Word: discs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...decision to abandon SelectaVision comes just as disc-player sales seemed to switch into fast-forward. After producing some 250,000 SelectaVision sets last year, the company was selling them during the past month at the rate of 400,000 a year. Company executives, though, figured that they would need to produce three or four times that many to make a sufficient profit. Only about 12,000 SelectaVisions remain in stock at RCA's Bloomington, Ind., plant, but wholesalers and dealers have about 150,000 left...
Even though SelectaVision is dead, videodisc technology will probably continue to grow. Such firms as Pioneer and Magnavox, which sell disc machines that use a more advanced system based on lasers, are expected to continue making machines. These devices, which assign a number to each image, allow the user to call up an individual frame almost instantly. Priced at about $700, the laser players are often used in education and industry. Several firms are developing ways to use video discs as data-storage devices for computers...
Wall Street analysts generally applauded RCA's decision to abandon its onetime pet project. Said Smith Barney's Russell Leavitt: "The disc players were using up too much of the company's resources." RCA can take consolation in the fact that it hedged its bet on SelectaVision. The company is the biggest U.S. marketer of its disc player's chief nemesis, the VCR. RCA is expected to sell 1.5 million cassette machines this year, up about 100% from 1983. -By Stephen Koepp. Reported by Lawrence Mondi/New York
Various kinds of software now give instructions to computers. Systems software controls the parts of a computer, including the video screen, the central processing unit and the disc drives, and makes them work together. Though sold under obscure brand names like CP/M, MS-DOS and UNIX, systems software for personal computers can be highly profitable, and last year sales totaled $500 million...
Users of personal computers are more concerned with a different kind of software: applications programs, which keep the family budget, help with students' homework, play computer games or do financial planning. These programs usually come on a so-called floppy disc, a piece of plastic about the size of a 45-r.p.m. record. They can also be on magnetic tape or a silicon chip inside a cartridge. Sales of applications software for personal computers last year totaled $560 million...