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Video Tape Recorder Unveiled 50 Years Ago
Argyle writes "50 years ago Ampex unveiled the first video tape recorder. TV Technology has an excellent story about the surprise launch of the video tape recorder, impacting almost every aspect of business, entertainment, and family life as we know it today. The enabler of the entire modern entertainment industry, the video tape recorder was was designed by only six men, Charles Ginsburg, Charles Anderson, Ray Dolby, Shelby Henderson, Alex Maxey, and Fred Pfost."
Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.
we have TiVo....
Simple concept, complex implementation. If you RTFA you know that other companies were working on the same problem and didn't manage to pull it off. These six guys did the job and won the day for Ampex, which I only previously knew as the company that made the best vt220 clone I've ever used (ignorance abounds.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In my opinion, a negative impact. I am so glad I don't own a TV any more. I now think that the real effects of mass video propiganda can only been truly understood by living without TV for a few months. I tolerate it when I'm over at friends houses and in public places like bars, but not as the sole activity.
Anyone else out there kick the addiction?
Yes, difficult to believe... if you're 16 years old. Jesus, it was less than 20 years ago that VCRs became ubiquitous.
Tell that to someone without a DVR... I was just digitizing VHS tapes the other day, and the memories came flooding back, of eaten tapes, tons of visual glitches, tapes deteriorating from age or repeated recordings, etc. Magnetic tape recording seems very iffy, even today.
That whole article is a waste of time. Extremely verbose and filled with hyperbole, and yet very little to say.
I strongly recomend the (defacement-proof link) Wikipedia Ampex article which I found infinitely more informative and concise than this article, when I was reading up on the history of broadcast a few weeks ago.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"If you RTFA you know that other companies were working on the same problem and didn't manage to pull it off."
I did RTFA, did you GMFP? It wasn't a "put more people on it" kind of problem. Try to imagine putting 100 software developers to write a new version of Notepad, and you'll start to see what I mean.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Bulk storage of data is so pervasive these days. Perhaps none of us really appreciate what a challenge this was.
I remember when I was 13 or so. My computer had a 300 baud modem to store data on casette. My uncle had a reel to reel audio recorder and I used to fantasize about getting 9600 baud out of it. That would have been some incredible storage system.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Cristopher Columbus broke asked a question "How do you make an egg stand on its end?" ... Many people tried to balance the egg, but no one had an answer.... It's Simple, you tap one of the ends gently on its end and once this end has a flat surface, you can balance the egg with no effort. This is the same when he discovered that his theory was correct: The world is round! Everyone before him didnt know it was round, yet when he could prove it, everyone said: That is obvious, the world is not flat, its round.
The same goes with the tape recorder, some idiot may say, well, its no big deal, its just an analog signal on tape, but it took 6 intelligent people to work out how to do it.
Dont be jealous.
...because it is irrevocably tied to a bunch of other stuff in a big tangle of cables.
"Bulk storage of data is so pervasive these days. Perhaps none of us really appreciate what a challenge this was."
I understand that it was a challenge. Read the sentence immediately following the one you quoted. I wasn't saying it wasn't a big f'n deal. I wasn't saying that those guys didn't do incredible work. I wasn't even saying that their work was overrated. What I was saying that the significance of 'only six men' is virtually nil. 100 men wouldn't have made it go faster. It wasn't a 'throw more people' at it problem.
Honestly, guys.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how many lifetimes have been spent staring at the TV (re)watching videos, or how many kids grew up with a video player as a surrogate mother.
We had one of the first betamax videos when they came out. We had it for a couple of months ... during the world cup in Mexico my father sat up until 2am programming the thing to record every game. Then a few weeks later some ****ers broke into the house and stole the thing, along with all my father's world cup tapes. By that time VHS was taking over, and since we didn't know anyone who'd had a VHS stolen, we replaced those lovely DAT-like betamax tapes for the horror, the horror, of chewed VHS tape.
Tape rules, bring back the audio cassette (only this time clean yer heads and don't use anything bigger than a C60).
