Ampex

Starting from our foundational years in 1944 at the bottom, trace the upward evolution of Ampex Data Systems® to our latest achievements. Discover our storied legacy as it ascends to today.

Ampex has excelled at processing and storing visual information for more years than most of today's technology companies have been in existence. As the world increasingly demands that information be created, stored, and transmitted in visual form, Ampex remains at the forefront of innovation. Ampex Corporation is among the world leaders in the fields of magnetic recording, digital image processing, and high-performance digital storage for the visual information age. Ampex introduced video tape recording, and it has applied its resources to other areas of data storage as well. While it continues to supply the radio and television broadcasting industry with professional tape recorders, its electronic data storage systems have applications in any company that handles large volumes of digitized information. The company has been granted thousands of patents in its history and has received numerous awards for technical achievement. Poniatoff had a hard time finding passage out of China due to his lack of credentials and linguistic limitations. His knowledge of German, however, did help him obtain a position working for the Shanghai Power Company. Poniatoff's work there brought him into a new field--electrical design. No machinery was manufactured in Shanghai at the time, so Poniatoff was forced to digress from his bent for mechanical engineering, which had been apparent even as a child. The son of a prosperous lumber company owner, Poniatoff had been fascinated by the first visits of locomotives to the rural province of Kazan where he was born. After seven years in China, Poniatoff at last managed to obtain a passport from the League of Nations, enabling him to sail to San Francisco. He had initially hoped to work the land but was disheartened by the austere conditions farmers in Petaluma, California, faced without the aid of modern machinery. So instead, he decided to travel the country with the aid of a $2,000 bonus he had received as a five-year service award from the Shanghai Power Company. A generous letter of reference then helped Poniatoff land a job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York. GE assigned Poniatoff to a circuit breaker design group. With the help of a friendly librarian who was also Russian, his grasp of English engineering jargon gradually improved. Poniatoff recalled a most daunting assignment came when he was asked, due to his relative inexperience and unfamiliarity with the concept of the "impossible," to design a new vacuum type of circuit breaker. Though hesitant, he completed the task and, newly confident, once again set forth for San Francisco in 1930. Dalmo Victor lacked a steady source for motors and generators for its radar scanners, and Irwin Mosley suggested Poniatoff, whom he had hired, form his own company to produce them. Poniatoff took his advice and on November 1, 1944, founded the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company in an abandoned loft in the Dalmo Victor building in San Carlos, California. Poniatoff wanted to use his initials to name his company, but Aircraft Marine Products, which made electrical connectors, had just registered the name "AMP." Poniatoff added "ex" for "excellent" to form the unique name. He recalled in an address to company engineers that the company's motors and generators performed so much better than the competition that they soon became exclusive suppliers for the Navy. Although a contract to supply motors for furnace manufacturers kept the company busy immediately after the war, Ampex focused its long-term plans on developing a magnetic tape recorder inspired by the Telefunken Magnetophon developed in Germany during the war. (Interestingly, Dr. Heyne, president of Telefunken, had proposed the concept to General Electric, who regarded it as impractical.) Harold Lindsay was hired and given the initial task of developing recording heads for the new machine. Mosley did not feel the company had a future in making tape recorders and the Ayala investment g