Redbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!
Meet the Video Vendor. YouTuber [SpaceTime Junction] was able to track down one of these rare machines, which apparently formerly served an Ohio rental outlet called Kohnen’s. It’s a monstrous thing that stands taller and about three times wider than traditional vending machines, and it could hold up to 320 tapes in its robotic magazine. It’s got lashings of woodgrain, a green-on-black CRT, and the beautiful kind of clicky keys that went away after the 1980s.
[SpaceTime Junction] has a bunch of videos up on the machine, and you even get to see it powered up. It’s a little difficult to see what’s going on, because the machine is something like nine feet wide and it’s all shot in vertical video. There isn’t a whole lot of content on these obscurities out there, so this is a great place to start. Apparently, there were recently a hundred or more of these found living in a Texas warehouse according to Reddit, so we might see more of these popping up online soon. [SpaceTime Junction] has toured that facility, too.
You can read more about the fall of Redbox, or the cleanup afterwards, in our prior coverage.
thanks for the warning: vertical video…. Brrr. only good for skyscrapers, doors and people standing upright.
Somehow I have a gut feeling a video about retro-tech would have more views in 16:9 rather than 9:16 for a smartphone generation rather watching TikToks rn, fr fr.
That was my attempt at youth speak. I’d watch, but I left my vertical screen at work. Yes that wasn’t a joke, I have a 2nd one there, pivoting for reading PDF files. The only sane use of vertical viewports.
Jokes aside, it is a cool machine and great article, but my attention span suffers when I cannot fully process a video un-letterboxed.
+1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2picMQC-9E
🥲
People who shoot vertical video should be beaten to death with their own phones!
The only acceptable use for vertical video is when you are filming with a high speed camera and the image needs to be cropped down to increase the frame rate.
Ah, the project that shut down Universal Research Labs and spawned Sega Pinball and later Stern Pinball. It also created Partec, Inc. The largest pinball company and the largest arcade video company. Video Vendor was written in 48k of memory. Using the tightest of Z80 assembly language and used bubble memory for storage. I still have the source code and a HP 68000 development system.
Hey! Can you put that online somewhere? It would be awesome to see and maybe could be useful for the folks that get the recently found lot?
That’s exactly what I was hoping to see when I suggested this. I asked the guy about dumping the ROMs but he’s not up for that task. It’s likely absolutely useless, but I’d love to see the code too.
Dumping would make sense also to the owner.
Having backup copies of the ROMs shouldn’t hurt.
That being said, it’s perhaps better to let it do by someone who has a bit of experience with it, at least.
The retro gaming or vintage computing scene tinkers with ROMs on a regular basis, for example.
A TL866 or similar devices should be able to read obscure ROMs, at least.
Unless they’re very archaic types such as 2532 or 2708, maybe.
Then mechanical adapter must be built/used, maybe.
But anything 2764 and up,-as being common by mid-80s-, should be okay.
But knowing those guys building such stuff, they probably had used 1970s parts in 1985.
Because the old, obsolete parts were cheaper. Sigh. 🙄😮💨
Actually the system is a HP64000. The code is on a external drive unit. I have a 4″ thick printout which would take forever to scan. I haven’t looked at that system in 10 years. Let me look into it tomorrow.
Sounds about right, after 25 years of working on MAME it’s a story I’m tired of hearing. Some asshat more interested in YouTube clout than digital preservation, with no capability to preserve anything, comes across a piece of digital history. Makes it difficult to not break down in despair some days.
Now that would make a good sandwich machine! I would make space in my living room for that, right next to the soda machine!
Moving that for maintenance and filling the slots woud be a chore though.
Still hoping santa will be bring me a redbox machine, maybe next year.
I’m very happy that machine didn’t get destroyed.
Something similar a robotic VHS changer was in Hackers movie.
https://youtu.be/2efhrCxI4J0?si=W16z19zJrMln-eM6
I can hear Voodoo People by the Prodigy without even clicking the link.
Damn if that doesn’t look a lot like the Panasonic M2 robotic playback machines. I think they went by the name of MARC
Can’t find a photo of one however. I’ve seen one in person, but no good data online. Low count on the number made.