Ampex Years

 Alexander M. Poniatoff (1892-1980), a Russian immigrant to the United States, and his colleagues saw enormous commercial potential in the German recording technology they encountered during World War II.

In 1944, he founded Ampex — Poniatoff’s initials AMP, plus “Excellence” — in San Carlos to build on these technical advances. Ampex moved in 1954 to this location in Redwood City, where it eventually became the city’s largest employer with 13,000 workers in 22 buildings. In 2005, Ampex moved its headquarters to Hayward.

Ampex breakthroughs include the first U.S.-built audiotape recording system and the first commercially successful videorecording system, which transformed the entertainment and broadcast industries. Among many other innovations in data recording, handling and storage, Ampex launched the first instant replay videodisc recorder for sports programs on commercial television. It also developed Videofile, used by Scotland Yard to electronically store and retrieve fingerprints.

In 2019 — the year the Stanford Redwood City Campus opened — three Ampex video tapes of the first lunar landing were sold at auction for $1.8 million. The tapes are the only surviving firstgeneration recordings of the historic 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

The tapes had been purchased by a NASA intern in a 1976 government surplus auction for $217.