Technology

RCA whiffed so hard in the 1970s. They had a great idea in CED - but futzed with vinyl formulas for fifteen years, instead of pressing discs with divots and then shaking metal powder into them. And then used an itty-bitty stylus that constantly skipped tracks, because nobody in R&D had ever seen a rake. Both problems probably would've gone away if they'd just reduced the play time to half an hour per side... y'know... like a record. But somebody demanded

They also released the absolute worst console ever. The Studio II only had a 64x32 display, squished into the middle of the frame, in one-bit black and white. The Channel F had all the same time constraints and was at least on-par with the 2600... which didn't release until a year later. Also releasing a year later was the Bally Astrocade, which nailed the potential of 8-bit framebuffering and still flopped.

The legacy of the Studio II is incredible, though. It became the CHIP-8 standard - a sort of bare-minimum fantasy console. Because damn near any machine can copy this silly thing's video capabilities. There are hundreds of games for this awful platform. Meanwhile its in-house processor, the RCA 1802, was interesting only to engineers and completely failed at market. Except for the ones we hurled into the planet Jupiter. Yeah, turns out RCA also produced them in radiation-hardened silicon-on-sapphire variants, making them suitable for deep-space applications like Galileo, Magellan, and Ulysses. You wanna talk about failing upwards...