Were you ever a "tapehead"?

^ ha, me & my brother did the same thing, except we'd tape the chart rundown, time how long the gaps were between each song, and then take it in turns to hit record & jabber away over the dj bits while the other one was in charge of the watch. so organised!

My daughter, the serial obsessionist, carefully taped complete runs of X-Files, Buffy and Farscape, but ditched them all when the DVDs became available. She was careful to get everything in order -- if she missed an episode, she'd put that tape aside and wait however many months it took for FX to get back to that spot in the rotation.

I used to know a guy who collected radio stations. He'd travel all over the country by car with five or six portable AM/FM/cassette decks and record station IDs at the top of the hour. Apparently there is a community of these folks, though I'd never heard of such a thing until I met him.

I bought some unlabeled VHS tapes at the flea market once and one of them was hours of home shopping network footage of woman's shoes/clothes. v creepy.

My parents were tapeheads cos a VHS cost like a hundred bucks when they bought their first one, and we were lower-middle class so for the most part if we wanted a movie we'd tape it off TV or dub it from the dollar rental place if it was something really good (like Flight of the Navigator or Conan The Barbarian or something). Eventually we got into taping Ghostbusters cartoons and I remember editing out most of the commercial breaks. Of course now there are whole youtube channels devoted to 80s commercial breaks.

I need to capture this one tape my dad made of some good 80s NOVA episodes on Chaos Theory and Einstein. The tape also includes a wonderful special on then-current computer graphics.

Around ten years ago I was talking about 120 minutes with a friend who let me borrow his 2-dozen tape collection of episodes, which I compiled onto a 2-hour videotape. At the time I was also dubbing art films from a local TV channel.

VHS = VCR