Video to Go (part 1):

My plane from Helsinki, Finland, touched down onto the cracked, decrepit airport runway in the old city of Leningrad in the USSR. There were no direct flights to the Soviet Union from the US in 1984, and a week earlier, the United States Department of State had issued a "travel warning" to Americans planning to visit the communist country.

It was late August 1984. The Soviet Union had just boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angles; it was the first anniversary of the Soviet Union shooting down Korean Airline Flight 007, and a few weeks before President Ronald Reagan joked that the Soviet Union "was too dangerous to allow a continued existence, and we will begin bombing in five minutes."

It was a hot time in the ol' Cold War.

While most "sane" people would spend their vacationing time on the beaches, camping or visiting Disney World, I thought that sightseeing in the "evil empire," and the People's Republic of China thereafter, might make for an interesting holiday.

My plane taxied to a remote corner of the Leningrad airport and we exited via a stairway onto the tarmac. I boarded an old, grey bus, which transported me and about half a dozen other brave Yanks to a dilapidated old World War II-era terminal, where the Soviet customs agent brazenly searched my purple duffel bag, which was emblazoned with a yellow "CBS Sports" logo.

The agent reached into the bag and grabbed a video camera with dangling wires attached to a portable tape recorder. "What is this?" he muttered as he pulled out the mysterious-looking camera from my duffel bag. "That's my video porta-pack," I pleaded. The suspicious look on his face soon changed into curiosity at this rather odd Japanese (JVC) camera attached to a video recorder. Back in 1984, the Soviet customs agent had probably never seen a portable electronic video camera; for that matter, neither had most Americans. Up to that time, the primary means of recording personal images was still likely to be 8mm film.

The advent of personal "home video" began in the early 1920s. Although 35mm film had been the standard for theatrical releases at that time, the large film was cumbersome, too expensive, and too dangerous (due to its flammable nature) for personal home use.

A more convenient and less expensive version was invented by the Eastman Kodak Company. Called 8mm it derived its name from the width of the film, 8mm (about 1/3"). It first appeared on the market in the early 1930s as a luxury item that allowed the very, very well-to-do to create their own personal home movies. Called "Cine Kodak Eight" and used with the Kodascope Projector, like the old silent movies of that era it did not contain an audio track. Utilizing a special 16mm film which had double the number of perforations on both sides, the user would run the film through the camera in one direction, then reload and expose the other side of the film, the way an audio cassette is used today. The combination of camera and projector cost $335.00. To put this into perspective, a new Ford automobile during that Depression era cost $550.00! "Brother, can you spare a dime!"

The 8mm film cameras were small and portable but film was expensive, awkward to use, needed to be developed and was only a few minutes long.

Using an 8mm film camera required opening the film carefully and threading it so as not to accidentally expose it to light. When you were done shooting the brief three minutes of film, without any sound, you had to rewind it inside the camera, carefully take it out, put it into a special light-proof canister, and then send it off to be developed. When you got it back after a week or so, you had to lug out your clunky 8mm film projector, set it up in a dark room and use a big, blank, white wall, or set up a projection screen to view it. After threading the film onto the reels through the projector's series of gears and pulleys, you could finally watch your "dreadful" home movies. (The only positive was that they were only three minutes long, so you didn't bore your friends and family to tears like we do today.)

The most famous 8mm film ever made was called the "Zapruder Film."

On November 22, 1963, dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, standing on a pedestal in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, with a recently purchased Bell & Howell Zoomatic 8mm movie camera, unexpectedly filmed the tragic assassination of President Kennedy. The Abraham Zapruder home movie of the Kennedy assassination is the only known film of the entire assassination, and became one of the most important pieces of evidence in the Warren Commission report into the assassination of President Kennedy. This is Abraham Zapruder's 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic movie camera, in the collection of the US National Archives.

In 1965, the 8mm film camera was joined by Super 8, also made by the Eastman Kodak Company.

Super 8 was supplied in a lightproof cartridge, the design of which allowed it to be inserted into a camera without needing to thread the film directly, improvements that made the format more user-friendly than the old 8mm.

There were two versions of Super 8: the original silent film, like its predecessor, the 8mm; and a sound version, introduced in late 1973. The sound film had a magnetic soundtrack, and came in larger cartridges than the original, to accommodate a longer film path.

Fuji Film produced its own format, called Single 8. The film had exactly the same dimensions as Super 8, but used a Mylar base and a different design of magazine. However, it could only be used with Fuji cameras, although it could still be projected using any Super 8 projector.

Had I taken an 8mm film camera to the old Soviet Union in 1984 instead of the porta-pak video camera and recorder, perhaps the Soviet custom agent would have recognized it as such and I would not be writing to you from Siberia, Russia, where I have been confined now for almost 21 years.

Comrade Ghinelli, sending you his best wishes from his Gulag in Siberia.

Warden, is the "Cold War" over yet? Nyet!