ABSTRACT
Nearly twenty years ago I 1 arrived in Berkeley ready to undertake what was one of the very first ethnographies of preschool children. Fresh from the completion of my dissertation which relied heavily on videotaped records of primarily adult-child interaction, I was eager to use this new technology to videotape naturally occurring peer interaction and discourse in a nursery school. I had been told that videotape equipment would be available for my use in the postdoctoral research. What I found out was that there was indeed equipment available — an early model, reel-to-reel Sony video tape recorder. The video recorder and separate camera were large, bulky, and very cumbersome to operate. Worse, nearly fatal, was the restriction that any recordings made on the machine could only be played back on the same model. Given that this model was already becoming an antique, I realized immediately that I had a big problem.
