Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor.

Ampex's first great success was a line of reel-to-reel tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby.

Ampex quickly became a leader in audio tape technology, developing many of the analog recording formats for both music and movies that remained in use into the 1990s.

Ampex's tape business was rendered obsolete during the 1990s, and the company turned to digital storage products.

Ampex supports numerous major DoD programs with the US Air Force, US Army, US Marines, US Navy and other government entities (NASA, DHS and national labs).

Ampex also works with all major DoD primes and integrators including Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon and many others.

[6] Near the end of the war, while serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Major Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments.

The technological processes in tape recording and equipment developed by German companies before and during the 1939–1945 war were subject to patents which were effectively voided after Germany's 1945 surrender and defeat.

Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and 50 reels of BASF Type L tape, and brought them to America, where he produced modified versions.

In June 1947, Mullin, who was pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorders to Crosby.

Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and placed an order for $50,000 worth of the new recorders so that Ampex (then a small six-man concern) could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes.

In 1952, movie producer Mike Todd asked Ampex to develop a high-fidelity movie sound system using sound magnetically recorded on the film itself, as contrasted with the technology of the time, which used magnetic tracks on a separate celluloid base film (later commonly known as mag stock).

In 1960, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ampex an Oscar for technical achievement as a result of this development.

Les Paul, a friend of Crosby and a regular guest on his shows, had already been experimenting with overdubbed recordings on disc.

[14] Ampex built a handful of multitrack machines during the late 1950s that could record as many as eight tracks on 1-inch (25 mm) tape.

[15] The first of these machines cost $10,000 and was installed in Les Paul's home recording studio by David Sarser.

In addition to this, the introduction of SMPTE time code allowed studios to run multiple machines in perfect synchronization, making the number of available tracks virtually unlimited.

By the 1970s, Ampex faced tough competition from the Swiss company Studer and Japanese manufacturers such as Otari and Sony (who also purchased the MCI brand in 1982).

While AMPEX are well recognized for their contribution to magnetic tape recording, they also had a huge impact on developments the whole video signal chain.

An optional digital 'combiner' was available to perform the foreground layering and priority switching – to reduce the burden on the vision mixer with multi-channel effects.

The product line evolved quickly from manual editing on the actual VTRs themselves to incorporate SMPTE timecode providing advanced timeline control.

The RA-4000 and EDM-1 were fully functional early products, but soon evolved to the extremely powerful ACE family to compete with CMX and other edit controller brands.

Starting in the early 1950s, RCA, Bing Crosby and others tried to record analog video on very fast-moving magnetic tape.

This vertical writing facilitated mechanical editing, once the control track was developed to display the pulse that indicates where a frame ends and the next one begins.

Sony Betacam was successful as a professional format but operated with a different recording system and faster tape speed than Betamax.

[23] A more deluxe version, the HS-200, was introduced in April 1968,[24] and provided a large control console with variable speed playback.

This made it ideal for instant replay for sports events and precise timing control in post-production service.

The HS-200 had a frame accurate timing computer that enabled frame-accurate cuts and dissolve transitions by way of a two-input video switcher.

The final generation of these products were quad density, introduced in 2000, resulting in a large cartridge holding 660GB of data.

Ampex Data Systems operates out of main three locations in the USA: the headquarters in Hayward, CA (about a dozen miles from the Redwood City location in Silicon Valley), a program office in Colorado Springs, CO and an engineering center in Las Cruces, NM, as well as from the main Delta HQ in Horsham, PA. Ampex continues to produce rugged data storage products used by government, military and commercial customers world-wide.