The CED: RCA's Very Late, Very Weird Video Gamble (Pt. 1)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN praises the depth of research and uses the CED story as a case study of a mismanaged, badly timed product.
What it is
Technology Connections gives a deeply researched history of RCA's CED video disc system, a capacitance-based format that took over a decade to reach market. Part one covers its development and strange technology.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec puranjay · 2019-10 · on “An Antique Toaster That's Better Than Today’s [video]”
Seconded. Their exploration of failed technology is particularly interesting. This two part video on CEDs - which I didn't even know were a thing - is absolutely fascinating. The depth of research rivals any educational program on TV. [this video]
Cites mkr-hn · 2020-12 · on “What If You Could Do It All Over?”
I've gotten a lot more out of studying failures. Especially other people's failures. People who are honest with themselves can warn you around the mistakes they made, but people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there. I think the reason is that success is usually cumulative: each little win builds on the last until it's obvious you're going in the right direction. Those wins often depend on random or temporary things you have little control over. For example: CED was the perfect format for the decade RCA started developing it in, but it took until VHS redefined the market to finish it.[0] Meanwhile one mistake can send everything tumbling down
Cites waselighis · 2023-04 · on “Google DeepMind”
There's an interesting history behind the RCA CED (Capacitance Electronic Disk), an attempt to put video on vinyl. While the full history behind it's failure is complicated, a large factor was the differing priorities between research and other departments that delayed the product by several years. [LINK] [this video] Considering some of the other comments about merging two AI departments together (DeepMind and Brain) and injecting more bureaucracy into DeepMind, it seems to have some parallels with the story of the RCA CED. You can't just let researchers do research. There needs to be a clear goal/priority that this research can eventually be converted into a profitable product or service. Other
Cites MrRadar · 2025-05 · on “Why Bell Labs Worked”
The Technology Connections video series on RCA's Selectavision CED home video system touches on this quite a lot (it was a horribly mismanaged project which took more than a decade to commercialize, by which time it had already been superceded by VHS/Betamax and Laserdisc)[1]. His main source for the information on the development of the CED system was the book "The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc" by Margaret B. W. Graham. [1] [this video]