What's a VHS tape?
Really big cassette tapes for videos. Cassette tapes are kind of like, um.... kind of like a giant "unbound" hard disk drive you read horizontally. Oh... shit... and a HDD is like a uhh.... uhhh.....
Ummm... Hrm. Okay. So, like say you take a bunch of photographs and tape them together.... and a photograph is like a uh... semi-transparent picture on a special "film" (it's like glossy see-through paper with a bunch of chemicals [and I guess they used silver?]). VHS tapes are a lot like that. Yeah. Anyway, people would take these tapes and put them in a big electricity-gulping black box ("futuristic" versions of these giant boxes were sometimes silver) which spun the taped-together pictures and somehow got the picture from the VHS box to a TV using "analog" signals, which just meant they're really inefficient and your image would look fuzzy and distorted. People used these around the time of CuRved Televisions (CRTs) where they used a type of glass screen which was actually curved instead of flat! Behind this blurry curved screen was a buzzing ray gun of some sort which had to be frequently adjusted because the picture would move off the screen. Anyway, back then, people were actually trying to get these ray guns to blast them directly in the face, which is where "don't sit too close to the TV, you'll burn your eyes out" came from. Of course, that was way back when the Americans produced TVs.
