The long, final goodbye of the VCR

New York

MANY new technologies are born with a bang: Virtual reality headsets! Renewable rockets! And old ones often die with a whimper. So it is for the videocassette recorder, or VCR.

The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corp of Japan, said in a statement last Thursday that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of "difficulty acquiring parts". The Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported on the impending demise earlier this month.