Like that infamous “ET” torrent in 1982 where it involved a “pirate” sneaking a huge JVC camcorder (with a VHS reel) recording the entire movie in theaters, given this was before DVD’s existed (don’t even ask about pirate bay, those weren’t available yet). The same applies to “torrented” music, one would have a spare tape cassette recording the song played via the radio, that’s how they torrented content back then if they can’t afford an official copy.
Only millennials or Gen X who were kids back then would’ve encountered or witnessed VHS or Cassette “torrents” from either friends or family and often or not, piracy in the pre internet days was rife even before torrent sites were a thing. There are VHS “torrents” of TV shows or series (placing a camcorder which faces the TV screen with a spare reel recording the entire show (ads included), then used to fast forward upon replay.
Wowza. “Torrent” being synonymous with “warez” was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Ddit: maybe just “copy” was the word it was replacing? Unexpected either way IMO.
I dunno, I think this is just an OP thing?
To me, something has to be shared over a computer network using the bittorrent protocol to be ‘torrented’.
You’d never say sharing something with Napster or limewire was ‘torrenting’.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen someone (mis)using the word “torrent” when asking about piracy in the 90s.
i completely agree. its just the wrong term. when op said “et torrent recorded in the theater” i assumed someone digitized an old pirate vhs and put it up on torrent.
but this may just be like the term “vhs player” where the kids these days have no reason to care that it was called a vcr.
also i could be wrong, but i always understood warez the be more a software thing, and not just any media.
Strictly speaking,a VCR is a video cassette recorder. If it doesn’t have recording capability, it’s just a player.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that couldn’t record, though.
My parents “pirated” all the time when I was a kid. We’d generally have no more than basic cable (usually just antenna). There would be free weekends for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime back when there was only one of each. My parents always had blank 8hr VHS cassettes and they’d record three movies to each. They recorded on SLP or EP mode (depending on the VCR model) to get that much time per cassette and it would end up with the crappiest quality ever. If you think VHS is shit quality, watch a movie on EP mode. Our movie collection was pretty extensive, but 90% of it was this.
You’d have to remember to reset the counter when putting in the tape and fast forward to a specific counter time written on the cassette in order to see the movie you want. My favorites were always second or third.
I vaguely remember talk of Dad climbing the pole to connect the cable himself but that went away when cable boxes became a requirement. There was also a time when he ran a coax from the neighbor’s apartment and we split the bill. That didn’t last long though because that neighbor moved.
My parents were sailing the seven seas back when your only option was a row boat.
My (58yo) VHS cinéphile collection was freaking extensive. Back then, as today, we didn’t watch TV but I bought, and scrutinised to no end, the program & set the VCR to record. I always had blanks, 3h for long movies and 4h for 2 “normal” ones. When we moved countries, at a time when DVDs where a thing, a friend of mine asked to keep the tapes because it was so good. Every Hitchcock, every Bogart, every Kubrick, every… You name it. Series even.
Yeah quality was shit, but “tomb of the fireflies” and “princess bride” totally made to the deepest of my heart, until today and forever. At work I had “Singing in the rain” as a testing tape - each time I used it, you had everyone passing in front of the beamer stop, and watch.
Emotion trumps quality.
My parents had a A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back VHS tapes that they recorded from TV showings… but not ROTJ. I spent like 2 or 3 years worrying about Han because we didn’t have ROTJ lol.
Psst, torrenting was invented in 2001. Back in the old days of which you speak it was entirely sneakernet (sometimes you’d rent the mail’s sneakers).
“Torrents” doesn’t mean “piracy,” it means the bittorrent p2p protocol specifically. If you download something today off Usenet it’s not torrenting.
Recording music from the radio (or video from tv) at home was not and is not piracy/illegal. In fact it is part of your rights when you buy a blank cassette.
