I came across this more or less accidentally and I wanted to share it because it’s one of the best engineering memoirs I’ve read in recent years, about the development of the first commercial videotape recorder, the Ampex VR1000, which completely revolutionized the television industry. It was written by one of the principal engineers, who later received an Emmy for his contribution to the industry:
How far we’ve come when we can record digital HD video on our phones and tablets and think nothing of it. The original VR1000 cost $50,000 at the time (about $456,000 in today’s dollars) and weighed three-quarters of a ton! I hate to even think what the reels of two-inch-wide tape cost.
It’s a relatively short article, but it has the same kind of vibe to it as Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, about the development of a new minicomputer. It’s loaded with technical detail, and also historical anecdotes like this:
On the Saturday before the convention started (April 14) [1956] we demonstrated the recorder for about 300 CBS affiliates meeting at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. I recorded (from behind a curtain) the opening speech of Bill Lodge, V.P. of CBS, who described all the activities that CBS had been involved in during the past year and that he had a big surprise to announce. After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about ten seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the twenty video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high quality, instantaneous replay of any event. My wife, JoAnn, who had accompanied us to Chicago (as a reward from Ampex for her patience during my long overtime hours pursuing this development) and I consider this demonstration one of the most exciting experiences of our lives. The experience still brings tears to my eyes when I recall this event.
Before the invention of broadcast-quality tape machines like this, television was mostly live, with some exceptions. I Love Lucy was filmed, mostly at the behest and at the personal expense of Desi Arnaz (which later made him very rich due to the seemingly endless syndication runs). The famous “Classic 39” episodes of The Honeymooners were done with the Dumont “Electronicam” system where the same camera provided both a television feed and film recording, which is why they exist today. Otherwise the only means of recording a television show was the kinescope, where you literally filmed the image on a CRT tube. The amazing VR1000 changed everything, but to do it, they had to devise a way of getting up to 5 Mhz of bandwidth off a magnetic tape, which no one had come even close to doing before.