The VHS tape did not win because it was the better picture. By most technical measures Betamax was sharper, and for a while that seemed as though it ought to settle the matter. It did not. VHS offered longer recording time and a lower price, and those two ordinary advantages beat the finer image outright. It is a lesson the exhibit returns to often: the format people can actually afford, and that holds the whole film, tends to outlast the one that merely looks best on a bench.

What VHS built around itself mattered as much as the tape. An entire ritual economy grew up on its cassettes. There was the rental shop with its walls of boxes, the weekend trip to choose something, the small anxiety of the late fee, and the quiet social contract printed on a sticker: be kind, rewind. Watching a film became an errand and an obligation, a set of small courtesies owed to the next borrower. None of that was in the tape itself, yet all of it depended on the tape.

And it was the last mainstream video format where finding a scene was genuinely physical work. There was no chapter menu, no scrubbing to a thumbnail. To reach a particular moment you held the button and waited while the reels whirred, the counter climbing, the sound fast-forwarding into a chirp. Locating anything took time measured in whirring minutes, and you learned the shape of a film by how far along the tape a scene lived. When the format faded, all of that friction went with it, replaced by instant menus and infinite copies. What the VHS tape preserves, then, is the memory of effort: an era when even rewinding was a small labour, and watching something was a thing you did on purpose.