Gone but not quite forgotten

I recently spent a few days at SVT in Stockholm, training operators and engineers on the MVS3000A.  The national public broadcaster has a delightful museum of old equipment, including this Ampex VR2000 videotape recorder:

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This was the industry workhorse from the mid-1960s through to the early 1980s, and when I started my television career, I recorded and edited many hours of material on these machines.  The recording medium was 2″ wide tape, travelling at 38cms/second. Slo-mo and freeze frames had yet to be invented: the ‘Quad’ format then in use could only play pictures at normal speed, or nothing!