This Hi-Fi Tape Recorder Changed Radio Forever
45 points by Jimmc414 4 days ago | 9 comments
bolangi 60 minutes ago
Long after the company was gone, the Ampex sign remained for years on the West side of 101 somewhere around Redwood City, was finally taken down ten or 20 years ago.
replyjoezydeco 7 hours ago
Sent to Germany at the war’s end, Mullin eventually came across that technology at a radio station...
replyFun trivia: that radio station was in Bad Nauheim, Germany, which is where Elvis Presley was stationed during his stint in the US Army.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago
The magnetic tape was produced by IG Farben, a lovely company if you like slave labor and holocausts.
replySanjayMehta 5 hours ago
The data was collated on IBM punch card machines, a lovely company if you like holocausts.
replysomat 4 hours ago
It does rise an interesting question, how much can you blame a company for the crimes of it's customers?
replySoftTalker 4 hours ago
IG Farben was deeply involved with supporting all that unpleasant business, much more so than IBM.
replyakanet 4 hours ago
IBM was extremely involved in purposefully collaborating with the reich to run censuses to identify Jewish populations, not to mention running actual prisoner inventory at various concentration camps. They specifically made overseas subsidiaries to shield this activities from US sanctions at the time.
replymatherial 2 hours ago
Right, which is still few steps removed from the actual genocide. IG Farben was a direct participant, to the point where a lot of their execs were tried and convicted at Nuremberg.
replyBut I'm not sure the focus on corporations is all that interesting here. The Allies eventually let most of the senior Nazi leadership walk free, and few in Germany faced any lasting consequences for what they did during the war (even IG Farben execs were released before too long). I think the idea was that they needed to govern the nation they have, and mass-imprisonment wasn't a viable strategy. It worked out in a pragmatic sense, but it was hardly justice for the millions of civilians exterminated by the regime.
The same story is told about Eastman Kodak and 35/70mm film stock, as well as 16mm and 8mm with and without sound track.