Timeline Analog 2 - John Buck Timeline Analog

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methods in the studios but it is incomparably more mobile outside. It is also easier to duplicate and more universal as a medium from which to originate transmissions in a world where systems differ…

       But the day is clearly coming when it will be possible to take an electronically based picture with as much flexibility as can now be done with a film unit.

       What will happen then to all the union expectations about the handling of picture making gear in a mobile setting, I don’t know. But it is impossible to believe that the 1980s will not see the wholesale development of practical systems of electronic recording in the field, which could replace the film camera.

      If anybody doubted Curran’s prediction that such a change in professional production technology was less than a decade away, they only needed to look at two U.S. companies so dominant that they had become icons.

       BELL AND HOWELL

      The Chicago based Bell & Howell (B&H) and Eastman Kodak in Rochester had long histories with the motion picture industry.

      Donald McCauley began his career at Bell & Howell headquarters in Lincolnwood, Illinois.

       B&H was a vertically integrated audiovisual company, back in the days when companies did everything. You could walk through their facility which was almost a mile long and you could see PC board stuffing, screw machines, injection molding machines, die casting, you name it they did everything. It was a fascinating experience to begin a career there.

      Both companies evolved their products for the video marketplace, but did so at a pace that didn’t match the speed of a new era. Innovative Japanese imports and smaller local firms had changed the marketplace, seemingly overnight and established companies no longer 'owned' customers.

      Bell & Howell's new CEO Donald Frey made changes:

       When I came on board at Bell & Howell, the company was in another world, a world firmly mired in the technology of the past.

      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.

      David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah, had started the company in 1968 to produce hardware that could support their labs' research. Sutherland had achieved fame in 1962 by creating Sketchpad, a computer drawing system that was the first graphical user interface.

      The CS department was engaged in a variety of disciplines including computer graphics, virtual reality, real-time hardware and printer languages. The student roster eventually grew to include Edwin (Ed) Catmull, Malcolm Blanchard, Jim Clark, Alan Kay, Jim Blinn, Henri Gouraud, John Warnock and Alan Ashton.

      Blanchard recalls his journey to Utah:

       In my senior year at UCSC, Dr. Ken Knowlton took a sabbatical from Bells Labs to teach a computer graphics class at Santa Cruz. This was the first I had heard of CG and immediately knew this is what I wanted to do with my career.

       I’m a visually oriented person and computer graphics was a perfect match. Dr. Knowlton was aware of the work going on at Utah and showed us some of the shaded-graphic images that had been produced by Jim Clark, Martin Newell and others.These were amazing images to me after only having pen plotters and text printers to make graphics.

       I applied, was accepted, and was so fortunate to join that group of professors and students. For my master’s project I designed and built a piece of equipment that Jim Clark needed for his thesis.

      Catmull told Karen Paik for To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios:

       We had ARPA funding, and it was an exciting field so we just went nuts.

      Blanchard told Paik:

       Ivan used to say he loved grad students because they didn't know what was impossible

      Catmull told Pat Hanrahan for ACM:

       We were expected to create original work. We were at the frontier, and our job was to expand it. They basically said, "You can consult with us every once in a while, and we'll check in with you, but we're off running this company."

       HELICAL - JULY 1971

      Ampex had become involved in many industries but facing large losses it returned to what management believed was its core business, with one glaring oversight as product manager Mark Sanders recalls.

       Even though it had invented Helical Scan, the alternative viable recording method to 2” Transverse scan, Ampex hardly bothered with it and virtually ignored the Helical Scan business group that had

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