Now that it's Christmas Day, some of you will probably be looking for a flat-panel TV or a Blu-ray player under the tree.
But it hasn't been so many years since Santa was filling orders for VCRs and Sega Genesis video-game systems.
I was reminded of how much entertainment technology has changed when my editor dropped a copy of Consumer Reports' 1998 Home Entertainment Buying Guide on my desk. She had unearthed it from her basement (insert joke about journalists' organizational skills here) and figured I'd get as many chuckles out of it as she did.
It's probably a sign of advancing age that 12 years doesn't seem that long ago to me, so it's amusing and a little surprising to see how far our home entertainment options have come in that time.
In 1998, Netflix was still figuring out how to offer videos by mail. Amazon.com was where you bought books. If you wanted to record a TV show, you set your VCR. If you wanted to own music, you drove to a store to buy a cassette or a CD.
The late-'90s state of the art is represented on the guide's cover by a boxy Panasonic TV hooked up to a pair of speakers about as tall as the TV set, all bathed in dramatic red, green, purple and yellow lighting. Funny, I was a homeowner in 1998; I don't recall disco lighting being a home-decor trend.
The guide was already warning of the end of analog TV and predicting that the digital video disc player -- too new to be universally abbreviated DVD -- might eventually supplant the VCR and the CD player.
A 32-inch TV set was selling for $600 to $1,500; a basic camcorder for about $500. Cassette decks and personal CD players were still desirable items, and VCRs could be had for about $150 to $250 -- or more, if they had features such as VCR Plus+. (If you paid a premium for that add-on in 1998, I'm sorry.)
