CompuServe Messages

Ampex was founded by a Russian WWI fighter pilot called Alexander Maximillian Poniatoff, that's where the AMP came from along with EXcellence to form the name AMPEX. He got hold of a captured German audio tape recorder after WWII and perfected the design. The company started to take off when Bing Crosby invested in some of the company's first tape recorders to record his shows. Until then, all his shows went out live which meant doing the show 3 times a night to hit the peak listening times across the States. Ampex went on to produce the first commercial VTR and showed it at NAB in 1956. For many years Ampex led the way in video technology. It perfected frame by frame video editors in 1963 and produced a slow motion disk recorder in 1967. Rumour has it that Ampex seriously considered buying up Hewlett Packard in the late 60s but decided that HP's product range didn't really fit in with Ampex's product strategy. Whilst all the computer companies are muscling in on the video world, Ampex is currently taking its video technology to the computer world with high speed mass tape storage devices. It's DST tape library system, looks a bit like a large cold drinks machine, holds something like 6.7 terrabytes of data with data transfer speeds of 60mbps Any item of data retreivable within 20 secs. What they call nearline storage. I believe it is being incorporated into the new VOD systems. Whilst Ampex has made mistakes and missed opportunities in its checkered history (what company hasn't?), it is one of America's most innovative companies.