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<DIV>Hi Bill:</DIV>
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<DIV>Always great to get your first-hand experiences and these interesting
stories!</DIV>
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<DIV>As for the technology behind multichannel transverse scan recording, it was
developed for scientific and military applications in the early 60's, so there
wasn't much of a delay between the videotape recorder and other applications for
transverse scan. I have much more information regarding RCA's work in this
field than I have about Ampex. Some of the early designs were rather
crude, and some of the systems used much slower writing speeds than used
for video, but the ability to record two different broadband channels
simultaneously was a big deal. Here's a pic of both low-speed and hi-speed
Octaplex headwheels from the early 60's.</DIV>
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<DIV>Don Norwood<BR>Digitrak Communications, Inc.<BR><A
href="http://www.digitrakcom.com">www.digitrakcom.com</A></DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT: 10pt arial; BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=wcarpen107@yahoo.com href="mailto:wcarpen107@yahoo.com">Bill
Carpenter</A> </DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: tahoma,new york,times,serif; FONT-SIZE: 14pt">Hi Don
& Everybody,<BR><BR>This is an interesting thread, I was product manager
for the VR-3000, and in the early fall of 1973, my boss, who had worked at
WSM-TV was contacted by his ex boss, Lee Whitehurst. The had been pitched the
TVR-10 for a new "venture", so we brought a group of engineers to Redwood City
and had some conceptual discussions and the VR-3000 would not meet their
needs. We sold them an "outline drawing", with "not to exceed" measurements
and weights of a full functioning broadcast quadraplex machine to be delivered
by the end of April 1974. <BR>At NAB we saw the drawings of the "Bread Truck",
single camera mobile they were building, for the "New Venture", Opryland.
<BR>I shipped the sixth production, AVR-2 from the Huston show floor on
Wenesday evening and it was providing news inserts, on the evening news in
Nashville on Friday, in less than 48hrs, and was the first AVR-2 use
"On-Air".<BR><BR>In another vein, both of the Quad based expermental digital
machines ("Annie, AVR-3 based) and the AVR-2 for Montreaux, used an Octiplex
head, maybe even the same one and as I remember it provided two seperate data
streams. The instrumentation div of Ampex, had used this for some Govt.
products, so it was a known technology.<BR><BR>Bill Carpenter<BR>
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