TOD: My first VCR was the RCA Selectavision. It was very dear in price (around $1,000), but it was truly the most versatile VCR I ever owned. The slow motion was a DREAM...and there were three separate speeds.
As with all Selectavision products (CED, anyone???), RCA was not supporting my model when it needed repair. So...into the junk pile it went.
I truly cannot remember what my first commercial VHS tape purchase was. These tapes were pretty expensive back then...at least for the titles I coveted most.
As I hinted at above, I also bought into the RCA Selectavision Capacitance Electronic Disc system (CED). It was being touted as far less expensive, more user-friendly and more reliable than the LaserDisc system which was having serious software problems at the time.
I bought many, many CED titles...yes, indeedy. And it didn't hurt matters that I was living in the Indianapolis area at the time and the CED factory was in those environs. Several stores had access to all avaialble titles. My first commercial copies of "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark"...both under $20 each (the VHS tapes were somewhere between $60 and $100 each) were on CED. Many titles were issued on CED that had not yet made it to VHS, including "Laura" (IIRC, it was the CED issue that led to legal problems for Fox about some music sources on-screen...heard on the radio or in a night club). These had to be replaced, and every version of "Laura" you see today has the theme from "Laura" playing on the radio or at the nightclubs. Several years elapsed before the title made its way onto VHS and Laser.
But, all fun ends. RCA not only gave up on CED, but it also withdrew its support for the machines it had sold.
