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www.us-
tech.com
May, 2016 Tech-Op-ed
SOUNDING OFF
By Walter Salm Editor Emeritus
Celebrating Ray Dolby O
nce, when I was still in high school, I drove the 35 miles to Schenec- tady, NY (my mother came along as chaperone) to see a day’s worth of live TV production at the local station, GE’s WRGB. This was the one
and only TV channel we could receive at the time, and only with a very tall antenna. It was on the air just three days a week. The network still hadn’t reached Upstate New York, so all programming originated in the large box- like one-size-fits-all studio where we saw a drama, a dog show, and later two boxing matches. In the studio. They did this all with just three cameras, which were very costly in those days, and production technology was very primitive. Later, the network finally reached Schenectady, so we were treat- ed to programming originating in the Big Apple (New York City) and at one point I learned that the network had also reached as far as Chicago. This month, I am celebrating Ray Dolby. I had known for a long time that
he had been one of the principal contributors to the original Ampex video recorders, but a little research revealed some fascinating details. He grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula surrounded by new technology and went to work part time at Ampex during his senior year. The company had called his high school and asked for a projectionist, and they sent Dolby. We were the same age. We both graduated from high school in 1951 and went off to college, him to San Jose State College for electrical engineering, while I went to Union Col- lege in Schenectady as a physics major. We were both drafted in 1953 because there was a war going on in a far-off place called Korea. He became an army electronics instructor in St. Louis, while I became an electronics student at New Jersey’s Fort Monmouth. The big difference: he was a genius, I was not. After the army, I remember attending live press demonstrations of ma-
chines that used 1/4-inch tape whizzing by recording heads at a breathtaking 400 ips in the quest to obtain video recording. I also witnessed the incredible tape shredding that happened when a tape broke. You did not want to try to pick up the pieces. Years later, I met Dolby and his gorgeous wife Dagmar at an NAB (Na-
tional Association of Broadcasters) convention. At the time, I was managing editor of Broadcast Management/Engineering magazine. At one point, I wangled the loan of an early Ampex helical scan recorder,
not broadcast quality, but pretty sharp black-and-white, and worth about $10,000 (in 1967 dollars). It used some very costly 1-inch-wide reel-to-reel tape. I wrote articles about home video recording for a couple of national mag- azines to justify the loaner, and Ampex didn’t ask for the return of the ma- chine for about a year. I used to tape Peyton Place for delayed viewing, so my wife (number one) could watch it later, because she had a conflict; she was at- tending night classes in electronics to become a little more knowledgeable about the freelance articles she retyped for me. One time, her instructor asked her if she was any relation to Walter Salm, and thus I discovered that I had fans everywhere. One day, the recorder developed some problems and when I contacted
Ampex, I fully expected them to ask for its return. Instead the doorbell rang the next day, and there was a clean-cut young Ampex techie, carrying a fully equipped Tektronix oscilloscope. It was army “portable” because it had a large fold-down handle. He ran some diagnostics, made some repairs, and the recorder was as good as new. I dreaded to think of what that service call would have cost if I had to pay for it. Ray Dolby spent much of his life in Silicon Valley, and according to
Wikipedia, his widow (still in Silicon Valley) is today worth $1.3 billion. He went to Cambridge for advanced studies, receiving a PhD there, and then worked as technical advisor to the U.N. in India. Ampex was the first compa- ny with practical video recording, later working out a cross-licensing deal with RCA for NTSC color technology. Ampex held the keys to the kingdom for quite a while, and we have that company to thank for countless regurgita- tions of old TV shows, instant replay, and the many low-cost lower-resolution machines to come out of Japan (Betamax and then VHS), technology that was ultimately displaced by digital recording. Thank you Ampex and thank you Ray Dolby. Now turn to Tech Watch on Page 10 for a really neat look at video recording and how it came to be. r
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
By Jacob Fattal Publisher
The Trans-Pacific See-Saw
economic reforms 30 years ago, China’s GDP has grown at an astonishing rate, most markedly between 1990 and today. Lately, however, the country’s business juggernaut has slowed its pace. Jobs in the industrial sector, such as state-owned coal mines and steel
T
factories, seem to be feeling the first squeeze. In coal and steel alone, the state has announced that it needs to reduce employment by a staggering 1.8 million jobs. In the electronics market, since the entire world depends on products from China, we are watching intently to see how the government handles its growth slowdown. In the meantime, we continue to watch and encourage the phenomena of
reshoring — returning manufacturing to the U.S. from offshore — and on- shoring — domestic manufacturing startups that stay in the U.S. The sheen that once appeared on the surface of the economics of manufacturing in Chi- na has started to dull. This after 30 years of trans-Pacific manufacturing that has found American OEMs dealing with the myriad frustrations of manufac- turing quality or lack thereof, difficulty in communicating with the contract manufacturers on the opposite of the globe, the cost in time and money of shuttling engineers back and forth across the Pacific, the insufferably slow transport time on containerships, loss of intellectual property, and now the rising cost of once cheap Chinese labor. But many companies are so deeply en- meshed in their Chinese manufacturing — Apple comes immediately to mind — that it seems unlikely that they will ever pull out of the Far East. Yet China still holds special allure for many U.S. and European compa-
nies. This issue of U.S.Tech will appear at NEPCON China just as it has for many years. This is a resounding testament to the ongoing interconnection and globalization of the world’s electronics manufacturing industry. The U.S. has been adding jobs at an invigorating pace, even as China hits a plateau in its industrial sector. For better or for worse, our markets are incredibly intertwined, and what affects China, affects all of us. r
he United States and China, the world’s two top economic and techno- logical giants, continue their see-saw relationship, but with a big differ- ence this year. Since Deng Xiaoping introduced sweeping market and
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