I have never felt older than ready these comments. I started working with interactive media exhibits right in between laserdiscs and mpeg files.

I loved the tension between the quality of analog devices and the convenience of digital.

Same. When I was born, optical storage did not exist in any form. It was vinyl, cassette tapes & floppy disks. Lasers were SoTA things that scientists worked with. Not in consumers' hands.

Then (besides LD & VHS) came the CD, which has gone a bit out of fashion lately.

Then the DVD. Which was popular in its heyday, but also over the hill.

Then Blu-Ray. Not to mention a truckload of recordable & rewrite formats, DVD-RAM, MO discs & what have you. On the computer side, flash & TB hdd's for cheap.

Disclaimer: and I'm not even that old yet! Neither retired or owner of a gray beard.

Same. We never had LD, though an elementary school I went to got one through a tech grant program. I remember watching some science class thing on it and the movie Hook. Though watching things on a 15 inch TV mounted up in the corner of the classroom by the ceiling from a desk somewhere in the middle doesn’t exactly let you see the full picture quality.

Outside of that my only experience was seeing them at Blockbuster or in stores before everyone gave up. I don’t remember if I ever saw the teacher holding the laserdisc, but the racks of them in movie stores let you see how big they were.

Behold, the epsilon turn:

https://youtu.be/t34dj8m1UGw?si=qh0JB48bmcpxY26B

The player stops spinning the disc, rotates the laser around to the other side, then starts spinning the disc in the opposite direction.

Later high end players had lasers on both sides and would “auto-flip” for you.