The end of the VCR? WHO. CARES. But maybe you should

News from Japan: The last company to make VCRs is shutting down production. If you know what a VCR is, you don't care, but if you don't know what a VCR is, you really don't care. Into the teeth of massive indifference I will now sail, and tell you why this matters.

First, some history. Once upon a time, everyone had to watch TV when the shows aired. Families got together and ate dinner from aluminum trays (often including apple cobbler), and watched a merry show about a typical American family just like them — except funny. And they didn't eat out of foil rectangles. Everyone would laugh together and then the news would come on and the mood would be spoiled by war and Richard Nixon.

These were the good old days, because everyone in America watched the same show. The next day at work you could say "Hey, Bob, did you catch Dick Van Dyke?"

"You mean 'The Dick Van Dyke Show?' "

"I do indeed, fellow American. Boy, that Morey Amsterdam got in a good one when he referred to Mel's baldness, didn't he? And you had to laugh when Sally's desperate spinsterhood was reflected in a joke about the bad date she had."

"Don't we have this conversation every week?"

"We do, indeed, and that's what provides the social glue that binds the culture together. That, and regular churchgoing."

The VCR changed all that, because you didn't have to watch a TV show when it was broadcast. You could go out to dinner and think "While I'm enjoying these TGIF appetizers, my VCR is recording a show to be watched later. It's like 'Star Trek' come to life."

We take this for granted nowadays. No one watches TV as it happens. There have been times I've sat down to watch a TV program, realized it's just starting, and thought "Well, this won't do; I'll have to watch commercials." So I read a book, checking my watch to see if the show was over yet. (By "watch" I mean "phone," which to the old-TV-paradigm age is like saying "I think the oven's on. Check the typewriter.")

In the olden days, you taped a show. But after a while your tape degraded, because you'd recorded 90 hours of "General Hospital" on the same cassette. So you'd get a new tape. Man, there was nothing like opening up a fresh VHS tape, sliding it out of its plastic sleeve, carefully removing the label, sticking it on crooked, cursing, peeling it off to try again, and tearing it. Well, you never wrote anything on the label anyway. If the label said "Miami Vice" it was probably six hours of NFL.

You saved all the tapes because they might have something you wanted to watch someday. You never did. Kids today may recall a shelf of VHS tapes at their parents' house, some prerecorded ("The Best of Tim Conway!"), some homemade from Dad's VHS camera, which he bought in the hopes that someone would get a lawn dart to the thigh some summer day and they'd win the Arterial Puncture division of "America's Funniest Home Videos."

Everything on those tapes is going to be lost. The format has been dead for years, but the end of the machines that play the tapes means the tapes may soon be useless. Oh, for years you'll find the machines at Goodwill; you'll be able to buy them online secondhand. But eventually they'll all break and the tapes will be like Edison wax cylinders — a wealth of information that cannot be retrieved.

It's entirely possible that by 2079, up to 96 percent of "The Best of Hee Haw" compilations will be unwatchable. History will not forgive us.

Unless they watch the surviving 4 percent.