[QuadList] Ampex ESS and AVA

[Scott Thomas]

Bill,

Did you ever meet Alvy Ray Smith? He wrote the software that became the AVA while at NYIT. He was later one of the founders of Pixar.

The person who took delivery of the paint software was Junaid Sheikh, who would later go on to start Abekas and Accom.
I went to the Abekas booth at NAB in 2006 or 7 and asked to meet Junaid. The first question he asked me was "You're not a lawyer are you?".

I really thought the demo video on the AVA 3 was amazing. I very nearly bought an AVA 3 system from a dealer a few years ago. I've never used one, but always wanted to.

Scott Thomas


On Dec 8, 2010, at 6:17 PM, Bill Carpenter wrote:

> Hi David and everybody.
> 
> Yes, the first Still Store was built for CBS, and was called the ESS or the ESS-1. This was a sorta spin off from the AVA, which we had in the late &0's and built 7, + 1 (but that's another story)
> 
> Then we built the ESS-2 which would handle real time video. I don't know how many of these were built, but they were Great.
> 
> Then in 1983, the ESS-3 came along, was shown @ NAB, and immediately redesigned, to make it more flexible and scalable.
> 
> I moved from VTR's to Graphic's at the request of Engineering and Marketing Management. 
> 
> I had introduced the VPR-3,and had a solid $ 40 million dollar order backlog before the first unit shipped, so in July of 1983, I moved over as the Product Manager of  Graphics, and re-introduced the redesigned ESS-3 and the new AVA-3 in 1984. 
> 
> I had learn about digital video and object based programming and databases, in a big hurry. OBTW along with this came learning how to deal with Graphic Artist's and some interesting union problems.
>  
> Bye for now, Bill Carpenter

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