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WD_434/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 40.2 x 25.2 | | Size (mm): | 1020 x 640 | | Catalog #: | WD_0434 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Phonograph cylinder -
The earliest method of recording and reproducing sound was on phonograph cylinders. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1888–1915), these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph. The competing disc-shaped gramophone record system triumphed in the market place to become the dominant commercial audio medium in the 1910s, and commercial mass production of phonograph cylinders ended in 1929.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_cylinder
Dictaphone -
Dictaphone was an American company, a producer of dictation machines—sound recording devices most commonly used to record speech for later playback or to be typed into print. The name "Dictaphone" is a trademark, but in some places it has also become a common way to refer to all such devices, and is used as a genericized trademark. At present, Dictaphone is a division of Boston-based Nuance Communications.
History:
The name "Dictaphone" was trademarked by the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1907, which soon became the leading manufacturer of such devices. This perpetuated the use of wax cylinders for voice recording. They had fallen out of favor for music recordings, in favor of disc technology. Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 under the leadership of C. King Woodbridge.
After relying on wax cylinder recording through the end of World War II, in 1947 Dictaphone introduced their Dictabelt technology, which cut a mechanical groove into a plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. This was later replaced by magnetic tape recording and eventually hard-drive recording.
In 1979 Dictaphone was purchased by Pitney Bowes but was kept as a wholly owned but autonomous subsidiary.
In 1995 Pitney Bowes sold Dictaphone to the investment group Stonington Partners of Connecticut for a reported $462 million.
During the following years, Dictaphone sold a range of products, including voice recognition and voicemail software.
In 2000 Dictaphone was acquired by the then-leading Belgian voice recognition and translation company Lernout & Hauspie for nearly $1 billion. Lernout & Hauspie provided the voice recognition technology for Dictaphone's voice recognition enhanced transcription system.
Soon after the purchase and triggered by an increased ownership of U.S. companies—following the purchase of Dictaphone, within a month Lernout & Hauspie purchased its main voice-recognition competitor in the U.S., Dragon Systems, who has since been acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc.—the SEC raised questions about Lernout & Hauspie’s finances, focusing on reported income from its East Asian endeavors which seemed to sky-rocket during these times. Subsequently the company and all its subsidiaries were forced into bankruptcy protection (Chapter 11 for U.S. assets such as Dictaphone).
In early 2002, Dictaphone emerged from Chapter 11 as a privately held organization with Rob Schwager as its Chairman and CEO, while the remaining assets were broken-up and sold individually with ScanSoft, now known as Nuance Communications, Inc., acquiring core businesses such as Dragon Systems and voice recognition research personnel in the U.S.
In 2004 Dictaphone was split into three divisions:
* IHS—Healthcare division which focuses on dictation for the medical industry
* IVS—dictation for law offices and police stations
* CRS—Communications Recording Solutions. Focuses on recording phones and radios in public safety organizations and quality monitoring solutions for call centers.
In June 2005 Dictaphone sold its Communications Recording Solutions to NICE Systems for $38.5 million, which was considered a great bargain in the industry. It has since focused its goals in speech recognition for the healthcare industry with only limited success, mainly building on its well established brand name.
In September 2005 Dictaphone sold the IVS Business outside USA to a Swiss company, Dictaphone IVS AG, in Urdorf, Switzerland (today called Calison AG), who developed the first hardware independent dictation management software solution ("FRISBEE") with integrated speech recognition and workflow management.
In February/March 2006 the remainder of Dictaphone was sold for $357 million to Nuance Communications, formerly known as ScanSoft, ending its short tenure as an independent company it started in early 2002, and effectively closing a circle of events it started in early 2000 by being sold to Lernout & Hauspie (assets of which were sold to ScanSoft/Nuance in the events of early 2002).
Dictaphone has now become a division within Nuance Communications, and in March 2007 Nuance acquired Focus Infomatics to further expand in the healthcare transcription business. In most recent financial results non-GAAP revenues were at $56.9 million in the quarter (March 2007–June 2007), including the contribution of Focus and up 31% over the same revenue last year. Excluding the benefit of Focus, Dictaphone revenues were $51.4 million, a record level for the company and up 18% organically from a year ago.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictaphone
Magnetic tape -
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording generally consisting of a thin magnetizable coating on a long and narrow strip of plastic. Nearly all recording tape is of this type, whether used for recording audio or video or for computer data storage. It was originally developed in Germany, based on the concept of magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and playback audio and video using magnetic tape are generally called tape recorders and video tape recorders respectively. A device that stores computer data on magnetic tape can be called a tape drive, a tape unit, or a streamer.