Simple concept? No, it isn't. Transverse recording is a major jump in technology from longitudinal recording. It enables head to tape speeds far in excess of that possible with longitudinal recording. It requires a complex rotating head assembly and very close attention to tape handling. A friend of mine used to use one of these beasties, modified for improved performance, to record image data from the LANDSAT-1 satellite. It was the only tape machine that could do the job.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This is cool because it reminds us what can happen when a *real* innovation is created, instead of version X+1 of existing software program with new feature Y.
People go crazy, you make more money than you can dream of, the world changes.
That's what geeks should dream to do...
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
... there wasn't widespread belief of a flat Earth at the time of Christopher Columbus. This misconception is generally attributed to Washington Irving.
We Build Beautiful Websites
Simple concept with a huge barrier to overcome, but still a simple concept. ...says the marketing guy to the engineer. ;)
If you are not in marketing, you should be.
Neither did it create a truly new product kinescope already existed and provided a pretty similar function. Just slower.
So what this really proves is that most tech is based on other tech and that devices wich the average human considers revolutionary are in fact evolutionary.
Funny that even after reading an article that constantly mentions how the various parts of the video recorder existed before you still claim to be innovative.
It is, but because they got existing tech to work better and together.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
" ...says the marketing guy to the engineer. ;) If you are not in marketing, you should be."
Heh. Actually I'd rather be the PHB. "Video recording is a big complicated problem. If we hire 1,000 engineers, we'll have this problem licked by next week!"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"Simple concept? No, it isn't. Transverse recording is a major jump in technology from longitudinal recording."
I think the point is widely being missed here. If only six men built the Great Wall of China, that would be worthy of a number of exclamation points. It isn't so easy to measure a leap of technology by the number of people who were or weren't involved in developing it. It's sort of like saying the only 3 cans of Mountain Dew were consumed while developing the MP3 algorithm.
"Derp de derp."
Wayne Green, the founder of Byte Magazine actually invented the video recorder when he suggested hetrodyne techniques to frequency shift the signal so that it would fit into the bandwidth availble on magnetic tape.
Very nostalgic, for those of us who work with broadcast VTR's on a daily basis. I can still thread a quad machine in a pinch, but even I can't wait to get rid of tape completely.
The next generation of broadcasters are going to look at tape like we look at recording on wax cylinders.
Good to see it's beginning, and even better to see its end. It's time has passed.
That's what Vasari says, in his Lives of the Artists (1550): http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/basis/vasari/vasari 5.htm
That was the question asked of the first working demo because the video was so bad. I had the priviledge of meeting Fred on several occassions, he is quite the tinkerer. He was working on several projects at once the last time I spoke with him at FAUG(First Amiga Users Group). He was working on a an automatic pool cue (spring loaded to help the novice deliver th right english). Distributed GPS (using modems!) to get 1 inch accuracy, and one other thing that escapes me now. What struck me each time I met him was that: If he was on the team, they were lucky to make the VTR work and the second one was that they were lucky to have him. He was that kind of unorthodox guy who could simultaneously seem the mad scientist and creative genius at the same time.
Yet another example of the Merkans (US-Anians) thinking they were there first, and now here they are, rewriting history. Twats.
The time was ..... 12:00 .... 12:00 .... 12:00 ..... 12:00 .... 12:00 .... 12:00
(Apologies to those of you who are 30yo and have no idea what I'm talking about).
There was a film a couple of years back about Hogan's Heroes' Bob Crane called "Auto Focus" starring Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe. He was one of the first to use the new "portable" VTR from Sony for sex video's. I googled up this: http://crimemagazine.com/bobcrane.htm
They unleashed a monster. Could have nipped it in the bud back in the 50's.
No no, the russians invented everything. Heard of popoff's law?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Don't forget that whenever we hear about new galactic phenomenon, the news is always millions of years old.
for the dupe!
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Actually, it wasn't the only way. In the late 1920s, back when cameras were still mechanical-scan, there were people in the UK who had hooked up vinyl disc recorders (search for "phonovision") to their primitive television sets and recorded a few programs. Not only did they record programs, but they actually used them for time-shift viewing!
