Movie Clip Of Cartrivision VTR Under Development
1969
A few months back I was contacted by a fellow who told me
that he had worked on the team who had developed the Cartrivision video tape
recorder. He gave me a few interesting
tidbits regarding the people who had developed the system along with some
details. He also let me know that he
had some video that he shot of one of the original machines being built. His name is Peter Berg. Well Peter recently contacted me and let me
know that he had converted the original video (shot in Super 8) and transferred
the contents to DVD format, and offered to send me a copy. Of course I took him up on the offer!
Here
is some of the email correspondence that I received from Peter regarding the
video and the project:
“I have located a few
items of interest, including the original first handdrawn schematic by Fred Pfost
who was involved in the feasibilty model build which was used by Frank Stanton
cs to convince Avco to spend a bunch of bucks on the development. This prototype showed a little bit of
fleeting video once - that was it. It
utilized 1/4 in. tape and, of course, skip field recording. I also found the movie clips that I made to
document some of the building of the first working model(s) and had those
transferred to CD.
I headed up the Avco
development group working in a secret Sunnyvale location; reporting to Harlan
Bass, director of engineering at Avco Cincinnati (Evendale plant). We had 5 engineers, 2 technicians and a
draftsman, all names have been recovered.
The Barger name was the cover name for the development operation which
was in a Barger-owned building. We
never changed the name.
Mechanical and electrical
engineering was expanded, mainly by people hired away from Ampex, and
production engineering was started. At
the same time, a color specialist was brought on board, to develop color recording
and playback.
As soon as the demo to the
board of directors of Avco corp was sucessfully made, Avco by means of their
president Jimmy Kearn (sp) started pumping millions of dollars into the
project.”
best regards,
Peter Berg
Peter Berg Enterprises LLC
Las Vegas, NV
Here is the video that Peter sent to me. The footage dates from 1969, but exact date
is not known. The file is 7 mb. long
so beware! Dial-up users who want to
view more than once might wish to download the video to avoid having to wait a
second time (it took me 25 minutes @ 49k) .
Thanks to George Steber for his help in converting/editing
the DVD video for me. Make sure to
read George’s excellent articles on the Cartrivision elsewhere on this
site. Also be sure to check out Labguy’s World Video Page. His site deals with vintage video gear and
he has a section devoted entirely to Cartrivision. He was kind enough to offer to host this video file as it was
hogging up bandwidth on my site. Thanks
Rich!
Video clip of Cartrivision
VTR under development