Technology History | 850 Front Street, Santa Cruz — The Disc in the Test Envelope Was a Patsy Cline CD

A used Patsy Cline CD went into the mail at this post office in 1997: no jewel case, a greeting-card envelope, a thirty-two-cent stamp.

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings could not get hold of a DVD. The format was on sale in Japan and almost nowhere else, so a music disc of the same size stood in for one.

The question was whether the Postal Service would deliver a bare plastic disc in one piece.

It did. Hastings brought the envelope back the next morning to the Scotts Valley car park where the two met to carpool over Highway 17.

Randolph learned the rest of it months later, on a tour of this building. Mail that stayed inside town was handled more gently than mail leaving it, and the envelope had been addressed to Hastings's house across Santa Cruz rather than to Randolph's in Scotts Valley.

Sent the other way, he wrote, the disc would probably have arrived scratched or broken.

The origin story most people know is the one Randolph has spent years correcting: a forty-dollar late fee on Apollo 13, and the whole idea arriving in a flash. His book calls that version emotionally true, then says the idea had nothing to do with late fees — "at the beginning, we even charged them."

The product bears him out. Netflix.com opened on 14 April 1998 with thirty employees and 925 titles, a seven-day rental cost $4 plus $2 postage, and keeping a disc longer cost more.

The subscription with no due dates came in September 1999, and the per-rental option was dropped early in 2000.

In 2022 the Associated Press interviewed Randolph on the street across from this building. The service he was there to talk about mailed its last discs on 29 September 2023, after more than five billion of them.

The post office still trades at 850 Front Street, and the blue collection box beside the door in the photograph is where a stamped envelope still goes.

Photo: Eugene Zelenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons