Frank Mezzatesta
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The Retrieval Center
The summer of 1969 leading to my junior year of high school, my friend Murray and I got a job working for Ampex Corporation. They were installing phase two of a prototype retrieval system in our high school. Starting in the fall we spent all our free time there helping to keep the system up and running. We learned from the system engineer Chuck who ran the system. Our knowledge of electronics came in handy as we started to make modifications to the system so it would be easier to maintain. In the fall of 1970 with phase three being debugged, this article in the local "Oak Leaves" came out. I like the "two young geniuses" quote at the end of the article.

What is a "Retrieval System"? Well today it would be a simple website, but in the late 1960s, students who wanted to listen to language tapes had to go to a special language arts room that had tables filled with individual reel-to-reel tape recorders. You signed out a reel of ¼ inch tape and sat down with headphones to listen to the tape. If someone else had the tape you wanted, you were out of luck. Hector Otero who was a foreign language teacher at the school along with Ted Johnston had secured a $1.5M grant ($9.5M in today's dollars) for Ampex to invent and produce this new system. Their idea was to have a set of master tapes that could be duplicated at high speed within 20 seconds and give the student a copy of that lesson. Instead of a tape recorder in front of the student, the student could sit in the library with a headset and a keypad interface in front of them. They keyed in a lesson number and behind the scenes a computerized system would make a copy of the lesson and provide it to the student. The student could pause the copy and play it at their own pace. Phase three added still pictures to go along with the lesson. This system would include all subjects, not just languages. The system stored some 300 lessons.

Some links on the subject include A Random Access Audio Retrieval System by Maynard J. Kuljian and The School and Technology by Ted Johnson and Hector Otero.



The Big Dino
In the March 2001 Discover Magazine an article called A Giant Among Robots discusses a robotic research project done by Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development. Bran Ferren and Danny Hillis thought up the idea and Danny led the initial effort. It was then handed over to me to carry it to completion. It was an amazing project mainly for its scale. Many have in the past and are still making walking robots, but I don't know of any 11,000-pound walking robots. Our internal name for the project was simply "The Big Dino".