The 8 Track That's Heard It All
Introduced in 1969, the Ampex 440-B is an 8 track reel-to-reel and a direct descendant of the Les Paul 351 multi-track recorder. The 440-B was responsible for recording most albums made in the U.S. throughout the late 1960s and '70s. It was also known to be a workhorse of a tape machine for the broadcast industry in the '70s.
Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. Ampex's first great success was a line of reel-to-reel tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby. Ampex quickly became a leader in audiotape technology, developing many of the analog recording formats for both music and movies that remained in use into the 1990s.
Today, Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, and consists of two business units. The Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems (ADS), manufactures digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments. The Colorado Springs, Colorado unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems (AIS), serves as a laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control systems, cybersecurity products and services, and its artificial intelligence/machine learning technology.
