Читать книгу Timeline Analog 2 - John Buck - Страница 15

The Chicago based Bell & Howell (B&H) and Eastman Kodak in Rochester had long histories with the motion picture industry.

Donald McCauley began his career at Bell & Howell headquarters in Lincolnwood, Illinois.

B&H was a vertically integrated audiovisual company, back in the days when companies did everything. You could walk through their facility which was almost a mile long and you could see PC board stuffing, screw machines, injection molding machines, die casting, you name it they did everything. It was a fascinating experience to begin a career there.

Both companies evolved their products for the video marketplace, but did so at a pace that didn’t match the speed of a new era. Innovative Japanese imports and smaller local firms had changed the marketplace, seemingly overnight and established companies no longer 'owned' customers.

Bell & Howell's new CEO Donald Frey made changes:

When I came on board at Bell & Howell, the company was in another world, a world firmly mired in the technology of the past.

Frey, a veteran of the Ford Motor Company, quit troublesome markets, like magnetic tape and consumer products. He sold off the professional camera business and the plants that made the 8 mm home movie camera, made famous by Zapruder’s recording of the Kennedy assassination.

Despite the plant closures, Bell and Howell’s Professional Equipment Division continued to make color printing systems, modular film printers for the professional film industry. It was these clients that Bell and Howell had in mind when it began work on a ‘film-like’ editing system called EnVision.