The video recorder wasn't trivial. The problem was getting enough octaves of bandwidth for the video signal. And the bandwidth was directly related to the head-to-tape speed. Using transverse or helical scan (transverse scan is really just helical scan at a very sharp angle), you can increase the head speed enough for video. Later, color added another problem, and a technique called "color under" was used which shifted the chroma information to another band.
Laserdisc isn't really much different, except that it has enough bandwidth to not need color-under. And no, just because it has pits and non-pits, it is NOT digital, though the audio can be. The distance between the pit edges represents a wideband analog signal, with four sub-bands for audio and one for video.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Some of the stories on Slashdot can be a bit dated, but this happened fifty years ago and /. is only reporting on it now?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Why no national holiday? The VCR did more to take Pornography from the seedy theater into your homes. In fact, were it not for the VCR, many people would still be thinking of motor oil whenever the subject of 'lube' came up.
when they pry my B&H Filmo-70DR from my cold dead fingers.
The GP's post is basically another "I hate IP". They want you to think that IP is always about everything being wholely unique, but there are many reasons why an invention isn't an island into itself. BTW software is no exception to this rule. The important lesson we should glean from the story is that hindsight is a strong force, blinding us towards the evolutionary nature of most of our useful inventions, and we shouldn't forget that evolutionary or revolutionary, hard work and peserverance is involved, and that's what IP rewards. Not the invention itself.
Claiming that only six men invented this video tape recorder is simply nonsense. The Ampex work - only one of the projects that independently invented video tape recording - depended on that done by thousands of earlier workers in the field. Ampex in the 1950s had to have given to them magnetic tape recording technology of a highly developed sort (including AC bias - most of the development work was done in Germany), as well as the idea of recording video signals (first demonstrated by Baird - Scottish - on disc in the 1920s) and putting video signals on tape (worked out in principle in 1932 by Schroeter - German).
e .htm. The reason they got the job done with such a small team is that very little was left to do bar `put the bits together to implement the method already described' (okay, okay, so they did have lots of new technical problems to overcome and I bet it was hell to get it to work properly and I am in fact very impressed with what they achieved (I couldn't do it, could I?) - but... It wasn't *that* big a deal and lots of people other than those working directly for Ampex were responsible for designing it.)
c tionVideoRecorder.asp
Some of the highlights of the groundwork that let Ampex put together a machine described by others using technology developed by others are mentioned here:
http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_timelin
There was a separate video tape recorder project running at the BBC (UK), which resulted in VERA coming into service two years after Ampex first demonstrated its video tape recorder. This was designed by BBC engineers and did not depend on Ampex research at all.
http://www.nmpft.org.uk/insight/downloads/Introdu
That was funny. (sadly I don't have mod points)
If you've ever seen the Anime OAV "Otaku no Video" you might remember the guy who was a videotaping freak. That was me from about 1987 until 2 years ago when I canceled my cable TV. I have boxes and boxes and shelves full of VHS tapes, primarily of movies and TV series, but also stuff from my tape trading days. It used to be that you couldn't download fansubbed anime, you would have to trade tapes with people. Tape traders lived by a strict code. No money was to change hands...you "repaid" your fellow tape trader with blank tape and stamps, or a nominal sum to cover blank tape and postage. If a legit release came out of a particular title, you stopped circulating the tape.
I have been thinking about getting a DVD recorder, but have been hesitant due to the expense. However, they are coming down in price. And now that I have a camcorder (thank you eBay) I have a need to burn footage to DVD+R to free up the expensive little DV tapes it consumes. And they *are* expensive, dammit. $4/tape! Damn, I remember when Maxell, TDK and Fuji VHS tape were that price...now they're a buck a tape or less.
It's amusing to look at my little chibi-DV camcorder and think about the gargantuan machine Ampex built. The thing fits in the palm of my hand. The tapes are about 2" x 1" x 1/4". And you can hear the mechanism wrapping the tape around the helical scan drum just like with any other videotape format. And DV tape is on its way out as a standard, replaced by mini-DVD and in camera hard drives. Looks like DV tape is going to eventually wind up at Total Rewind on display. Oh well, it's working for me now.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
An old (1970?) copy of Audio magazine toured Hugh Hefner's 'Playboy Mansion' and gave details of his gear and gadgets. A big reel-to-reel video recorder was pictured along with a library of Hef's favorite movies. Wow. Watch whatever movie you wanted, right in your living room. Hot stuff for the day.
