Last known VCR maker stops production, 40 years after VHS format launch
Source: Ars Technica
40 years after the first VHS video cassette recorder rolled off the production line, the last known company making the devices is ceasing production. According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Funai Electric, a Japanese consumer electronics company, will give up on the format by the end of the July after 30 years of production.
Declining sales, plus a difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts, prompted Funai Electric to cease production. While the Funai brand might not be well-known in the west, the company sold VCRs under the more familiar Sanyo brand in China and North America.
Funai Electric began production of VCRs in 1983 following the unsuccessful launch of its own CVC format in 1980. While CVC had its strengths—its quarter-inch tape made its machines smaller and lighter than VHS machines, which used half-inch tape—VHS and Betamax were strong competitors.
At its peak, Funai Electric sold as many as 15 million VCRs per year, but last year only sold 750,000 units. That VCRs were behind sold at all still comes as something of a surprise, not only because VCR has been superseded by two far superior formats—DVD and Blu-ray—but hard disk-based personal video recorders have rendered its one advantage, the ability to record content easily, obsolete.
Read more: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/07/vcr-vhs-production-ends/
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What do they say now? "Playout the file"?? 
That's what I ended up doing.
But then I wanted to be able to go from VHS to DVR and then DVR to DVD so I could deploy edits before burning the DVD, so ended up with that too.
Have a long bucket list of tapes to transfer! Still have tapes from 1985. They look awful on a HD TV though. 
I said something about getting rid of it and a co-worker snapped it right up.
We had an old stereo at another office that had an 8 track. The teenage son of one of my co-workers saw it and said in amazement "Is that an 8 TRACK?!" like it was some ancient relic. Of course it was
Now I need my stepson to help me with the cable.
I remember when my parents first got one in the mid 80s. It was an old Sears VCR like this one.
Apologies on the small size, this was the only image I could find.
Back then it was over $300 for a VCR. This one had a remote but it could only stop, play, rewind, fast forward, record, and pause. VCRs with remotes with channel changers were over $500. I remember this VCR was set for channels 2 to 13 but we wound up changing several of them so we could tape some of the UHF channels we had. There was the door on top of the chassis that had the dials you used to tune each channel. It had a sheet with all the channel numbers which you could put in the little tray that displayed the channel numbers.
Despite all its shortcomings it allowed us to tape different things and to rent movies to watch instead of having to wait for the edited for television versions to be aired every once in a blue moon.
I was so glad when we got a new VCR a few years later for about 1/2 the price that had a remote you could change channels on but now I miss that old VCR a bit.
We still have a couple VHS VCRs. There's a combo VCR/DVD in my office and my mom has a TV with a built in VCR/DVD combo built in. I think I used it a couple years ago to watch the fan made MST3K episode on Star Trek V before I was able to make a DVD copy of the movie.
all the interesting things that got stuck into the VCR slot, inevitability leading to the eating up of VCR tapes. For one, my nephew decided the slot was a sandwich and cookie chute. 
.....Don't be a hater.
