[QuadList] Ray Dolby passed today--Youngest of the six Quad pioneers at Ampex

[Tim Stoffel]

Charlie once made the comment to me that Ray was the youngest of the
'Gang of Six', but had aged the fastest.

Very sorry to hear this news.

Tim Stoffel

--

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Langdell <ted at quadvideotapegroup.com>
Reply-to: Quad List <quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com>
To: Quad List <QuadList at quadvideotapegroup.com>
Subject: [QuadList] Ray Dolby passed today--Youngest of the six Quad
pioneers at Ampex
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:49:41 -0700

Ray Dolby, the youngest of the six pioneering VTR engineers who
developed the Quadruplex video recording format at Ampex passed away
today at his San Francisco home.

Dolby was 80, and had been diagnosed in July with acute leukemia,
according to a Dolby Labs press release. In recent years, Dolby had been
living with Alzheimer's Disease.


        http://investor.dolby.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=790493


Dr. Dolby is survived by his wife, Dagmar, his sons, Tom and David,
their spouses, Andrew and Natasha, and four grandchildren.

A celebration of his life will be held at a later date.

The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, donations are made to the
Alzheimer’s Association, 1060 La Avenida Street, Mountain View, CA
94043, or the Brain Health Center, c/o CPMC Foundation, 45 Castro
Street, San Francisco, CA 94117.


Dolby founded Dolby Labs in 1965 and holds more than 50 patents.  He
sponsored the acquisition of the Ampex Museum by Stanford University. 


Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon in January 1933 and his family
eventually moved to the San Francisco Peninsula. 


While a student he was hired part-time by Ampex in 1949, and worked on
various audio and instrumentation projects.


In 1952, Dolby was the second engineer assigned to the exploration of
video recording at the pioneer audio recorder manufacturer, and joined
Charles Ginsburg who had been hired in 1951 to work on the project.  


After a stint in the Army, Dolby re-joined Ampex and provided further
contributions to the first practical video recorder, while attending
Stanford University. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in
Electrical Engineering from Stanford, left Ampex to study in England at
Cambridge University from which he received a PhD in Physics in 1961.


His connection with sound was cemented through Dolby Labs.


In his passing, Dolby joins four Videotape® colleagues whose efforts
made electronic picture recording practical and created jobs for
thousands of engineers, camera operators, editors and technicians around
the world.


Charles Anderson—who pressed for and developed the use of FM recording
for the video signal—passed away in Sparks, Nevada on July 12 of last
year (2012).  Anderson was the first full-time engineer hired for the
project and remained with Ampex through retirement as an executive in
1984.


Alex Maxey joined the development team in 1954 and developed the curved
vacuum guide that gently curved the 2" videotape into contact with the
head drum, enabling the four heads to write tracks from the top to the
bottom of the tape as it moved from left to right.  His experiments led
to ways to control tape tension, which proved critical.  Maxey later
proposed a helical scan VTR at Ampex, and worked on its creation using
systems borrowed from the successful Ampex Quadruplex units.  Alex Maxey
left Ampex to pursue development of Helical Scan recorders, and passed
away in 2004 at age 82.


Charles Ginsburg died in Eugene, Oregon on April, 9, 1992, a few months
shy of his 72nd birthday. He was an Ampex employee until he retired in
1986 as Vice President for Advanced Development.


Dolby's passing today leaves just two of the six pioneers living.


Fred Pfost—whose work on the video heads and assemblies was essential to
the success of the project—and Shelby Henderson, the machinist and
model-maker who brought plans and ideas to life in metal.


Henderson was reported wheelchair bound living in Oregon several years
ago.


Pfost had a successful career outside of Ampex, working for 25 different
companies on a wide range of projects. He is the VP of Engineering at
ABD, Inc., on Los Altos, a position he's held since January of 1991.


Fred Pfost and his wife have organized an annual September gathering of
"Ampex Old Timers."  This year's picnic will be in two days, at a park
in Mountain View, not so many miles from where the the Quadruplex
Videotape® recorder was born.


Ted


Ted Langdell
(530) 301-2931
ted at quadvideotapegroup.com
Secretary for the  QuadVideotapeGroup.com: 
Preserving Tape, Equipment and the Knowledge to use them, in conjunction
with the Library of Congress





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