DVDS JUST LATEST IN LINE TO USURP CONVERSATION.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I never liked videotape. In my hands it has a tendency to unspool inside the VCR.

Every time I shove one of those black cassettes into that mysterious machine I have the uneasy feeling that disaster is just one loose screw way. And I am the loose screw.

Time is running out for videotape. According to The New York Times, the sales of digital video discs have surpassed those of VHS tapes and within a few years DVDs will be the sole packaging for all home entertainment: movies, video games and everything in between.

This dawning of another new age in electronics has left me feeling a bit nostalgic for my old enemies. Is this tapeless universe truly going to be a brave new world, or just a new one?

I didn't start out skeptical. Why, when digital watches first appeared I crowed. No more vague approximations, like a quarter till or half past. Digital watches were definite and absolute. You could now say to your boss, You're wrong, boss. I'm not 10 minutes late. I'm 12 minutes late.

Clearly, that was progress.

But before I had digested the full experience of electronics on my very wrist we were thrown into the VCR revolution and the Beta and VHS wars.

Well, it wasn't much of a war. Beta was the Boston Red Sox of video technology - most buyers got their Sony Betamax Recording System out of the box just before it became obsolete. The Video Home System became standard instead because you should never underestimate the value of mass marketed mediocrity.

Of course, in those days VCRs were powered by coal. There was a little door in the bottom and you inserted one lump of coal to play each video tape. ``Gone With The Wind'' took six lumps. You knew you needed more coal if the clock started blinking 12 midnight.

It's surprising how many people never figured that out.

Speaking of ``Gone With The Wind,'' I own the two-tape set of the VHS Collector's Edition of the remastered print of ``Gone With The Wind,'' which cost me $35 back in 1985. It has been gathering dust on a dusty corner of my dusty videotape storage shelf for years and frankly, I don't need the dust that badly anymore.

VHS has overstayed its welcome with me. Of course true lovers of ``film'' were insulted by the victory of VHS and flocked to the consumer snobbery of the laser disc. Laser stands for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation and disc means a big round silver thing about the size of an 18-inch pizza.

The laser picture was better than VHS but on 1980s TV technology, who the heck could tell? The sound was better too, but we were less than one generation away from 8-track tape players and our ears had not recovered their full range as of yet.

Still, laser disc snobs used to deliver endless dissertations about the almost religious experience of seeing ``The Sound Of Music'' on laser.

``You simply must witness it,'' they would say. They never said much of anything else. In fact I think ``The Sound Of Music'' was the only movie ever made available on laser disc.

Laser held out almost as long as VHS, testament to the ability of wealthy snobs to stand in the middle of the fast lane of life and hold up traffic.

But eventually even laser snobs got run over by something smaller and better - DVDs.

DVDs replaced VHS and laser, which had replaced Betamax, which had replaced film, which had replaced plays, which had replaced books, which had replaced an ancient mode of entertainment called ``talking.''

Each technology has dominated in its turn. Each rose and seemed destined to last forever. And each fell suddenly and was replaced and quickly forgotten.

So before you DVD lovers celebrate the timeless victory of your technology it might behoove you to remember that somewhere in this world lives a poor rich son-of-a-gun who converted his entire collection of home movies onto laser disc, never to be seen again. And another guy who put his on Betamax. And the Babylonian who had his inscribed on cuneiform clay tablets.

Judge not, lest ye be judged, oh DVD-er. And if the power should go out one night, the cable fail and solar flares burn up the satellites, conversation may yet make a comeback.

Try selling the collector's edition of that one.