Alasdair Lawrance

Was the machine known as VERA – Video Electronic Recording Apparatus? Was there only one?

Alan Taylor

The Marconi Stille was an audio recorder and only barely good enough for audio. When it was first manufactured, video cameras were in their infancy and I don’t think anybody had given serious thought to recording video signals.

VERA worked in a similar manner and looked a bit like Stille. It was a video recorder using linear recording, with the tape running ridiculously fast, hence the need for huge spools. Quad and helical machines very elegantly solved the problem of moving the head across the tape while only feeding the tape through at sensible speeds.

Chris Woolf

VERA was pictures, the Stille was just audio.

It took a surprisingly long time before the brute-force-and-ignorance approach to magnetic recording became refined. High linear tape speed was thought to be the only approach worth tackling and it took some years to recognise that there were more interesting techniques that could be used. Interestingly this was very largely due to simple invention as opposed to new materials or processes becoming available.

David Plowman

Showing my age, but remember seeing Vera demonstrated on Panorama. Live, of course. Was it a BBC invention to use an FM carrier to get the required bandwidth on tape – but Ampex who thought of rotating heads to get the linear tape speed down?

Alec Bray

As I heard the story, the team who were working on VERA were having to get a high tape to head speed to get the required bandwidth, and they suggested that the record/reply heads could be contra-rotated against the tape transport direction.

Management pooh-poohed that suggestion, so VERA tape speed was made lethally fast. The team were subsequently snapped up by Ampex who, of course, had transverse tape head rotation across wider tape.

Management!!