Timeline Analog 2. John Buck

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      Frey, a veteran of the Ford Motor Company, quit troublesome markets, like magnetic tape and consumer products. He sold off the professional camera business and the plants that made the 8 mm home movie camera, made famous by Zapruder’s recording of the Kennedy assassination.

      Despite the plant closures, Bell and Howell’s Professional Equipment Division continued to make color printing systems, modular film printers for the professional film industry. It was these clients that Bell and Howell had in mind when it began work on a ‘film-like’ editing system called EnVision.

       KODAK

      B&H’s long time competitor was in similar trouble. Kodak, the leading consumer film company in the world, was under siege from the Polaroid Corporation with instant film cameras.

      Dr Edwin Land’s startup had invented instant film in 1947, but it was his latest camera iteration, the SX-70 that caused a major shift in the amateur photographic market and devastated Kodak’s profits. Land told Time magazine:

       I think this camera can have the same impact as the telephone on the way people live.

      Land then committed Polaroid to its next major technical challenge. To re-invent home movies. He created the secret Polavision project to deliver an instant motion picture system for consumers. Former RCA engineer Ken Kiesel worked on the challenges involved with image processing and computation.

       I worked on the hardware and software design for the Polavision instant movie developer/player, which used the first General Instrument Corporation 8-bit single chip microcomputer. I then developed a movie light control circuit that automatically held brightness and color temperature constant.

      Kiesel’s experience with pixel-by-pixel manipulation would become invaluable in a future editing product that, like the Polaroid products, broke all the rules. From an industry viewpoint Polaroid’s sudden rise over Kodak and B&H served to remind all watchers of a business constant.

      No company was too large to be immune from a change in technology or in consumer sentiment. Two Silicon Valley stalwarts, Ampex and Memorex looked set for the same fate as their photographic counterparts, Bell & Howell and Eastman Kodak.

      Mark Sanders had progressed through the ranks at Ampex into senior management.

       Of course through the Fifties and Sixties Ampex's financial strength and the world of videotape recording in general had been built upon quadruplex 2" tape. The transverse scan recording method dominated television broadcasting and had even been adapted as a data storage method and other applications.

       UTAH - 1971

      The wealthy Rockefeller family of New York sat on the board of the Utah based computer graphics company, Evans and Sutherland.