Magnetic tape revolutionized the broadcast and recording industries. In an age when all radio (and later television) was live, it allowed programming to be prerecorded. In a time when gramophone records were recorded in one take, it allowed recordings to be created in multiple stages and easily mixed and edited with a minimal loss in quality between generations. It is also one of the key enabling technologies in the development of modern computers. Magnetic tape allowed massive amounts of data to be stored in computers for long periods of time and rapidly accessed when needed.
As of 2007, many other technologies exist that can perform the functions of magnetic tape. In many cases these technologies are replacing tape. Despite this, innovation in the technology continues and tape is still widely used.
Audio recording: Magnetic tape sound recording
Magnetic tape was first invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 in Germany, based on the invention of magnetic wire recording by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898. Pfleumer's invention used an iron oxide powder coating on a long strip of paper. This invention was further developed by the German electronics company AEG, which manufactured the recording machines and BASF, which manufactured the tape. In 1933, working for AEG, Eduard Schuller developed the ring shaped tape head. Previous head designs were needle shaped and shredded the tape. An important discovery made in this period was the technique of AC biasing which dramatically improved the fidelity of the recorded audio signal.
Due to the international hostilities preceding World War II, these developments were largely kept secret from the rest of the world. It was only after the war that Americans, particularly Jack Mullin, John Herbert Orr, and Richard H. Ranger were able to bring this technology out of Germany.
A wide variety of recorders and formats have developed since, most significantly reel-to-reel and Compact Cassette.
Video recording: Videotape
The practice of recoding and editing audio using magnetic tape rapidly established itself as an obvious improvement over previous methods. Many people saw the potential of making the same improvements in recording television. Television ("video") signals are, in principle, very similar to audio signals. The main difference is that video signals use much more bandwidth than audio signals. This meant that the existing audio tape recorders could not capture a video signal effectively.
Many people set to work on resolving this problem. Jack Mullin (working for Bing Crosby) and the BBC both created crude working systems that involved moving the tape across a fixed tape head at very fast speeds. Neither of these systems saw much use. It was the team at Ampex, lead by Charles Ginsburg, that made the breakthrough of using a spinning recoding head and normal tape speeds to achieve a very high head-to-tape speed that could record and reproduce the high bandwidth signals of video. The Ampex system was called Quadruplex and used 2 inch wide tape, mounted on reels like audio tape, and a wrote the signal in what is now called transverse scan.
Later improvements by other companies, particularly Sony, lead to the development of helical scan and the enclosure of the tape reels in an easy-to-handle cartridge. Nearly all modern videotape systems use helical scan and cartridges. Videocassette recorders are very common in homes and television production facilities though many functions of the VCR are being replaced. Since the advent of digital video and computerized video processing, optical disc media and digital video recorders can now perform the same role as videotape. These devices also offer improvements like random access to any scene in the recording and "live" time shifting and are likely to replace videotape in many situations.
Data storage: Magnetic tape data storage
The use of magnetic tape for computer data storage has been one of the constants of the computer industry. In all formats, a tape drive (or "transport" or "deck") uses precisely-controlled motors to wind the tape from one reel to another, passing a tape head as it does.
Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951 on the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I. The recording medium was a thin strip of one half inch (12.65 mm) wide metal, consisting of nickel-plated bronze (called Vicalloy). Recording density was 128 characters per inch (198 micrometre/character) on eight tracks.
Early IBM tape drives were mechanically sophisticated floor-standing drives that used vacuum columns to buffer long u-shaped loops of tape. When active, the two tape reels thus fed tape into or pulled tape out of the vacuum columns, intermittently spinning in rapid, unsynchronized bursts resulting in visually-striking action. Stock shots of such vacuum-column tape drives in motion were widely used to represent "the computer" in movies and television.
Most modern magnetic tape systems use reels that are much smaller than the old 10.5 inch open reels and are fixed inside a cartridge to protect the tape and facilitate handling. Many late 1970s and early 1980s home computers used Compact Cassettes encoded with the Kansas City standard. Modern cartridge formats include LTO, DLT, and DAT/DDC.
Tape remains a viable alternative to disk due to its lower cost per bit. Though the areal density is lower than for disk drives, the available surface on a tape is far greater. The highest capacity tape media are generally on the same order as the largest available disk drives (about 1 TB in 2007.) Tape has historically offered enough advantage in cost over disk storage to make it a viable product, particularly for backup, where media removability is also important. The rapid improvement in disk storage density and price, coupled with arguably less-vigorous innovation in tape storage, has reduced the market share of tape storage products.
In 2002, Imation received an US$11.9 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology for research into increasing the data capacity of magnetic tape.[1]
References:
1. ^ The Future of Tape: Containing the Information Explosion. Retrieved on 19 September 2006.
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape
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