Enquiry Desk

Welcome to the Virtual Museum. If you this is your first visit, please read the first section to find out the different ways you can explore it.

How to explore the museum

There are four ways you can navigate this site:

Credits

Total Rewind was created by Andy Hain, with contributions from David Browne. We are both thirty-somethings; Andy is a Software Engineer, David is an illustrator.

The museum is based on our collection of old video hardware. We started collecting them at boot sales and junk shops just for fun, because they were wierd (and cheap) and it was challenging to find out how they worked and if they could be got going again. After a while, we started to discover the richness of the history behind the technology, and began to hunt down specific machines in order to fill in the gaps in the story.

Eventually we had so many machines, and so much information, that we decided to do something creative with it.

Contact

Andy and David live in Brighton, on the south coast of England, and can be contacted at the following addresses:

andy@popadom.demon.co.uk
db.illus@mcmail.com

Feel free to mail us with comments, suggestions, contributions, or just to say hello.

Links

Here are some sites with some kind of relation to the museum.

BETAMAX

The BetaPhile society - the (now defunct) american Betamax fan club:
http://condor.lpl.arizona.edu/~vance/betaphile.html

Some other US Beta fans:
http://home.earthlink.net/~videoholic
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/6263/index.html

And some similar Beta pages in the UK:
http://www.palsite.com
http://www.elektratec.demon.co.uk/home.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/6263/index.html

V2000

A sub-page of the betamax fans' palsite:
http://www.palsite.com/v2000/index.html

CED / Selectavision

Looks like there's a very active Selectavision community, at least in the US:
http://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html

Misc

The Farnsworth Chronicles - the startling story of who REALLY invented television.
http://www.songs.com/philo

DiscoVision - a collector's page for the early US version of the LaserVision format
http://www.oz.net/blam/DiscoVision/MCA_DiscoVision_Welcome.htm

PhonoVision - a remarkable site, by the man who "cracked the code" of Baird's TV records - TV signals on 78rpm records, from the 1920's and 30's. Includes animations showing the actual original recordings!
http://members.aol.com/mcleandon/tv_index.htm

Various "old sad stuff", from a fellow fan of obsolete technology. - currently very weak in video stuff, though
http://www.gifford.co.uk/~coredump/oldsad.htm

Another video museum, this time concentrating on proffessional hardware & systems
http://home.pacbell.net/ricdiehl/rnd001.htm

Wish List

We have managed to track down nearly all the machines which seem to us to be significant firsts, or which demonstrate some important stage in the development of home video. But there are some rarities which still elude us, and if anyone can help us locate them we will be eternally grateful.

Please let us know if you have an example of the following machines - dead or alive! - or anything else which you think we might be interested in.

We are also interested in any stories about early home video - was your uncle one of the lucky few to have a VCR machine in 1974? Did you buy a LaserVision player, only to discover that there were no discs available? Did you invest in a V2000 deck the week before the format was cancelled?

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