[QuadList] Vital... Gainesville

[rabruner at aol.com]

I both maintained and operated the VIX-114 switcher and the SqueeZoom.  The problem Vital had was rushing things into production.  That was also the advantage they gained in the market place over GVG.  They would be out a year earlier with all the bells and whistles at the expense of getting the bugs out of the device.  For Instance, they were on the market first with 'clock wipes' and 'ghoul wipes.'  The clock wipe generator was really four 90 degree quadrant wipes that took an infinity of pots to set up so that all the quadrants had a common center, etc.  The 114 switcher was used by CBS to produce shows like Sonny and Cher that featured a lot of those kinds of tricky transitions.  It was used in Nashville to produce Hee Haw for the same reason. The 114 had a lot of potential as a switcher, but it suffered from a lack of development to knock the rough edges off. It just wouldn't stay adjusted.
    The SqueeZoom was also let out of the box before it was ready in order to get it onto the market before GVG could integrate the NEC EFlex into their switchers.  It suffered from a lot of design shortcomings, not the least of which was the quality of the circuit boards as has been mentioned here.  The problems with the boards in all products, I have been told by someone who worked at Vital at the time, was twofold.  They put the first artwork into production and then tried to clean it up after the fact by blowing out incorrect traces and using rework wire.  The second problem was that they made large runs of boards for all products and then didn't de flux them properly because the machine they used to clean the boards was malfunctioning and no one knew it.  So flux was left on the boards, washed into the IC sockets, etc. In a period of a few months, the residue corroded away traces, and fouled the contacts in all the IC sockets.  I spent hours removing IC sockets from SqueeZoom boards and replacing them with Augat machined pin IC sockets. If you pried the plastic tops off the IC sockets, the pins and board underneath were covered with a black residue.  
    The squeezoom was under designed in a lot of ways.  Due to a lack of CPU horsepower, it cut a lot of computational corners.  The motion was mostly 8 bit functions.  There were 128 steps of squeeze and 128 steps of zoom, or 256 steps from infinity to off the screen. As long as you flew things up pretty quickly, it looked o.k., but anything stately had a definite 'steppiness.'  The color interpolation was troublesome too. as I recall each channel had 8 y memory boards, 5 r-y memory boards and 3 b-y.  So trying to zoom an object in a blue screen always produced strange edges, especially at small sizes.  Then Ampex put the ADO on the market and all this became academic.  
Bob Bruner 
W9TAJ






On Feb 27, 2011, at 8:01 PM, Chuck Reti wrote:
> 
> I never had the "pleasure" of using a Vital. Did use some ISI (Gainesville) 
product, and also American Data (worst-construction-ever. From Alabama, maybe).
> 
> Chuck Reti
> WV8A
> Detroit MIl



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