching it again, and yes, sometimes figuring out how to hold onto it a little longer than the rental window technically allowed. There was something magical about that. The anticipation, the ritual, the tangible thing in your hands.
The library has brought a little of that back. And the fact that my kid sought it out, in a world where they could just tap a screen and start watching anything — I don’t know, I find that quietly wonderful. They’re not doing it for nostalgia; they weren’t there. They just like it. Maybe the ritual speaks for itself.
What was your first “wait, I can just do this?” moment with technology? I’d love to hear it.