The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History

[Big Boss Man]

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/m ... reddit.com

Archive.org are going to be digitising all the VHS and Beta tapes. I assume she wasnt recording like pay channels/pay per view events.

[Big Boss Man]

Some of the ladies tapes have already been archived

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Marion%20Stokes

I assume any sports, music concerts/videos etc won't be uploaded due to licensing issues, copyrights etc and I don't know if it was just Network TV or cable/PPVs etc. that was recorded. But real interesting this dates back to 1979.

British comedian Bob Monkhouse also recorded a ton of TV onto VHS tapes too

[melancholy]

I couldn't imagine being on the team archiving all this. The amount of work necessary to catalog all of this digitally would likely be a decade long process for a small group.

[Big Boss Man]

Yea definitely. Some more info from Wiki

Stokes' tape collection consisted of 24/7-coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC and other networks—recorded on as many as eight separate VCR machines stationed throughout her house. She had a husband and children, and family outings were planned around the length of a VHS tape. Every six hours when the tapes would be ending, Stokes and her husband would run around the house to switch them out—even cutting short meals at restaurants to make it home to switch out tapes in time. Later in life when she was not as agile, Stokes trained a helper to do the task for her.[4] The archives ultimately grew to live on 71,716 (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media)[5] VHS and Betamax tapes stacked in Stokes' home, as well as apartments she rented just to store them

She also collected Macintosh computers, books, newspapers etc. I think a lot of this collection could and should be put in museums so the history is preserved. There's more here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes