I have been told (perhaps incorrectly) that the Phillips cassette tape dimension is based on being able to source the full track tape stock and split it.

The same story is told about Eastman Kodak and 35/70mm film stock, as well as 16mm and 8mm with and without sound track.

Long after the company was gone, the Ampex sign remained for years on the West side of 101 somewhere around Redwood City, was finally taken down ten or 20 years ago.

Sent to Germany at the war’s end, Mullin eventually came across that technology at a radio station...

Fun trivia: that radio station was in Bad Nauheim, Germany, which is where Elvis Presley was stationed during his stint in the US Army.

The magnetic tape was produced by IG Farben, a lovely company if you like slave labor and holocausts.

• SanjayMehta

  today at 5:13 AM

  The data was collated on IBM punch card machines, a lovely company if you like holocausts.

  • somat

    today at 5:23 AM

    It does rise an interesting question, how much can you blame a company for the crimes of it's customers?

    • SoftTalker

      today at 5:30 AM

      IG Farben was deeply involved with supporting all that unpleasant business, much more so than IBM.

      • akanet

        today at 5:48 AM

        IBM was extremely involved in purposefully collaborating with the reich to run censuses to identify Jewish populations, not to mention running actual prisoner inventory at various concentration camps. They specifically made overseas subsidiaries to shield this activities from US sanctions at the time.

        • matherial

          today at 7:56 AM

          Right, which is still few steps removed from the actual genocide. IG Farben was a direct participant, to the point where a lot of their execs were tried and convicted at Nuremberg.

          But I'm not sure the focus on corporations is all that interesting here. The Allies eventually let most of the senior Nazi leadership walk free, and few in Germany faced any lasting consequences for what they did during the war (even IG Farben execs were released before too long). I think the idea was that they needed to govern the nation they have, and mass-imprisonment wasn't a viable strategy. It worked out in a pragmatic sense, but it was hardly justice for the millions of civilians exterminated by the regime.