Ampex From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, Alexander M. Poniatoff. It actually stands for (A)lexander (M). (P)oniatoff (Ex)cellence. Poniatoff's company was established in San Carlos, California in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. In 1948, ABC used an Ampex Model 200 audio recorder for the first-ever U.S. tape delay radio broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show. In 1950, Ampex introduced the first "dedicated" instrumentation recorder, Model 500, built for the U.S. Navy. Ampex became a leader in magnetic sound and video recording technology. Ampex was not a recording format, but a company that developed the Quadruplex format that dominated the broadcast industry for decades. The format was licensed to RCA for use in their "television tape recorders." Ampex's invention revolutionized the television industry by eliminating the kinescope process of archiving television programs on motion picture film (at least in the U.S.; in Britain, the BBC and most of the ITV companies continued to use kinescoping alongside videotape until the late 1960s; in most developing countries, many television broadcasters continued to use kinescoping alongside videotape until the mid-1970s). The Ampex broadcast video tape recorder also facilitated time-zone broadcast delay so that networks could air programming at the same hour in various time zones. One of the key engineers in the development of the Quadruplex video recorder for Ampex was Ray Dolby, who worked under Charlie Ginsburg and went on to form Dolby Laboratories, a pioneer in audio noise reduction systems. The first magnetically-recorded time-delayed network television program using the new Ampex Quadruplex recording system was CBS's "Douglas Edwards and the News" on November 30, 1956. Since the early 1950s, Bing Crosby and others tried to record video on very fast-moving magnetic tape. One semi-successful attempt was the BBC's VERA. Ampex pursued recording methods in which recording heads were rotated at high speed and the tape movement was kept slow. The "Quad" head assembly has 4 heads that rotate at 14,400 rpm. They write the video vertically across the width of a tape that is 2 inches (5 cm) wide and runs at 15" (38cm) per second. This allows programs of one hour to be recorded on one reel of tape. (In 1956, one reel of tape cost $300, equivalent to $2000 in 2000 and the recorders cost about $75-100,000, about a half a million dollars today). Today, a majority of the early videotaped content still existing are network programs, since the typical television station could not afford an Ampex VTR. Ampex had trademarked the name "Video Tape", so competitor RCA called the medium "TV Tape" or "Television Tape". The terms eventually became genericized, and "videotape" is commonly used today. In 1967, ABC used the Ampex HS-100 disk recorder for playback of slow-motion downhill skiing on World Series of Skiing in Vail, Colorado. This was the first use of slow motion instant replay in sporting events. Later that year, Ampex introduced the Ampex VR-3000 portable broadcast video recorder, which revolutionized the recording of high-quality television in the field without the need for long cables and large support vehicles. Broadcast quality images could now be shot anywhere, including from airplanes, helicopters and boats. In 1970, Ampex introduced the ACR-25, the first automated robotic library system for the recording and playback of television commercials. Each commercial was recorded on an individual cartridge. These cartridges were then loaded into large rotating carousels. Using sophisticated mechanics and compressed air, the "carts" were loaded into and extracted from the machine at extremely high speed. This allowed TV stations to re-sequence commercial breaks at a moments notice, adding, deleting and rearranging commercials at will. The TV newsroom also began to use the ACR-25 to run news stories because of its random access capability. The Ampex video system is now obsolete. Those machines which still survive have
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
But 50 years ago, they didn't realize that any idiot would be able to go out with a $100 video camera and take countless videos of their friends doing stupid stunts with absolutely no meaning. No theme, no posture, just footage of people jumping off of buildings.
Everyone's favorite Jewish kid!
MPAA celebrates 50 years surviving in the uneven battle with the evil video recorders.
And they still got enough money to sue kids and grandparents too! Yei!
But aren't you at least a little diminished by not knowing who Kelly Pickler is? Those of us who do know have a lot in common that you don't.
One of which was the series "Tribal Life" on the Travel Channel depicting the life of the Bunlap tribe on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu.
