/diy/ - Do It Yourself

I thought this was pretty cool. I bought my grandmother's house out of the estate and I found this. It's the remote from a vcr, circa 1997. It blew my mind back then, mostly cause I had never seen it before. The big gimmick knob in the middle was temporary fastforward/rewind. The position I'm holding it in now would be the fastforward. It has some kind of spring or recoil in it so that when I take my thumb off it spins back to play. If I remember correclty it was supposed to be able to show frame by frame, but we could never get it to work. I also believe the speed was affected by how far the knob was rotated.

I just thought it was interesting, never saw anything like it before or after on a vcr. It mystified me as a kid, like those old rca stereo receivers where the knob moved when you turned up the volume with the remote. Now I realize things like this aren't hard to accomplish, but back then it fueled my interest in electronics.