Social issues and the moon race took precedence over consumer technology development during the turbulent 1960s. But as the last strains of Watergate and the first notes of disco were heard, corporate engineers and physicists in Japan and mathematicians and tinkerers in the San Francisco Bay area were marching to very different drummers. The effects on daily life from the two disparate technologies – home video and the personal computer – that these disparate groups of geniuses were conspiring to create ultimately would be as profound as radio and the telephone had been in their time.

While the public battle over color TV was being waged, a smaller skirmish was being fought to develop videotape recording in three labs: RCA; Bing Crosby's Labs, headed by audiotape pioneer John Mullin; and, Ampex. In April 1956, a six-man development team at Ampex, headed by Charles Ginsburg and including a young college student named Ray Dolby, shocked the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Chicago with the first black-and-white videotape recording machine, a desk-sized device that had taken five years to develop.

RCA traded its color TV technology for Ampex's video recording technology to produce the first color videotape recorder a few years later. During the next 20 years, several companies, including RCA and Sony, attempted to bring some kind of video recording system into homes, but consumers were resistant to reel-to-reel and film-based solutions. If video recording was to become a home device, it would have to be simple and convenient – a cassette, for instance.

Koichi Tsunoda, a Sony engineer, first proposed the idea of a videocassette in 1964, after seeing Philips' audiocassette. But the question was whether consumers were interested in recording TV programs. There also were legal issues to resolve – was it legal to record copyrighted programs off the air? In spite of such questions, several companies raced to bring some sort of home video recording system to market.

It was clear by the mid-1970s that videocassettes made the most sense. But there were two companies perfecting non-compatible videocassette formats: Sony, with its Beta system, and JVC, with its Video Home System (VHS), developed by chief engineers Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano under the tutelage of cathode ray tube pioneer Dr. Kenjiro Takayanagi. Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Matsushita, JVC's parent company, failed in his attempts to get the two companies to agree on a single format.

So, in February 1976, Sony introduced the first Betamax VCR in the United States, telling consumers, "Now you don't have to miss 'Kojak' because you're watching 'Columbo' (or vice versa)."

Two movie studios, Disney and Universal, promptly sued, claiming that home video recording constituted copyright infringement.

Nearly two years after the Betamax was introduced, in October 1977, RCA unveiled its Matsushita-made VHS SelectaVision VCR. The Yuma Shiraishi machine improved on the Sony Betamax by offering not only two-hour recording (the Sony could record for only an hour) but four-hour recording as well. RCA executives told Matsushita engineers that this longer speed was required to enable Americans to record an entire football game. RCA marketing executive Jack Sauter made sure that each machine was packed with prerecorded tapes, including one of Muhammad Ali's greatest fights. RCA backed the introduction with a $4 million advertising campaign. In six months, the VCR format war was practically over. Sales of VHS machines caught and passed Beta as the video-recording format of choice. By the summer of 1979, VHS was outselling Beta by a margin of two to one.

But some entrepreneurs discovered that people didn't necessarily want to record programs as much as they wanted to watch movies. Andre Blay started a company called Magnetic Video with 106 licensed titles from 20th Century Fox and offered them for sale via mail order. Allied Artists released 100 titles on tape soon thereafter.

In December 1977, a Los Angeles entrepreneur named George Atkinson opened the first video rental store, The Video Station. A year later, the store was so popular that Atkinson began to sell franchises. At the end of 1978, Fox recognized the goldmine it was sitting on and bought Blay out. In 1982, entrepreneur Stuart Karl convinced actress Jane Fonda to make a video of her popular exercise book, "Jane Fonda's Workout", initiating a home exercise craze in offerings from such diverse self-made exercise gurus as Kathy Smith, Billy Banks and Richard Simmons.

As the VCR became more important to the consuming public, the Hollywood establishment that fought it bowed to its inevitable benefits. In January 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded 5-4 that VCRs were legal products and that home taping of copyrighted works fell under the "fair use" exception to copyright. While Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA), legislative attempts to codify the Betamax decision and fair video recording rights still are pending before Congress. CEA (at that time known as the Consumer Electronics Group of the Electronic Industries Association), in cooperation with the Home Recording Rights Coalition, protected the legality of home recording and promoted the acceptance of the new technology.

Hollywood studios also established home video divisions to reap the profits from a technology it once considered a threat. Blay's idea sparked a retail revolution as hundreds of mom-and-pop video rental and sales stores popped up in every community in America. In 1987, video rental income reached $5.25 billion for the year, surpassing movie theater ticket sales for the first time. Today, movie studios regularly make more money on a film from home video sales and rentals than from the theatrical box office.

During the next five years, advancements such as visual fast forward/rewind (1978), front loading (1980), wireless remote control (1980), stereo (1981), hi-fi stereo (1983), improved definition with Super Beta (1985) and Super VHS (1987), digital special effects (1986), digital PCM recording (1987), and on-screen program guides called VCR Plus from a company called Gemstar (1991), were added to VCRs.

In August 1992, the 100 millionth VCR was sold. It had been just 17 years since the Betamax had been introduced; it had taken 25 years for 100 million TV sets to be sold.

Ironically, although the VCR was designed as a device to record television shows, most consumers didn't time-shift. They used the device to watch pre-recorded movies. The reason: VCRs were difficult for many consumers to program. In fact, many users never even bothered setting the clock on their VCR, leading to the flashing "12:00" on the VCR display to become a national cultural touchstone. And the flashing numbers on the VCR, along with the alphanumerical displays on all home electronic devices, are made up on little light-emitting diodes, invented by Dr. Nicholas Holonyak Jr.

Holonyak learned of research on how semiconductors could generate infrared light in the late 1950s. Holonyak believed the technology could have a greater impact if people actually could see the results. In 1962, while working at GE’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, N.Y., Holonyak developed the red GaAs1-xPx, otherwise know as the light-emitting diode, or LED, which used crystal alloys to make semiconductors emit red light visible to the human eye. Holonyak’s red LEDs first were used commercially in the Hamilton Pulsar watch developed with Monsanto in 1972 and in Mattel's Electronic Football Game. LEDs in other colors soon followed.

LEDs produce more light per watt than both incandescent and halogen lighting sources, making them more environmentally friendly and cost effective in the long run. LEDs last an average of ten times longer than incandescent bulbs and are threatening to replace other chemical-based lighting technologies in flashlights and household light bulbs.

In 2005, a research center was set up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop Holonyak’s proposed LET – light-emitting transistor. LETs enable optical and electronic functions to be integrated on a single chip and could lead to the development of optical computers that can run 1000 times faster than today’s electronic computers.