As a Digital Production Specialist at Duke Libraries, I work with a variety of obsolete videotape formats, digitizing them for long-term preservation and access. Videotape is a form of magnetic tape, consisting of a magnetized coating on one side of a strip of plastic film. The film is there to support the magnetized coating, which usually consists of iron oxide. Magnetic tape was first invented in 1928, for recording sound, but it would be several decades before it could be used for moving images, due to the increased bandwidth that is required to capture the visual content.

Television was live in the beginning, because there was no way to pre-record the broadcast other than with traditional film, which was expensive and time-consuming. In 1951, Bing Crosby Enterprises (BCE), owned by actor and singer Bing Crosby, demonstrated the first videotape recording. Crosby had previously incorporated audiotape recording into the production of his radio broadcasts, so that he would have more time for other commitments, like golf! Instead of having to do a live radio broadcast once a week for a month, he could record four broadcasts in one week, then have the next three weeks off. The 1951 demonstration ran quarter-inch audiotape at 360 inches per second, using a modified Ampex 200 tape recorder, but the images were reportedly blurry and not broadcast quality.

More companies experimented with the emerging technology in the early 1950’s, until Ampex introduced 2” black and white quadruplex videotape at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in 1956. This was the first videotape that was broadcast quality. Soon, television networks were broadcasting pre-recorded shows on quadruplex, and were able to present them at different times in all four U.S. time zones. Some of the earliest videotape broadcasts were CBS’s “The Edsel Show,” CBS’s “Douglas Edwards with the News,” and NBC’s “Truth or Consequences.” In 1958, Ampex debuted a color quadruplex videotape recorder. NBC’s “An Evening with Fred Astaire” was the first major TV show to be videotaped in color, also in 1958.

One of the downsides to quadruplex, is that the videotapes could only be played back using the same tape heads which originally recorded the content. Those tape-heads wore out very quickly, which mean’t that many tapes could not be reliably played back using the new tape-heads that replaced the exhausted ones. Quadruplex videotapes were also expensive, about $300 per hour of tape. So, many TV stations maximized the expense, by continually erasing tapes, and then recording the next broadcast on the same tape. Unfortunately, due to this, many classic TV shows are lost forever, like the vast majority of the first ten years (1962-1972) of “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” and Super Bowl II (1968).

Quadruplex was the industry standard until the introduction of 1” Type C, in 1976. Type C video recorders required less maintenance, were more compact and enabled new functions, like still frame, shuttle and slow motion, and 1” Type C did not require time base correction, like 2” Quadruplex did. Type C is a composite videotape format, with quality that matches later component formats like Betacam. Composite video merges the color channels so that it’s consistent with a broadcast signal. Type C remained popular for several decades, until the use of videocassettes gained in popularity. We will explore that in a future blog post.

In past posts, I’ve paid homage to the audio ancestors with riffs on such endangered–some might say extinct–formats as DAT and Minidisc.  This week we turn our attention to the smallest (and perhaps the cutest) tape format of them all:  the Microcassette.

Introduced by the Olympus Corporation in 1969, the Microcassette used the same width tape (3.81 mm) as the more common Philips Compact Cassette but housed it in a much smaller and less robust plastic shell.  The Microcassette also spooled from right to left (opposite from the compact cassette) as well as using slower recording speeds of 2.4 and 1.2 cm/s.  The speed adjustment, allowing for longer uninterrupted recording times, could be toggled on the recorder itself.  For instance, the original MC60 Microcassette allowed for 30 minutes of recorded content per “side” at standard speed and 60 minutes per side at low speed.

The microcassette was mostly used for recording voice–e.g. lectures, interviews, and memos.  The thin tape (prone to stretching) and slow recording speeds made for a low-fidelity result that was perfectly adequate for the aforementioned applications, but not up to the task of capturing the wide dynamic and frequency range of music.  As a result, the microcassette was the go-to format for cheap, portable, hand-held recording in the days before the smartphone and digital recording.  It was standard to see a cluster of these around the lectern in a college classroom as late as the mid-1990s.  Many of the recorders featured voice-activated recording (to prevent capturing “dead air”) and continuously variable playback speed to make transcription easier.

The tiny tapes were also commonly used in telephone answering machines and dictation machines.

