It wasn’t directed at anyone. I invented the expansion `Inferior Blowup Machines’ in a moment of creative genius and I attributed it to DEC because I’m a VAX freak and I wish DEC had beaten IBM to the punch with PCs.
Because then, ya know, early PCs would have had VAX emulation modes instead of IBM minicomputer emulation modes. And that would have ruled.
All 3 of my VCRs have heads (drums? whatevers the part is that actually TOUCHES the tape) that are sideways slightly. Tilted just about 20 degrees or so to the left as I look in the flap.
I was referring to the vertical-mounted head drum in the old Ampex machines, AcidKid was talking about. Yes, you are correct, Muldoon, the video head drums in modern VCRs and VCPs are tilted.
Baird says that VHS stands for Vertical Helical Scan. Here’s the relevant quote from that page:
Vertical refers to the orientation of the head, as opposed to horizontal, as the previous tape players were.
Helical Scan, as opposed to Linear Scan, allows much greater bandwidth with lower tape speeds. Let’s look at it this way:
Linear technology relies on the media moving very fast past a stationary head, whereas helical scan technology moves the tape very slowly past a rotating head. To put the speeds into perspective, a helical scan tape drive moves tape at around 1 inch per second and a linear tape drive moves tape at 160 inches per second, resulting in the same effective tape speed. In effect, linear head technology would take 1 mile of tape to record 6 1/2 minutes of video, while that same mile of tape would record over 16 hours of video utilitizing helical scan.
My money is on the Vertical Helical Scan designation. Besides, that’s what I was taught in my TV production class at college.