Locust Valley High School, circa 1974 - 1980:
My "high tech" junior high and high school was wired for video. Most classrooms had a coax port on the wall . . . nor for "cable" TV but for local transmission.
As I recall, there were maybe four channels.
The A.V. room had a funky old rack unit with a patch panel and a couple of small B&W monitors. Feeding into this were three reel-to-reel video tape machines: Two half-inch, plus one giant 1" Ampex. (Near the end of my high school years we got a video cartridge machine; nothing you'd be familiar with. The carts were huge, pre-VHS and pre-Beta.)
There were also units on wheels we could trundle into classrooms that didn't have the connection. There were maybe three or four video cameras as well; these were not self-contained, and had to be plugged into a reel-to-reel unit.
There were no commercially available tapes to speak of. We recorded stuff off of the air, mostly from PBS. (There MIGHT have been a timer available, but maybe I'm imagining that!)
Now, the nerd pay-off:
One of the senior AV guys (Richard Salz?) figured out a neat trick. He connected a camera to VTR "A", and the patch panel monitor to VTR "B." He then ran a tape from the "source" reel of "A", past "A"'s recording head, across a foot of space, over "B"'s recording head, and into "B"'s "sink" reel.
He then pointed the camera at the monitor, creating a "tunnel" effect . . . monitors nested in monitors.
Bear with me.
When you waved a hand between the camera and the monitor, it appeared in the FIRST of the nested monitor images on screen.
A few seconds later -- the time it took for the tape to travel from the recording head of "A" to the play head of "B" -- the waving hand appeared in the next nested monitor image..
And so on, until you could see just a blur in the inmost-visible nested monitor image.
Um, OK, I guess you had to be there.
Brought the idea out of the milspec salvage yards after WWII and got the ball rolling on multi-track recorder (which is what a video tape recorder is). Besides that, he was a brilliant man. http://raymondscott.com/timeline.html
We had one of the first betamax videos when they came out.
I still have one! Free to a good home - want it? (Warning: you pay shipping.) E-mail me, slant6mopar@yahoo.com. If I could find my digital camera (damned miniturization makes things get lost easily!), I'd put photos online. It's a 1975 Sony top-loader with mechanical tuners, and *only supports Beta I* (effectively, SP only - no LP or EP speeds). If there's interest, I'll actually pull it out of the closet and copy down the model number. FOB Ottawa, Canada.
We had it for a couple of monthsHeheh... can you imagine the back injuries? Until the end of Betamax, they were always heavy machines, with a good strong steel chassis. Lovely pieces of work, far more reminiscent of their broadcast quality 3/4" U-Matic brothers than the pedestrian VHS crap.
By that time VHS was taking over, and since we didn't know anyone who'd had a VHS stolen, we replaced those lovely DAT-like betamax tapes for the horror, the horror, of chewed VHS tape.Yah. VHS uses what's called an "M-load" design, while Betamax, 3/4" and all professional formats use a U-load design. While VHS had that Rube Goldberg bicycle-chain-pulls-the-threaders design, everything else had a threading ring which simply rotated and threaded the tape - a lot simpler and less dependent on mechanical tolerances than the multilinks of the VHS threader.
Both machines can chew tape, but even new (and "improved") VHS machines are still criminally reprehensible in the face of Betamax.
Tape rules, bring back the audio cassette (only this time clean yer heads and don't use anything bigger than a C60).Cassettes are crap. Stick with OGG/MP3 for portable use and FLAC for anything serious!
On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot of fun to fire up my Ferrograph, and watch the tape fly by at 15IPS every now and then. Yeah, there's something really deliciously tactile about the analog formats, especially with a good quality machine - the snaps of solenoids, the hum of threading motors, the whirr of the capstan motor.
Having worked as a maintenance and production technician at a TV station during the dying days of Quad, I miss most the "WWWOOOOoooowwww..." of the brakes stopping a full 6lb reel of tape at the end of a rewind cycle. I still have a few scars on my hands from trying to change a tape before the reel stopped, with the director screaming "We're live! We're live!" in my ClearCom.
[sigh]
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
but 'only six men'... So?
More likely, only six men got the credit.
If I really am talking out of my ass...explain it to me with respect so I'll at least pull my ears out to listen.