LabGuy's World of Vintage Video Equipment - by Richard Diehl
Kirt's Cogitations™ #363

RF Cafe University "Factoids," "Kirt's Cogitations," and "Tech Topics Smorgasbord" are all manifestations of my ranting on various subjects relevant (usually) to the overall RF Cafe theme. All may be accessed on these pages:

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"LabGuy" Richard Diehl.

RF Cafe website visitor Richard Diehl recently contacted me in search of the "TV Monocle Gives Extra Eye to Wearer" article in the September 1962 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine. Come to find out, Mr. Diehl is none other than the progenitor and still current publisher of the LabGuy's World website, which contains a vast amount of information on vintage video tape equipment (hence, his interest in the TV Monocle article). He is a fellow traveler along the road of website creation, having had a World Wide Web presence since October 1997 - predating RF Cafe by a year and a half (July 1999)! Dig this: "These pages were originally created with Netscape Composer and are now maintained solely with Microsoft Notepad." The WhoIs record shows labguysworld.com domain registration was in 2001, so it went by another name for a couple year prior.

LabGuy's World - home of the WWW's most extensive collection of video tape recording and playback equipment.

LabGuy's World:

The History of Video Tape Recorders before Betamax and VHS. Find out where that VCR in your living room came from. Read about video hardware that has been extinct a very long time. At LabGuy's World, you can tour the virtual museum, flip through the catalog of extinct video recorders and cameras, browse the time line of video recording history, figure out how to hook up that gnarly antique you just bought at a yard sale AND much, much more!

Per his bio page, "Mildly obsessive and manic, he runs the site in 'cackling mad man' mode. His collections of almost antique video tape recorders and cameras is legendary. If it is electronic and makes pictures of any kind, he knows something useful about it."

An extensive list of hyperlinks to related websites is provided on the Extinct Video Tape Recorder Related Links page. LabGuy also offers some hard-to-find manuals for sale at a low price, to help compensate for the often great deal of time needed to manually scan the many hard copies he has collected. "If it was small format video, used in the USA, between 1960 and 1980, it is possibly in my archives." Ampex, AT&T, Bell, Western Electric, Blonder-Tongue (not a typo), Craig, CVS, JVC, Motorola, Panasonic, RCA, Sharp, Sony, and Zenith are among the manufacturers represented. Lots of good videos are available on the LabGuy's World YouTube channel.

LabGuy is still a practicing engineer, working for a major defense contracting company that specializes in high power microwave transmitter products.

Posted August 20, 2024

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RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...