Bringing entertainment into present

The machine kept saying the same thing: "No disc."

It was wrong, but it was persistent.

So was I. The concert DVD had been a birthday gift, and I was ready to enjoy it.

So I opened the DVD player, fiddled with the DVD again, then closed the player. The same message popped up, time after time: "No disc."

"I think it's time to get a new DVD player," I told my wife.

To my surprise, she agreed with me.

That probably has to do with the fact that the price of DVD players is now about the same as the price for a nice dinner at a restaurant.

Over the holiday weekend, my wife and daughter picked up a replacement machine, leaving me the chore of hooking it up.

Actually, hooking it up was the easy part. Disconnecting the old unit was the challenge.

The TV in our family room sits in a built-in bookcase that came with the house. The bookcase is nothing fancy. Just a carpenter-built plywood unit with adjustable shelves. But it does the job.

However, it was built with books in mind, not wires and cables.

The equipment I was removing had been there awhile. How long? Long enough that the cable TV hook-up went first into a VCR, then to the TV. The DVD and VCR also had their own various snaking wires to the television.

Simply unhooking things and fishing the wires and cables out took several minutes. The cable then hooked up directly to the TV, as did the DVD player. The VCR - unused for as long as I can remember but still essential given the number of videotapes that have been accumulated - was finally out of the equation.

The plan was to take the old equipment into my study and hook it up to a TV set in there. My study is also a guest room with a hide-a-bed sofa, so the plan made a certain amount of sense. While the "No disc" message is annoying, it's not consistent. The machine still works when it wants to.

Hauling the old equipment, with cables and wires streaming festively behind me, from one room to the other, I set to work.

The cable TV hook-up then went into the back of the VCR. The video and audio output cables were plugged into the back of the VCR and the old DVD player. I dug up an old surge suppressor to make sure I had a handy power outlet for all three devices.

All that was left was to hook it all up to the television set.

And that's where everything stopped.

I stared at the back of the old set, looking for the input sockets.

They weren't on the right side. Nor on the left.

In fact, they weren't there at all.

"How long have we had this television set?" I called out to no one in particular.

No one could remember.

Whenever we acquired it, it was back in the day before manufacturers thought in terms of showing videotapes, let alone DVDs, on a TV set. There were two connections on the back. One was the power cord. The other was for cable service or an antenna.

For now, the old VCR and old DVD player are sitting directly below the old TV set. Think of it as sort of a retirement community for consumer electronics. They're not connected, though the TV set still functions when it's needed.

The cables and wires have been put away for now. One of these days, they'll be put to use.

But that will only happen when the TV in the family room is replaced and that set is moved to my study, sending the one with no connectivity directly to the Smithsonian, where it belongs.[[In-content Ad]]