From [today’s LA Times](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-vhs-tapes22-2008dec22,0,5852342.story):
> On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.
> …
> The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs and, in more recent seasons, the latest upstart, Blu-ray discs.
VHS was how I saw most movies growing up. Not just classic movies, but the R-rated ones I couldn’t see in the theater. I can trace my screenwriting career directly back to a rented copy of WAR OF THE ROSES, which I rewound and transcribed, amazed to realize that *somebody wrote that.*
Still, I have almost no nostalgia for the VHS format itself. With its springs and gears, each tape was built to fail. I can’t think of another technology that seemed so inelegant even when it was new.