Bingewatching Before It Was A Word

When my family returned to the states from Germany in the late seventies, we were completely flabbergasted by television.  We suddenly had THREE networks to choose from instead of just the one Armed Forces channel. My family dove right into the network schedule like starving people at a banquet.  Any free time we had found us all right there in front of the television.  It was perfectly justified; there were no devices to record a show.  If you missed it, you had to actually...WAIT. 
At least until the reruns during the summer.  

And then my father found a Betamax, a machine which played tapes of movies. He brought it home and we gathered round.  It was a colossal machine, huge, ugly, and ungainly.  My father explained about video stores, where we could rent tapes of movies and bring them home.  He'd brought a few tapes home with him, for experimental purposes, of course. 

We loved it. 

During the winter months, weekends would find us in the family room gathered around the television.  We would watch two or three movies in a day, with pauses for bathroom breaks and munchies.  There were movies that we never saw in the theater, movies that had been hits in the sixties that were released.  Horror, comedy, drama...it didn't matter.  We watched it all. 

We were bingewatching. 

I realized it the other day, when my husband and I sat down to view multiple episodes of the second season of Daredevil.  The medium has changed, of course.  Now we use our X-box One to access Netflix instead of a betamax.  But it was still bingewatching, before there was even a word to describe it. 

I like the idea of being a trendsetter.