20 Clever Design Tricks That Made Early Tech Feel Smart

Few things interrupted movie night quite like a VHS tape producing rolling images, horizontal noise, or flickering bands across the television. The tracking control offered viewers an immediate way to fight back by manually adjusting how the VCR aligned its playback heads with the recorded signal on the tape. Under the right circumstances, this adjustment genuinely could transform a distorted picture into a watchable one. In other cases, however, the problem came from tape damage, dirty heads, recording incompatibilities, or other issues that no amount of tracking adjustment could solve. That rarely stopped viewers from repeatedly turning the dial or pressing the tracking buttons in search of a perfect picture. The control created a powerful sense of participation in the repair process, even when it could accomplish very little. For a generation of viewers, adjusting tracking became almost a ritual whenever VHS playback misbehaved.