[QuadList] fun questions for you hardware gurus

[Dennis Ray Wingo]

There is a very good reason for this separation.  The government contracts paid for a lot of the R&D for the commercial products but this could not be shown on the books as it would cause the government to cut payments to the company.  So what you had were two separate divisions, with (here is the most important part) separate accounting for government contracts and for the commercial products.  The engineering advancements made over on the government side could leak over to the commercial side but you could not have the same engineers working on the different products as that again would get you in trouble with the government.  The Instrumenation machines sold for a LOT more than the commercial stuff.  I have seen some head refurb bills for the Ampex FR-900 that were $20,000 per head.  I doubt seriously the commercial world could ever get away with that level of cost but since the heads had different part numbers and a different part number system all through, this could be gotten away with and the commercial guys benefitted.

Note that today Ampex survives primarily as a government contractor.

Dennis



On Jan 20, 2013, at 9:57 PM, Don Norwood wrote:

> 
> Hi Dave:
>  
> In the useless trivia department, Ampex used this style switch on the instrumentation recorders before they used it on the video decks.  The VR-1100 was the first quad transport to use them but the first video machine to use them was the VR-8000 2" helical.  However, they had already been in use on instrumentation decks.  Here's a picture of a transport control for an FR-600 that I had and it predates the video decks.  There seemed to be a lot of technology and design sharing within the company, but many video folks don't know much about other Ampex products.  A similar situation existed at RCA, and both companies had government contracts for specialized products that were often far more sophisticated than what we saw in the television business.

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