by Klaas Robers » Wed Jun 07, 2017 12:29 am
I still remember that when I started at Philips Research (the Nat.Lab.) in 1971, they had in the basement of the colour TV studio in Eindhoven the remains of a large experimental reel to reel taperecorder for video. Looks more or less like the VERA, only the two reels were bottom and top and the tape was normal 1/4" audio tape. It also ran at high speed, may be 5 m/s or even more. The greatest problem was starting and stopping without breaking the tape. A well known practical problem was that when something went wrong with the tape guidance, you almost immediately had the room filled up with tape, which ran immediately in between the fast rotating capstans, guiding rollers and reels. Then it took much time to undo the machine from this spoiled hectometers of at then useless tape. I had the idea that they never solved that problem and the machine was there already for years and was scrapped later.