The skirmish between Betamax and Video Home System (VHS) began brewing in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until commercial videotape players became affordable to the general public that the war erupted.

In 1975, Sony introduced Betamax, the first popular home videotape recording system. Matsushita subsidiary JVC followed with VHS a year later. Betamax and VHS used different cassettes and ...