Race to the finish; RCA's final gamble (CED Part 5)
1M views · Jan 26, 2020 · Science & Technology
Comments · 2.3K
@TechnologyConnections · 6 years ago · pinned
Hello! I'd like to thank you all for coming on this bizarre journey with me. Telling the story of the CED has been a lot of fun, but it also required a lot more... storytelling than I typically do. However, once I found Margaret B. W. Graham's book on the subject, well first of all the story is frankly bonkers and quite enjoyable, but also I felt the real nuts and bolts of the story deserved to see the light of day.<br>Not a lot of info is online beyond "what is this product?" and "It failed because VCRs". And without the context that Graham provides, the entire idea seems outlandishly foolish. In the end we know it was, but I think there are a lot of truly valuable lessons to learn from this ordeal.<br>Thanks for putting up with this project, and as I said at the end - if there's anything you'd like to know that I didn't cover in these video please ask! I may make a follow-up video down the road.
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@Tom5TomEntertainment · 6 years ago
This series has lasted longer than the CED.
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@Stoney3K · 6 years ago
<b>RCA gives Matsushita their demonstration model and design drawings</b><br><br>Matsushita: Nice unit. Would be a shame if someone... pioneered it.
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@Magnavox-1972 · 3 years ago
As completely bonkers and messy the circumstance was for CED, I still find the idea of “Video on a vinyl record” to be mind-blowing and I’m glad it came out if for no other reason than to make me go “woah, that’s actually doable!?”
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@Sashazur · 5 years ago (edited)
I went to work straight out of college as a software developer at RCA labs, right after they killed off CED. I worked in the same group that had been developing interactive video apps for CED (which never saw the light of day either). To keep interactive video alive (and keep our jobs) they decided to switch to CDs - which at the time didn’t do video. RCA was in a race with Phillips and MIT to get digital video to play from CD and RCA were the first to publicly demonstrate it actually working. RCA’s technology included a custom chipset to do advanced (for the time) video-quality graphics. RCA hoped to eventually introduce a home computer with TV-like video (which would have been amazing back in the mid 80s), but except for some niche commercial products (like bar trivia machines in the UK) RCA’s CD video and chips never went anywhere. When GE broke up RCA the technology was sold to Intel and most of us ended up working there. Intel shared the technology with Microsoft and by then it was called Indeo - one of the early bits of software which allowed a normal PC to record and play back video. The algorithms and chips that RCA developed to enable video from CD were the ancestors of the core tech in DVD, HDTV, and Blu-Ray.
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@damandbass · 6 years ago
Careful Technology Connections - last time someone spent so much time with the CED, they folded.
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@andrewchapman2039 · 6 years ago
TC writing part 2: "This is going well, I should be able to talk about everything I just thought about in part 3 and be done."<br><br><br>TC writing part 5: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-"
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@MisterNohbdy · 6 years ago
"If you'd like to learn more about the VHD, I'll be making a 7-part trilogy about it shortly."
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@otakuribo · 6 years ago
"Part 5 of 3"<br>the Borg: "actually, let's not assimilate them."
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@yoshipilot · 5 years ago
“There was Beta in the back room” is an underrated line.
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@rager-69 · 6 years ago
I could've sworn you told us in Part 1 that the original intent was to use conventional record pressing to be able to produce cheap video disks. WTF, RCA?
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@TalkiToaster · 6 years ago
The history of the CED. A trilogy in 5 parts.
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