As you may have guessed, the rise of digital recording, handheld devices, and cheap data storage quickly relegated the microcassette to a museum piece by the early 21st century.  While the compact cassette has enjoyed a resurgence as a hip medium for underground music, the poor audio quality and durability of the microcassette have largely doomed it to oblivion except among the most willful obscurantists.  Still, many Rubenstein Library collections contain these little guys as carriers of valuable primary source material.  That means we’re holding onto our Microcassette player for the long haul in all of its atavistic glory.

If you happen to be rummaging through your parents’ or grandparents’ attic, basement or garage, and stumble upon some old reel-to-reel audiotape, or perhaps some dust-covered videotape reels that seem absurdly large & clunky, they are most likely worthless, except for perhaps sentimental value. Even if these artifacts did, at one time, have some unique historic content, you may never know, because there’s a strong chance that decades of temperature extremes have made the media unplayable. The machines that were once used to play the media are often no longer manufactured, hard to find, and only a handful of retired engineers know how to repair them. That is, if they can find the right spare parts, which no one sells anymore.

However, once in a while, something that is one of a kind miraculously survives. That was the case for Troy Haupt, a resident of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, who discovered that his father, Martin Haupt, had recorded the very first Super Bowl onto 2” Quadruplex color videotape directly from the 1967 live television broadcast. After Martin passed away, the tapes ended up in Troy’s mother’s attic, yet somehow survived the elements.

What makes this so unique is that, in 1967, videotape was very expensive and archiving at television networks was not a priority. So the networks that aired the first Super Bowl, CBS and NBC, did not save any of the broadcast.

But Martin Haupt happened to work for a company that repaired professional videotape recorders, which were, in 1967, cutting edge technology. Taping television broadcasts was part of Martin’s job, a way to test the machines he was rebuilding. Fortunately, Martin went to work the day Super Bowl 1 aired live. The two Quadruplex videotapes that Martin Haupt used to record Super Bowl 1 cost $200 each in 1967. In today’s dollars, that’s almost $3000 total for the two tapes. Buying a “VCR” at your local department store was unfathomable then, and would not be possible for at least another decade. Somehow, Martin missed recording halftime, and part of the third quarter, but it turns out that Martin’s son Troy now owns the most complete known video recording of Super Bowl 1, in which the quarterback Bart Starr led the Green Bay Packers to a 35-10 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs.

For music fans, another treasure was uncovered in a storage locker in Marin County, CA, in 1986. Betty Cantor-Jackson worked for The Grateful Dead’s road crew, and made professional multi-track recordings of many of their best concerts, between 1971-1980, on reel-to-reel audiotape. The Dead were known for marathon concerts in which some extended songs, like “Dark Star” could easily fill an entire audio reel. The band gave Betty permission to record, but she purchased her own gear and blank tape, tapping into the band’s mixing console to capture high-quality, soundboard recordings of the band’s epic concerts during their prime era. Betty held onto her tapes until she fell on hard times in the 1980’s, lost her home, and had to move the tapes to a storage locker. She couldn’t pay the storage fees, so the locker contents went up for auction.

Some 1000 audio reels ended up in the hands of three different buyers, none of whom knew what the tapes contained. Once the music was discovered, copies of the recordings began to leak to hardcore tape-traders within the Deadhead community, and they became affectionately referred to as “The Betty Boards.” It turns out the tapes include some legendary performances, such as the 1971 Capitol Theatre run, and the May 1977 tour, including “Barton Hall, May 8, 1977,” considered by many Deadheads as one of the best Grateful Dead concerts of all time.

You would think the current owners of Super Bowl 1 and Barton Hall, May 8, 1977 would be sitting on gold. But, that’s where the lawyers come in. Legally, the people who possess these tapes own the physical tapes, but not the content on those tapes. So, Troy Haupt owns the 2” inch quadriplex reels of Super Bowl 1, but the NFL owns what you can see on those reels. The NFL owns the copyright of the broadcast. Likewise, The Grateful Dead owns the music on the audio reels, regardless of who owns the physical tape that contains the music. Unfortunately, for NFL fans and Deadheads, this makes the content somewhat inaccessable for now. Troy Haupt has offered to sell his videotapes to the NFL, but they have mostly ignored him. If Troy tries to sell the tapes to a third party instead, the NFL says they will sue him, for unauthorized distribution of their content. The owners of the Grateful Dead tapes face a similar dilema. The band’s management isn’t willing to pay money for the physical tapes, but if the owners, or any third party the owners sell the tapes to, try to distribute the music, they will get sued. However, if it weren’t for Martin Haupt and Betty Cantor-Jackson, who had the foresight to record these events in the first place, the content would not exist at all.