[alanmcorcoran]

Chris,

Given how far behind you are (I'd say at least four generations) your best bet is to take the tape to a video shop and have them make you a CD with an .AVI or other PC compatible file. For a while there, there were digital Hi-8 recorders that could read an analog tape (I have an old Sony TRV350 I've kept around for that purpose.) My unit will convert the analog to digital and transfer it to a PC via a Firewire port. I'm not sure they had any digital recorders that wrote to the full size tapes - but there were a lot of different options over the years.

Since yours was made there has been:

Analog on Video8 and Hi-8 tapes (a little bigger than a music cassette)
Digital on Hi-8
Digital on mini DV (probably the most popular format today)
HD digital on mini DV
Various "tapeless" contraptions that use flash memory, hard drives, and DVD-R's

Don't worry,as soon as you buy a new one, it'll be obsolete.