The golden age of the family camcorder.

The first one could not show you what you had shot

Sony's Betamovie went on sale in May 1983 and it was the strangest thing in any shop that year. It recorded. That was the entire list. There was no way to play anything back on the camera itself, so you filmed your daughter blowing out the candles, carried the cassette eight feet across the living room, pushed it into the deck under the television and found out then if you had got it.

It weighed somewhere between five and a half and six and a half pounds, and it sat on your shoulder, and it could not show you a single frame of what it had just taken.

People bought it.

JVC answered in March 1984 with the GR-C1, the first VHS-C camcorder: a small cassette, twenty minutes to a tape, and playback built in, so you could finally squint at the thing you had just filmed without going indoors. It is the camera Marty McFly is holding when he films the DeLorean in Back to the Future the following year, which tells you how fast it became the shape the future was supposed to be. By 1985 Panasonic, RCA and Hitachi were all selling full-size shoulder-mount VHS machines that swallowed a full-length VHS cassette, and the family camera could suddenly run for longer than any family could stand.

Before it, three minutes and a wait for the post

To understand why a camera that could not play back felt like a liberation, you need to know what it replaced.

Kodak had launched 8mm in 1932, in the middle of the Depression, by taking 16mm stock and running it through twice: a cheaper film for a poorer decade. A standard fifty-foot reel gave you three or four minutes. Super 8 arrived in the spring of 1965 with a plastic cartridge you loaded without thinking, fifty feet again, three minutes and twenty seconds at eighteen frames a second. Sound did not turn up until 1973, as a magnetic stripe down the edge of the film, and a longer two-hundred-foot cartridge followed in 1975.

Three minutes, then the camera was empty. And the film went away to be processed, and you waited, and the birthday came back to you some weeks after the birthday.

Against that, a machine that ran for hours on a cassette you could buy with the groceries and watch the same evening was worth carrying on your shoulder. Nobody thought it was heavy. They thought it was fast.

For years, most families had nothing to play it on

This is the part the nostalgia skips, and it is the best fact in the whole story: the camcorder turned up before the audience did.

Sony had launched Betamax in Japan in May 1975 and in the United States that November. JVC announced VHS in Tokyo in September 1976 and had it in shops by the end of October. But the machines went into homes slowly, in a way that is genuinely hard to picture now. Nielsen put VCR ownership at roughly one American household in a hundred around 1980, and still fewer than one in ten by 1983, the year of the Betamovie.

Then it broke open. Inside a decade the thing went from a curiosity to furniture, and the footage finally had somewhere to land: a yellow, white and red cable trailing across the carpet from the camera to the back of the television, and everybody sitting down at once, because there was one screen and it was that one. By November 1988, 62 percent of American households had one.

Dad, narrating

Every family's tapes contain the same footage, shot by people who never met.

The slow pan across the buffet table, narrated. The lens cap, on, for the first eleven seconds. The floor, for two minutes, while a conversation about the oven happens at head height. The zoom pushed all the way in until the child is a soft peach smear, then hauled all the way back out. The date burned into the corner of the frame in that particular glowing orange, a year wrong, because nobody reset it after the batteries died.

And the operator, breathing, right up against the microphone, asking a four-year-old to say hello to the camera, and the four-year-old declining, at length, in what is now the funniest thirty seconds anyone in that family owns.

Nobody designed that house style. It fell out of the constraints. A camera you held up until your arm ached, a tape you had paid actual money for, a microphone mounted an inch from your own face and three feet from everything you were pointing at.

By the end of the decade there was enough of this material sitting in enough houses to build a television programme out of it. America's Funniest Home Videos went out as an ABC special on 26 November 1989 with Bob Saget presenting, and as a weekly series from 14 January 1990, handing over a ten-thousand-dollar prize for the best thing somebody's uncle had filmed by accident. A country sat down on a Sunday night to watch strangers' home videos.

Wedding videography became a real trade over the same decade, for the plain reason that the equipment finally existed and the day only happens once.

The label was the entire filing system

A tape had a label on the spine and another on the face, and what went on them was ballpoint, written fast, usually by whichever parent was nearest the drawer. CHRISTMAS 94. SPORTS DAY. HOLIDAY, DO NOT RECORD OVER.

That last one existed because the other thing everybody did was record over. A cassette was a physical object with a finite amount of room and a price on it, so it got reused, and the label got a second layer of biro across the first, and somewhere underneath a taped-off film is fourteen minutes of a grandmother who has since died.

A tape got labelled in ballpoint, which is a kind of caring no filename has ever managed.

It was a terrible system and it worked, because the unit it organised was not a clip. It was an occasion. Nobody labelled a tape IMG_4471. They labelled it with the name of the thing that had happened, which meant that finding it later took no skill at all, just an arm and a shelf.

The weight came off, a year at a time

Sony had started shrinking it almost immediately. The Handycam CCD-M8, in 1985, was the lightest camcorder in the world when it launched: about two pounds, against roughly four for the things it was sitting next to on the shelf.

Ten years later the picture went digital. The DCR-VX1000 of 1995 was the first consumer MiniDV camcorder, and did something no home camera had ever done: it moved video onto a computer over FireWire without wrecking it on the way. Digital8 followed in 1999, putting a digital signal onto the old 8mm shells so nobody had to abandon their cassettes. Hitachi's DZ-MV100A brought the first DVD camcorder in 2001.

Each one was lighter, sharper and easier than the last, and each one sold to the same person: the parent who had decided, once, that this family was going to be filmed.

The last real camcorder barely was one. Pure Digital's Point & Shoot went on sale in May 2006, was renamed the Flip a year later, and did almost nothing on purpose: no tape, no menus, a plastic arm that flipped out into a USB plug, and a red button. Cisco bought the company for 590 million dollars in 2009. Nearly five million Flips had sold by September 2010, which briefly made it the biggest camcorder brand in America.

It ended on a Tuesday in April

The phone did not win by being better. The original iPhone, in 2007, could not record video at all. Not badly. At all. When the 3GS finally added it in June 2009 it shot 640 by 480, which a fifteen-year-old MiniDV tape beat on every measure you could name. It won because it was already in the pocket, which turned out to matter more than any spec sheet.

The family camera stopped being a thing you bought and became a thing you already had. On 12 April 2011, Cisco shut the Flip down, one day before a new model was due to reach shelves.

The tapes are in the loft and they are on a clock

Conservation estimates give magnetic tape a working life of roughly ten to thirty years, and heat and humidity can pull that down to five or ten. Most family tapes have spent their retirement in a loft or a garage, which are the two worst rooms available. Funai, the last company on earth still building VCRs, stopped in July 2016.

So: get them digitised. Services exist, and they are not expensive relative to what is on the tapes. VideoBro does not digitise anything. We do not touch physical tape and never will. If a transfer lands on your phone as an ordinary horizontal video file, tap + and it goes onto a tape like anything else you shot.