Thin flat plastic slabs of my childhood: Remembering CED videodiscs.

Part of doing a history blog is examining the history of your own life. Some might call that “nostalgia,” but remembering is a form of doing history. I’m in my early 50s, so the childhood that I remember encompassed the tail end of the 1970s and especially the decade of the ‘80s. In this vein I thought I’d trot out a somewhat obscure reference for your consideration, and one that will utterly mystify the young’uns in the audience: CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) format videodiscs. In my family we had piles and piles of these things, which invariably came in thin flat plastic slabs. I can trace the roots of my lifelong love of great movies back to some viewing experiences on these old dinosaurs and the many evenings we spent watching them, after sliding them somewhat awkwardly into our state-of-the-art (for 1981) Hitachi CED VideoDisc Player that my dad brought home with great fanfare. This was such a strong and indelible part of my childhood that I’m astonished that so few people now, 40 or 45 years on, have ever even heard of this technology, much less have experienced how it works.

Those who do know about CED discs and talk about them today usually weave them into a narrative of technological—and marketing—failure. A CED disc is pretty simple: it’s basically a phonograph record for video, played with a stylus just like an old-time phonograph (which makes it different than laser discs or CDs, which are played with a laser). The technology was originally developed by RCA way back in 1964, and the powers-that-be realized early on that there was a huge potential market for home video that the device could create and fill. Unfortunately RCA’s timing was pretty crappy. They spent an astonishing 17 years screwing around with perfecting the technology and figuring out how to market it, and by 1981, when the first CED disc players actually went on the market to consumers, the VCR—which used cheaper and also more inferior VHS videotape as its format—was already starting its market ascension. My dad could hardly know it, but the day he brought home that Hitachi player in 1981 it was already obsolete. CED wasn’t even on the field in the epic battle between VHS and Betamax, the home video format war that everybody remembers, which climaxed in 1984 with the extremely unfortunate victory of VHS players. That sentenced us to 15 years of fuzzy tapes, jiggling static bands across the screen and the fulsome ritual of rewinding. By 1984 CED discs had already proven an epic marketing flop and were on the way out. The format was discontinued for good in 1986.