CED Digest Vol. 6 No. 46

CED Digest Vol. 6 No. 46 • 11/17/2001
20 Years Ago In CED History:

November 18, 1981:
* President Reagan, in an address before the National Press Club in
Washington ,D.C., says he has sent Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev "a
simple, straightforward, yet historic message" calling for removal of
Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted at Europe in exchange for NATO's
scrapping the planned deployment in Europe of Pershing II and cruise
missiles.

November 19, 1981:
* The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission suspends the license of the
Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, citing design error at
the facility.
* The AFL-CIO ends its annual meeting in New York City after snubbing
President Reagan, who was not invited to address the assembly, and
repeatedly ridiculing budget director David Stockman.

November 20, 1981:
* World chess champion Anatoly Karpov of Russia keeps his title,
defeating Viktor Korchnoi in the 18th game of their title match in
Merano, Italy.
* Bulent Ecevit, who served as prime minister of Turkey three different
times, faces four months in prison after having been convicted by a
martial law court of violating a ban on political statements.
* Future CED titles in widespread theatrical release: Absence of Malice,
Ragtime.

November 21, 1981:
* At least 300,000 people demonstrate in Amsterdam against the nuclear
arms race.
* "Physical" by Olivia Newton-John (CED) becomes the No. 1 U.S. single.

November 22, 1981:
* Soviet President Brezhnev arrives in Bonn, West Germany, for three
days of talks with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Arms control outweighs all
other issues to be discussed.

November 23, 1981:
* President Reagan vetoes as too costly a financing bill for government
operation, causing many federal offices to close down temporarily. The
president later signed a bill extending financing at the existing level
for three weeks.

November 24, 1981:
* The NIH Record publishes an article titled "Rare Cancer Strain Found
in Homosexual Men," concerning the unexplained occurrence of Kaposi's
Sarcoma among gay men.

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Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 19:56:47 -0800
From: Neil Wagner <orac>
To: _CED Magic mail list <digest@cedmagic.com>
Subject: A laughable auction

Think anyone will bid?  :<>
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1297037468

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Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 00:57:04 -0500
To: digest@cedmagic.com
From: Michael Dunn <mdunn>
Subject: General tech questions

   First let me say a big thanks to Tom for his amazing site.

   I have an SJT-100 that seems to be mostly ok, and am waiting on a
shipment of discs, so I will finally be able to try it out!

   I am doing some work on the player, and was wondering if there are
any net resources that get into the technical aspects of player
operation and repair.  Of course, the operation will become much clearer
once I actually see it work with a disc!

   I just have one question for now.  The SJT-100 has a rod that can
poke up through the disc platter.  I assume this is for unloading the
disc, though I fail to see what will keep the disc horizontal as it does
so!  Anyway, there is a plastic cap on this rod, though on mine, the top
is broken off.  I assume this is important?

thx very much

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Dunn     | Surround Sound Decoder & Stereo Enhancer
Cantares         | Self-Amplified Speakers, Test Equipment
74 George St.    | Ambisonic Surround Sound CDs and Recording
Waterloo, Ont.   | (519) 744-9395 (fax: 744-7129)
N2J 1K7          | mdunn@cantares.on.ca
Canada           | http://www.cantares.on.ca/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 17:44:19 -0800
To: digest@cedmagic.com
From: Tom Howe <tom@cedmagic.com>
Subject: Fifth Anniversary of CED Digest

Hello All:

Today is the 5th anniversary of CED Digest with Volume 1 No. 1 having
been sent out on November 16, 1996. The 10th anniversary of the World
Wide Web took place last week on November 8th, so I thought this would
be a good time to reminisce on the history of collecting CED's over the
internet.

My experience with collecting CED's via computer actually began with the
Prodigy Service shortly after it was launched in 1988. This service
could be considered the precursor of the present-day web, as in contrast
to the pay-by-the-minute CompuServe service, Prodigy offered unlimited
email and connect time for a low monthly fee supplemented by continuous
16-color banner ads at the bottom of the 40-character wide screen.

http://www.prodigy.com

Prodigy experienced phenomenal growth for a few years and I got a number
of CED's by posting wanted messages in their Home Electronics forum, but
I never encountered another CED collector there. Prodigy gradually
eliminated what they included "free" in their base fee, first killing
off mailing lists by severely limiting the number of people an email
message could be sent to. In 1992, just as the WWW was about to explode,
Prodigy to a large degree killed itself by going to pay-by-the-minute
for most of their forums. People left the service in droves (much to
the delight of AOL) and today Prodigy is a mere shadow of what it was
10 years ago. It was then that I too switched to AOL and encountered a
few other CED collectors by way of their searchable personal profile
system.

At that time Prodigy and AOL were completely separate from the Internet,
which actually started in the 1960's as a network of military computers.
I got on the Internet in 1990, thanks to being at a university, and
started using the Usenet newsgroups to look for CED's. Usenet consisted
of about 500 newsgroups at the time, which seemed like a lot, but is
tiny compared to the 60,000 available today. There was only one consumer
video group, rec.video, and I was able to search archives of it dating
back to 1987. There was quite a bit of discussion about LaserDiscs in
these archives and a little bit about CED's, and a few current
subscribers to CED Digest were found by searching the archives. Usenet
started in 1979, but I've never seen archives dating prior to 1987,
although they apparently still exist, as the now defunct deja.com once
talked about making them available. Deja.com is now owned by Google,
Inc.

http://groups.google.com

The World Wide Web became generally available in 1993 with the beta
release of the Mosaic browser:



http://www.cedmagic.com/history/mosaic-1993.html

It might seem strange today, but during the early days of the web
Infoseek was the only comprehensive search engine available and you
actually had to pay a $10 monthly fee to perform 100 searches/month with
a 10 cent charge for each beyond that. I used this to search for the
word "selectavision" once a week but didn't get any matches until some
time in 1994, the first one being the on-line resume of Robert J. Ryan,
who happened to mention his prior work with VideoDisc:



http://www.cedmagic.com/mem/rca-laboratories/mem449.html

In 1995 the availability of a web server at my university resulted in
the start of CED Magic, with CED Digest being launched about a year
later as an expansion of what previously had been a one-way announcement
list. At first, I thought CED Digest would be mainly used by collectors
to find additional titles, and that was true for a while, as Pierre
Omidyar, founder of Auction Web (= Ebay) was managing it from a laptop
in his apartment when CED Digest started. Ebay has become the way to
find specific CED titles, indeed it's a lot easier to collect CED's
on-line today than it was 10 years ago. At launch, I thought CED Digest
would be going out about once a month, so it's been a pleasant surprise
to see it going out almost every week, even before the weekly History
Column was started.

--Tom
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