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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.
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.'"
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
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
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.
Yup, I stopped watching tv a few years ago, and now I'm utterly addicted to pointless internet activity. In fact, I'm indulging the addiction right now.
then went back to my Clancy novel
Isn't that what they call "out of the frying pan, into the fryer?"
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Babe, do what I do, choose not to watch it; thats
what an adult would do; you have the power right
there in your hands.
Yes, you made that choice to drop television, BUT
at the same time, what gives you the right to some how
unilaterally start imposing your values on those
who may not share them.
And yet you post and read /.? So much for making good use of all that extra time!
/. and posting your personal opinions is what does it for you, great! But don't look down your nose at other people just because they enjoy something you don't.
Really though, at different point in my life I have gone without TV, and I just don't get the whole "TV sucks" thing. Just like anything else, there are good shows, and there are bad shows. There is stupid stuff, and there is really enlightening stuff. Besides, some people need to just unwind sometimes.
I mean, I have been 10 years now without a car, and I could certainly make comments like "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know throwing away tens of thousands of dollars just so they can be fat and lazy and not have to walk to the store." By the same token I haven't gotten drunk in years and I could say "What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know pay money to kill off brain cells." However, I realize that it is a gross oversimplification to even think that way.
People do what pleases them. If reading on
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.
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.
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
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.