Technology is not created in a vacuum. As Raymond Williams argues in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, no technology has a single origin, as it pulls  from advancements in prior technologies.  8mm video cassettes are no different, as they are predicated by the first video recorder, the Ampex VRX-1000, which was introduced in 1956 (Jones 91). However, this technology was inaccessible to the vast majority of consumers because of its high price of $50,000 (Bellis). As a result, it was used in professional contexts for television rather than amateur recording (Bellis). This was followed by the more consumer-friendly Sony U-Matic in 1971, which used video cassette technology that provided ease of use, smaller size and better storage, but this too was built on the back of the developments in open reel helical scanning from Philips, Toshiba, and Sony (“U-Matic”). These advancements are made possible because of Dr. Norikazu Sawazaki’s prototype for the helical scan videotape recorder in 1953 (“Magnetic Videotape Recording”). Undoubtedly, Sawazaki’s invention can be attributed to the developments of many people in a messy lineage of contributing factors and fields (“Magnetic Videotape Recording”). That is to say, that video cassette technology was developed in a system that already had a purpose for it (broadcast television) and an understanding of recording operations which allowed for commercial evolutions until consumers could access the creative power of the technology. This nuanced lineage should be kept in mind as we look at development of the 8mm video cassette tape, because it illustrates the often slow nature of technological advancements. The 8mm format was first launched in 1984 by Eastman Kodak Co. with the Kodak Kodavision 2200 and 2400, followed shortly after by Sony’s own Video8 in 1985 (“Eastman Kodak Co. Wednesday Entered the Home Video War”, “The Video8 Format”). These were both brought into a market that already used magnetic tape in the form of the analog VHS and Betamax which were largely used for amateur-created and distributed media texts, although there were still professionally distributed tapes available on VHS and Betamax (“The Betamax Format”, “The VHS Format”, “The Video8 Format”). While VHS would eventually beat Betamax out of the market, the VHS consumer camcorders were large and impractical in comparison to the much smaller VHS-C. However, predating the VHS-C was the Video8 format created by Sony, which like the VHS-C differs from the larger VHS and Betamax because of its miniaturized form and handheld capabilities. 

The VHS-C and Video8 would remain in tight competition within the consumer market throughout  the 1980s, but eventually, both would be usurped in the 1980’s by Sony’s new innovation of Hi8 magnetic tape (“The Video8 Format”). Hi8 was created in response to the growing usage of VHS-C format (created by Panasonic,) which used smaller versions of VHS tape and had the advantage of VHS compatibility (“The Hi8 Video Format”). Hi8 tape is a particularly notable contribution not only because of its backwards compatibility to read and record in Video8 format — although it should be noted that Video8 technology cannot playback tapes recorded using the Hi8 format with limited exceptions — but also because of its capabilities with the soon to be developed Digital8 (Wallace). By understanding the way inventions overlap and foster the growth of new developments in reference to analog technology, this knowledge of a gradual transition can be extended and applied to the transfer between analog and digital.