CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[alleysally]

I've just discovered this site and find it fascinating!

A friend of mine asked me to help her clean out her great aunt's home and we found something we thought was an LP record album but turns out it is a boxed set of these "large strange discs"! We didn't even know what to call them until I suggested we Google the term "videodisc" and found your amazing site!

I know this may be considered an annoying post by those of you who are heavily into these CED's, but any info would be an enormous help. Her great aunt is currently in a nursing home and the house and all her belongings are to be sold in order to keep her there. Friend wants to find out if there is any demand for this title, if it's common or uncommon and what kind of price she should put on it for the estate sale.

There is an ISBN on it: 0-697-14595-6, and the title is "The Brain Teaching Modules"; The rest of the text on the cover says, videodisc set - Wm. C. Brown Publishers - WNET - The Annenberg/CPB Project - Frank J. Vattan/Colorado State University. The discs appear to be in excellent condition with translucent sleeves over each one (there are a total of 4 discs with material on front and back) and the box shows just very minor superficial wear.

Any help from anyone here will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your kind assistance,
~alleysally

[cedmagic]

Assuming the discs you have are 12 inches in diameter and are the same silver color as audio CD's, they are LaserDiscs rather than CED's. The term VideoDisc was often applied to both formats.

Quite a few educational LaserDisc titles were published back in the late 80's to early 90's, and they often used a computer attached to the disc player, with the computer providing the textual content while the LaserDisc player and a television provided full-motion video content. This practice fell by the wayside when CD-ROM became established and computers became powerful enough to display video in a window.

So your "Brain Teaching" LaserDiscs are pretty rare, but I don't believe they have much collector value. I've purchased a couple of similar educational LaserDisc titles on eBay for less than $10, a tiny fraction of their approximate $500 cost when new.

--Tom Howe

[alleysally]

Tom--you're exactly right about the size and color of these!
Do you mean to say that this boxed set might have cost $500 when new?
So these went the way of the 8-track tape, basically. Technology moves ever forward.
Thanks very much for the clarification.
Cheryl

[cedmagic]

I looked up the ISBN on Amazon and because this LaserDisc set is classified as a book, you can still buy it new for the price of $482.10. I'm guessing Mcgraw-Hill has a shelf of these in a dusty warehouse somewhere and hasn't sold a copy in years.

http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Teaching-Modules-Videodisc/dp/0697145956/

The library at my university had a LaserDisc player, 27" TV, and Macintosh for doing medical instruction back in the 1990s, but the equipment was surplused in 2000, and the LaserDiscs got shipped to an off-campus storage facility.

--Tom Howe

[alleysally]

Tom--that's fascinating.
Thanks for looking up that information.
If I could find some organization that wanted this, I'm sure my friend would gladly donate it to them.
Thanks again,
Cheryl