Like that infamous “ET” torrent in 1982 where it involved a “pirate” sneaking a huge JVC camcorder (with a VHS reel) recording the entire movie in theaters, given this was before DVD’s existed (don’t even ask about pirate bay, those weren’t available yet). The same applies to “torrented” music, one would have a spare tape cassette recording the song played via the radio, that’s how they torrented content back then if they can’t afford an official copy.
Only millennials or Gen X who were kids back then would’ve encountered or witnessed VHS or Cassette “torrents” from either friends or family and often or not, piracy in the pre internet days was rife even before torrent sites were a thing. There are VHS “torrents” of TV shows or series (placing a camcorder which faces the TV screen with a spare reel recording the entire show (ads included), then used to fast forward upon replay.
This was a thing until well into the 2000s. VHS stayed around for a long time. We only got our first DVD player in 2003 (it was dirt-cheap - a tiny silver thing the size of a PSOne that cost maybe €35, a small fraction of the price we paid for our VCR in the '90s) and you could still get many of the latest movies on VHS at that point, both legally and illegally. There were regional differences though. From what I’ve heard, my country of Germany held onto this medium for longer than others.
Most piracy (in my experience at least) involved recording TV broadcasts and then duplicating it for friends and family or duplicating content that was otherwise available within your circle. Some people recorded DVDs onto VHS (there were even devices that had both disc and tape drive that did this very conveniently), but this wasn’t that common.
Slightly off-topic, but I had a neighbor who was very proud of being able to circumvent the copy protection and compress movies on DVD to fit onto a single CD (which would still play on a DVD player) at an acceptable level of quality that was somewhere between VHS and DVD (but closer to the latter with the right codec settings). I taught myself how to do this later on as well, although only in order to share movies and shows with others, since I quickly preferred having media on hard drives and USB drives instead of juggling discs around. My personal go-to method was to rent DVDs from the local library for free and then create backups of those I wanted to enjoy more than once. I did the same with PC games and software from that place…