By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won't play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section. Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds. A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.

The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh... and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)