To this day almost all countries recognize this right to home recording. As long as you aren’t acting to circumvent a copy protectionion system you are good to go.
camcorder at the tv gives such ugly picture. that’s for n00bs.
i was the one in my family who figured out how to connect vcrs together to copy… “family home videos”. i was 10 btw. adults were useless. 1980s Will Smith was right when the said they just don’t understand… (now though, he just don’t understand)
if i didn’t have to go to school, i could have put blockbuster out of business.
Back then you wouldn’t necessarily sneak anything in, you’d bribe the projectionist (cash, ass, or grass) to set up in the booth and line-in the audio feed with a splitter. Then you’d sell it to the guy at the flea market who would make copies and sell for the low.
im a 90s zoomer cusper and we used vhs well into the mid 2000s. its not just millenials or gen x.
probably half our vhs tapes were recordings of tv broadcasts or other tapes. the one i remember most was a recording of rankin-bass rudolph, commercial breaks and all. (and it technically isnt piracy, as the US supreme court determined in 1984 that private home recordings counted as fair use.)
Didn’t have it for ET but for Disney movies that weren’t published on VHS at all because in my region they just kept rereleasing Snowwhite and Jungle Book in theaters periodically.
I’ve recorded songs off the radio too. I have copied VHSs as well later in life when a buddy had to bring over their recorder so we could hook them up to each other.
And the first music torrent was in maybe 7th grade and up. Somebody would get a new CD for their birthday or xmas and after a couple of weeks of exclusive listening Guns’n’Roses or Metallica would go from friend to friend where everybody got themselves a copy on cassette tape. There would be strategic planning like you get Michael Jackson (we didn’t know back then) and you get U2 or whatever around December.
Late '80s. We would coordinate who would buy which cassette album and then go to the person’s house with the best “dub” deck and make copies. There was 2x and maybe even 4x copy speed but the quality would suffer. Usually good enough for our shitty car stereos though. 90 minute tapes could normally get an album on each side. IIRC the high quality blanks were about $1.50 each if you bought a 10 pack. $8 for a tape of a regular band or something older like Led Zeppelin, $12 for a brand new hit album.
Making mix tapes for your crush was HUGE at the time. Hey, if I can’t write poetry at least I can make her a cassette of love songs, right?
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I remember having a pirate copy of A Bug’s Life on VHS, which started with a menu. I wasn’t old enough at the time to realise it was taped from a DVD
I had some friends who would go on holiday and come back with VHS tapes with badly photocopied covers. The films were really bad quality as well. I was too young to understand what piracy was so I just thought that really bad videos were normal in the country to which they were going.
And you were right!
Of course I know them. It was me.
I had a stereo with the double vcr setup. I’d rent movies and copy my favorites.
My experience is more late 80s, early 90s as a kid/teen. We recorded tons of stuff on VHS from cable TV and shared with friends and it was extremely common. It’s similar to how people use DVRs only you end up with a more portable copy if you want to share it. DVRs took away that sharing capability on purpose to increase cable and streaming revenue. Sure VHS was lower quality, but at that time cable wasn’t great either and HD TV’s and content weren’t common. Cams from movie theaters just wasn’t realistic and theater was still about the experience way more than it is now with everything just extra loud and flashy if you go to one.
I also copied stuff on cassette to share or to make it more portable since I had a cassette walkman. Sometimes that was from radio, but that was harder since you didn’t have a guide to what was coming up. Either you had to sit there and hope a song played that you wanted and then rewind if it wasn’t one. Or you had to copy from one cassette to another and further lose quality with analog copying. More common was making mix tapes either from original purchase cassettes or CDs once I had a CD player. Then BMG and copycats came along and everyone cheated the free trials to get a ton of free music before torrenting came along later.
My Aunt brought us back a bootleg copy of Return of the Jedi from Saudi Arabia in 1983. I remember helping my Dad hook up two VCRs and continuously running copies off for a whole weekend so he could distribute them at his work on Monday in rural NSW Australia.
