[QuadList] fun questions for you hardware gurus

[L.E. Odham]

Hi Dave, 



Bev Gooch at Ampex probably played a major role in the development of instrumentation recorders and head assemblies. 



-M ore that he would ever take credit for.   



Bev was a principal scientist at Ampex. He went to work there in 1962. At the time , he held several patents for magnetic recording apparatus'. 



      I remember asking him  one day  what all the patent certificates hanging on his walls were for. He said that before he went to work for Ampex, the Brush corp bought several of his longitudinal video recording head patents. This would have been in 1958 or '59. Up until then, I suppose Ampex considered him as  a competitor in the video recording field.  His longitudinal video patents were from 19 53, -'54. 

    Brush planned to use the(his) video head design  patents for instrument recorders. The rest he took with him to Ampex in '62. 



  He and Edward Schiller also shared a couple patents on magnetic head design. 



He mentioned to me once while visiting that he had contributed a little to the gap sputtering process used in the multichannel stacked-head designs Ampex came  out with in the mid-60s. 



It may be that some of the Honeywell,etc.,and others, equipment that came later may have originated from the Brush patent collection thru lineage, chain of patent ownership, buyouts, licensing, etc. 



That could explain some of the similarities you noticed between different manufacturers since many of the fundamental design patents at that time  can be traced back to one person. 



Larry Odham 







----- Original Message -----




I owned a pair of FR-80's many years ago that were surplus from NASA in Huntsville. 
I remember being super impressed with the level of design perfection. 
They were 14-track 1" machines.  Found an old B&W print from my dusty archives... 
Never could figure out why 14 when the standard for 1" for the rest of us  
was 16 tracks, unless NASA for some reason spec'ed it that way. 


They had beautifully machined 10" brass capstan pulleys that used 
sewn silk or nylon belts, ran at 15, 30, or 60 ips, had swappable record and 
playback modules for regular or FM recording, some even had little 2" 
oscilliscopes for each channel!  They used compressed air feeding the 
guides, and a pressure sensor to each guide modulated the take-up 
or supply reel tension.  The capstan was in the middle, the tape wrapped 
around an idler with an optical tachometer, and when you started the 
tape in Reproduce or Record, the takeup would first pull the tape through 
the whole head assembly and get it moving at exactly the right speed 
before 

he pinch rollers would engage it to the spinning capstan. 
I was quite impressed with the transport. 


Of course this was for the space program, probably used to record many 
channels of telemetry of rocket engine tests or who knows what. 
I've since seen similar apparently compatible 14-track machines made by 
Honeywell and... Bell & Howell? 


My first exposure to the later quad-type machines like the FR-600 was 
the guys working to read the Apollo tapes. 


But I was always extremely impressed with Ampex's ability to turn out 
such quality instrumentation. 


It was interesting having two of them standing in my spare bedroom on 2x4's! 
They made flawless analog recordings...  
But no erase heads!!! 

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