hey did you know that "software" used to mean "prerecorded videotape"? it's true! in the early days of home video, the purpose of tape was mostly to record TV broadcasts and self-produced material, but there have always been companies selling videotapes with stuff already on them, and the industry needed a word for that. I assume they borrowed it from the computer industry, which had been in full swing for some time already; it seems very unlikely that they would have independently coined it.

In any case, it was in heavy use by 1971, and I've found it still in use as late as 1984. In fact, what got me started on this today was a friend linking a Japanese article eviscerating the concept of a widescreen TV, which uses the term "video soft" - soft being a common Japanese shortening of "software."

A few interesting peripheral notes:

• That same article makes the point that wide TVs aren't wide, they're short. This is very valid, because in the world of CRTs, there was a fairly hard cap on tube size. The biggest generally available ones were 40" and I don't believe those showed up until the very last days of the technology; in the 90s, you were looking at more like 36". "Widening" the tube beyond that point was not practical, so in reality, a 16:9 CRT was at most as wide as a 36" set, but shorter, so when viewing 4:3 content (as in the overwhelming majority of contemporary software) you were guaranteed to see a smaller picture.

• There's also this very interesting passage: "There are three types of video software screen width:height ratios: 4:3 ( TV size ), 16:9 ( Vista size , HiVision size), and more horizontal ( cinesco size )." I assume gorgle translated these correctly, but they're very interesting ways to refer to aspect ratio that I've never seen before, specifically because they make a lot of sense. 'Vista' is almost certainly short for VistaVision, the nearly-16:9 film format that effectively replaced "Academy ratio" (4:3-ish, if I recall) as the default for Hollywood movies in the mid 50s. "HiVision", the early HD TV format used in Japan, was the first consumer video format to adopt a 16:9 ratio, so of course it would be synonymous with VistaVision. And "cinesco" is almost certainly short for CinemaScope, the aspect ratio (very close to what we now call 21:9) that came to prominence more or less alongside VistaVision. By the time this article was written, any given new movie was a coin toss between the formats. It makes sense to refer to the ratios that way, it's just weird that no layman knows these terms in the US, the place where they were invented and where the movies that popularized them were made.

• I regularly roll my eyes at the continuous assertion people make, usually without any citations, that porn is critical to every video technology's success. It may be true, but I'll believe it when somebody shows me proof, because it's the kind of titillating 'fact' that lends itself to getting repeated endlessly without anyone ever bothering to check if it's true. With that said, Billboard certainly acknowledged the potential in 1971.

• It is an interesting fact that the majority of TVs in the UK were rentals up through the 80s. Another friend of mine says that based on what he's learned, this is because early PAL sets were super unreliable and it was just not practical to sell them outright because they'd just come back for warranty work anyway; rental short-circuited the process, you simply brought your set back and swapped it for another whenever it quit working. I do not have hard proof of this but it sounds reasonable to me. Anyway, I think it's interesting that a B&W set would run you a hot One Pound per week at the time.

That whole "porn is why VHS beat betamax" thing annoys the shit out of me.

1. The story usually goes that Sony refused to allow it on the format, but Sony had no control over what anyone put on a tape. How could they? Patents for a recordable format don't give you any control about what people do with it once you sold it to them, including reselling a tape once something was recorded on it. Even if they actively hated porn on the format and refused to sell blank tapes to a porn distributor or license the patent to whoever supplied them tapes, there's nothing stopping someone from ordering a fuckton of tapes under a different name, then just recording porn on them and selling them. The story fundamentally doesn't make sense for this reason alone, but also:

2. There was plenty of porn on Betamax, and plenty of evidence of it. Like in one minute, I found a 1979 magazine ad for it. I'm pretty sure I remember hearing from someone who looked into it that Betamax actually had porn before VHS (something that would make sense given how it's an older format), though I'm having trouble finding a source for that.

3. You could already get porn for 8mm projectors since at least the 1960s, and while those projectors aren't super rare or anything, they also weren't a huge mainstream thing that took over home entertainment like VCRs, which you would probably expect if having porn videos at home was a big enough deal to win a format war.

4. The surviving evidence doesn't match the idea that porn was the big priority for most people buying home video on any format. Like I collect laserdiscs, and while there's certainly a lot of porn on the format, those aren't the most common titles. When you find someone's personal collection that they built while the format was active, it's mostly big Hollywood stuff. Like the common titles are stuff like Speed, Jurassic Park, Total Recall, and True Lies. Heck, it's more common on laserdisc groups to have someone join with a post like "Hey, my dad died, and he left me dozens of opera laserdiscs. What are these worth?"¹ than porn for sale. It really doesn't look like porn was a priority for the vast majority of people who were using the format while it was active. And while I don't collect VHS or beta, it doesn't look like a market that was driven by porn more than LD was.

1. The LD format got CD quality digital sound in 1984, so it ended up becoming a popular format for people really into opera and recorded concerts, or at least more popular than LD was for other niche video enthusiast groups.