My first movie library, (as long as it didn't rain)

The first movie library I ever was all movies that I recorded off the TV on blank videotapes. I built it over 12 years, and at its peak, just before DVDs came along and ruined the party for everyone, had a couple of hundred movies stored on big, bulky tapes.
 
That was the only one to get them. Buying the actual movies was prohibitively expensive, because they went for insane prices. I once got stuck with a huge bill after someone stole Turkey Shoot from my car, and had to cough up $70 for them to get a replacement copy.

Even blank videotapes were expensive - an E-180 tape could set you back $15 in late 1980s money, so it took a few years before I had a decent amount (and the price dropped to $5 a tape in the mid-90s). One of the best Christmas presents I ever got were 10 E-240 tapes - that was 40 hours of video, and I could record so many movies.

It was also so much easier to get two films on one tape. That was just one of the problems - trying to get two 90-minute movies on a three-hour tape took some skill, and usually meant the credits were cut off. I was always just a little bit pleased that I could get both Bill and Ted films on one tape, and still recall the absolute pride I took in editing together a Doctor Who story into one seamless film, especially when it finished literally three seconds before the tape ran out.

There were other issues - relying on analogue broadcast television meant you could end up with all kinds of weird interference; our TV would get these bizarre black bars when it got a little misty. And the general quality of video tape is obscured by nostalgia, it's easy to forget how much the quality could deteriorate when taped.

And you also had to deal with some brutal censorship on free-to-air channels. The copy I had of Robocop from the TV was so ridiculously shredded with all the sex, swearing and violence taken out, that it was one of the very first films I ever bought from a video store ($15 at the Highfield Video store, which closed down more than 15 years ago).

Video tapes have changed into collectibles, but they were once indispensable, and while that collection of hundreds of movies might be long gone, they kept me in movies for a significant part of my life.