Closer to RCA developing video on vinyl records in the mid-1960s and then playing with chemical formulas until after VHS launched. They had the right idea - they knew it’d be a big deal - it was totally within their interests - and they still let themselves get scooped. Repeatedly, in RCA’s case, since Laserdisc and Betamax also beat them to market.
We came this close to Star Trek TOS episodes getting a home release as they aired. All they had to do was settle for half an hour per side. Y’know. Like any other vinyl record.
This is a bit revisionist. They spent so much time tinkering because they just couldn’t get the costs to be reasonable enough that people would actually buy it.
The discs produced a television signal directly, and were pressed the same way as any LP. Complexity and costs ballooned because RCA demanded comically small grooves. At an hour per side, any speck of dust would cause skipping, so the final product had a ridiculous semi-mechanized caddy system. This is despite tremendous difficulty even making grooves that small, with their metallic vinyl formula, let alone placing the zillion tiny pits which encode the signal.
Compromising on play time would have relaxed all of those tolerances. The minimum-bullshit version of this technology would work like any other phonograph - disc spins on platter, arm follows groove, amplifier does its thing. There’s no laser tracking. There’s no decoding. There’s no serpentine tape transport. There’s no helical-scan witchcraft. It’s a higher frequency of wiggly line.
All of this should have been dirt cheap. More electric than electronic. But in the absence of competition, they wanted to get it Just Right, and spent twenty years solving problems instead of avoiding problems. Minimum viable products change the world.
Closer to RCA developing video on vinyl records in the mid-1960s and then playing with chemical formulas until after VHS launched. They had the right idea - they knew it’d be a big deal - it was totally within their interests - and they still let themselves get scooped. Repeatedly, in RCA’s case, since Laserdisc and Betamax also beat them to market.
We came this close to Star Trek TOS episodes getting a home release as they aired. All they had to do was settle for half an hour per side. Y’know. Like any other vinyl record.
This is a bit revisionist. They spent so much time tinkering because they just couldn’t get the costs to be reasonable enough that people would actually buy it.
The discs produced a television signal directly, and were pressed the same way as any LP. Complexity and costs ballooned because RCA demanded comically small grooves. At an hour per side, any speck of dust would cause skipping, so the final product had a ridiculous semi-mechanized caddy system. This is despite tremendous difficulty even making grooves that small, with their metallic vinyl formula, let alone placing the zillion tiny pits which encode the signal.
Compromising on play time would have relaxed all of those tolerances. The minimum-bullshit version of this technology would work like any other phonograph - disc spins on platter, arm follows groove, amplifier does its thing. There’s no laser tracking. There’s no decoding. There’s no serpentine tape transport. There’s no helical-scan witchcraft. It’s a higher frequency of wiggly line.
All of this should have been dirt cheap. More electric than electronic. But in the absence of competition, they wanted to get it Just Right, and spent twenty years solving problems instead of avoiding problems. Minimum viable products change the world.