Memorex VIS MD 2500 Controllers?

[CynicalJedi]

Photos are here: https://imgur.com/a/9kbbv

I found these at a thrift store and after some searching online I'm pretty sure they are controllers for the Memorex VIS MD 2500 system.

As far as I can tell these are new but I can't find any examples of NIB ones to compare them with. From what I read this was a radio shack exclusive and it seems odd that they are "sealed" with two staples but not unheard of.

I found one sold listing on ebay for a loose controller that was a BIN for 39.99 but otherwise couldn't find any examples of them.

Any info on if these are "NIB"? Any idea how common these are and any estimate on value?

[jhd]

I have never ever seen the Tandy/Memorex computers, much less the accessories. It was only a very short-lived system.

 

I suspect, however, that this is a case where rarity =/= value -- unless the controllers can be used on a diferent system.

[John_L]

I remember the system. There was a short lived CD-ROM based "information system" which was billed as "the computer for people who don't own a computer". It would give you access to games and applications via CD-ROM. Philips and Commodore both had similar "VIS" (which was a proposed standard) systems, I think panasonic did too. They never went anywhere and died of pretty quickly. They ran a specialized version of Windows 3.1, and at the time, MS thought they were going to be running windows on a slew of non-computer type things like this. The powers that be made a huge mis-calculation on this system. I was about $700 bucks at a time when low end PCs ran about $1100, and the idea was people who balked at paying over $1000 for a real PC would plunk down $700 for this POS, and they never did. The industry is constantly looking for a way to sell something cheaper, or go a different direction than the norm in the hopes of being an early adopter of a technology that just might take off. Problem is, to meet cost concerns, the systems ( by all the manufacturers who backed the VIS standard ), were low low low end systems that were woefully slow.

 

I think the problem was that during that time period, there were (and still are), some people who have nothing to do with computers. This bothered the people who could see the everyone could benefit from a computer, and they thought they just needed to find the right product to market to people. Also, this was during that 6-8 year time period from the late 80's into the early 90's (before the interwebs) when CD-ROMs were considered the wave of the future because large amounts of data (audio, video, animation, text, etc) could be delivered that way. The internet took a good while, about 20 years, to pretty much snuff out CD-ROMS, but these days, the internet provides everything the CD-ROM promised plus much more.