The EditDroid was never a commercial success and after the close of The Droid Works in 1987 and subsequent redevelopment of the product for seven years, the software was eventually sold to Avid Technology in 1993.
The controller, called the TouchPad, features a KEM-style shuttle knob, a trackball, and a host of buttons with LED labels that changes in function depending on what the system was doing.
The EditDroid pioneered the use of the graphical display for editing—introducing the timeline[4] as well as digital picture icons to identify raw source clips.
Aside from the technological advantages of digital editing, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, editor Walter Murch mourns the loss of the older analog solutions.
Analog editing requires the editor to frequently move back and forth or scrub in the source material to gain an overview, thus increasing one's familiarity with it.