Paid $105.50 total including shipping March 2025
The discs are translucent. If you hold them up to the light, you can see through them. Easter Parade is labeled as Disc #10012
Engraved on both sides, it reads:
Easter Parade - Color - Side (3-4 depending on disc and side) - RCA and Selectavision are Tradmarks of RCA Corp. Made in USA. 10012
Hand etched on side four, it reads: 11 (possibly 1 - 1 or H) -7-54
All Prototypes were purchased by the same seller of California, at different times, in different ebay auction listings.
The seller informed me, he purchased them in the SF east bay area, at an estate sale. A year after buying two of these, he listed King Solomon’s Mines. After buying it, I asked if he had more and offered him a price to buy them all and he agreed.
It would be then, that I would learn they originally belonged to a late RCA engineer; Bob Moore.
"The first CED prototype discs were multi-layered, consisting of a vinyl substrate, nickel conductive layer, glow-discharge insulating layer and silicone lubricant top layer. Failure to fully solve the stylus/disc wear and manufacturing complexity forced RCA to seek simpler construction of the disc. The final disc was crafted using PVC blended with carbon to make the disc conductive. To preserve stylus and groove life, a thin layer of silicone was applied to the disc as a lubricant.
CED videodiscs were originally conceived as being housed in jackets and handled by hand similar to LP records, but during testing it was shown that exposure to dust caused skipped grooves. If dust was allowed to settle on the discs, the dust would absorb moisture from the air and cement the dust particle to the disc surface, causing the stylus to jump back in a locked groove situation. Thus, an idea was developed in which the disc would be stored and handled in a plastic caddy from which the CED would be extracted by the player so that exposure to dust would be minimized."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
Wikis source link:
http://cedmagic.com/history/ced-1977-vs-1982.html