For some reason, this reminds me of the origin of the term "footage", when referring to filming something. In ye olden days, film was measured in feet. So to capture video on film, you were using up a certain amount of footage/length of film.
Put another way: The fields of modern digital audio file metadata contain keys descended from the specific features of data-storage technology from 1912.
And people think it's odd that we still use the floppy disk icon to mean "save".
This got me thinking: Does this mean that kids these days aren't doing the banana telephone thing? I'm young enough to never have seen a telephone (as opposed to a mobile phone) other than in movies and museums, but maybe I lived in sufficient temporal proximity to the era of wired telephones to have banana telephones as a part of my childhood.
Laserdiscs were huge for being able to stop on a single frame - I worked for a place that used them for language teaching, so you had to stop dead on a sentence for it to make sense. At the time mpeg could only stop on iframes that could be 10 seconds apart, and paying to get iframes mastered where you needed them was mucho expensive (even decoding required hardware.. mpeg encoding in software was a pipe dream).
Compressed video still has this problem to some extent but it's mostly worked around in software.
Also the hardware to interface to a PC was basically a simple analogue capture card and a serial link for the control. Cheap, at least compared to the mpeg decoders of the day.
For sure! The first time I saw my animation professor pull out a laserdisc, I started to have doubts on my colleges budget, but damn, crisp, clean frame by frame of Bugs Bunny. Couldn't be beat!
Another fun fact: They were often not A side and B side on a single disc, but something like A side and F side. You put the whole stack on the record player spindle, it feeds one down, plays the top side, feeds the next down, play the top, and so on. Then when all the top sides were done you flipped the whole stack over and did it again. Each 78 only had enough room for about 5 minutes per side.