CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[ketonic_dude]

So during one of the workshops in Indianapolis I stopped at the Indiana Historical Society there and went through some CED stuff. One of the items were some hand written notes by the human resources staff. I've been in contact with Bob McHenry Jr., the son of Bob McHenry Sr. who was the head of Human Resources at the Rockville Road factory where they manufactured discs and styli. Well I sent a picture of the notes to Bob who forwarded them to his father. This was his response. I thought it might interest some folks here. Enjoy.

Hey, I showed them to my Dad and here's his reply....

Bob, you can tell Josh that the person named Frank that was in this loop was Frank McClure who was the V.P. of Employment on Corporate Staff at 30 Rock. He was tracking our activity and reporting to

Ed Griffiths, the President. Videodisc was Griffiths pet project and I had to fly into NYC in the early days every other week to give him personal updates. He actually interceded with reluctant divisions who would not release executives we wanted on our staff.

During the phaseout period Frank agreed to not require formal reports because we were so busy during the phase out and Tom worked as the intermediary between Jay Brandinger (my boss) and me with corporate (Frank).

As far as the longevity of Videodisc at RCA (which Josh commented on), it had been in the development stage for about 4 years when the decision to manufacture the disc and player utilizing a stylus was made in the late fall of 1978. I was approached by Harry Pollock and Dr. Jay Brandinger (Harry was the Corporate Executive VP over half of the Corp Divisions and subsidiaries – I knew Harry from Taiwan when he ran the Coponents Div & Jay was the engineer in Princeton primarily responsible the for design of solid state tv when I was last in Bloomington) through Frank McClure to become Director of Employee Relations in December, 1978 and Jay, who would run Videodisc, and I moved to Indy in January 1979 to start the new operation. It was not given full divisional status because marketing and sales were being provided by Consumer Products Div. By April 1 we completed building a nine person staff under Jay. Eight came from other divisions and the ninth required a flight to London to convince Harry Wiseberg to leave Harris to come back to RCA and run our Disc portion of the business.

Disc and Player engineering was done in Rockville Rd while Player mfg was done in Bloomington. I believe we peaked at about 1200 employees at Rockville Rd and Bloomington added about 4-500 for the Player manufacturing. We were out of business by April 1985 and I retired May 30, the eve of your wedding. So you can tell Josh it was a short run.

[SelectaVision420]

dang, thats cool! i love bits of info like this!
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(2)Sears 274 & 934(80150,10&11350), sft100, sgt250, sjt 090-400, vp550, VDR3000, VP2000 & 4000
complete '84 Dimensia Owner

[The Sarnoff Collection]

Hello and I read with interest your account of these crucial interpersonal/personal aspects of the Selectavision story.

We're developing an exhibit here at the Sarnoff Collection (near the former SRI site) and I would love to be able to quote briefly from your post. Would that be okay? You can reach me (Brian Wallace) at wallaceb@tcnj.edu.

Also, if you or the folks you're in touch with have any other stories (or photos, or documents) pertaining to this fascinating story you might want to share or donate please get in touch. You can see information about the Sarnoff at https://davidsarnoff.tcnj.edu.

Many thanks.
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Brian Wallace, curator
The David E. Sarnoff Collection
The College of New Jersey
wallaceb@tcnj.edu