It became the standard in the 1980s after competing with Sony's Betamax and, to a lesser extent, Philips's Video 2000[?].
A VHS-cassette contains a long magnetic tape which is wound from one of two spools to the other, allowing it to slowly pass by the reader head[?] of the video cassette recorder.
Several improved versions of VHS exist, most notably S-VHS, an improved analog standard, and D-VHS[?], which records digital video onto a VHS form factor tape.
Although VHS officially stands for Video Home System some early reports claimed that the initials originally stood for Victor (Company) Helical Scan system, since the tape head describes a helical path when recording and playing back video material.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump