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."

Waste of time...

[evilviper]

In an age when video cameras and recording devices are virtually everywhere, it's difficult to believe that it wasn't always possible to walk into a Wal-Mart or Best Buy store with $50 and leave with a new video recorder.

Yes, difficult to believe... if you're 16 years old. Jesus, it was less than 20 years ago that VCRs became ubiquitous.

The science of magnetically recording video images is so mature today that it's taken completely for granted,

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:Well okay...

[Detritus]

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.

Actually...

[Sirch]

... there wasn't widespread belief of a flat Earth at the time of Christopher Columbus. This misconception is generally attributed to Washington Irving [wikipedia.org].

Except that this isn't true

[SmallFurryCreature]

If you read the article you can read that this vcr was a X+1 technology. Not only does the article mention two previous video recorders from wich lessons were learned it also makes the link that a video recorder is just a audio recorder +1

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.

Disc recording came first

[b1t r0t]

This was a seeming impossibility, as the only means for preserving video images was kinescope recording, a process in which a special motion picture camera photographed a television monitor. When the recording was finished, the film had to be removed and sent away for developing. Under normal circumstances, this could take hours.

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.