Video editing: in the early years it was awful

Martin Davids has written an admirable history of Reuters technical development.

He mentions video editing systems (1973).

The initial Bonn video editing system existed from about 1974 to 1979. (Bonn was then the capital of Germany and therefore the editorial centre for Reuters' German-language news service.)

The system was awful.

It was installed specifically because the New York editorial already had video editing and Reuters, quite correctly, foresaw that video editing would have to come in London. So Bonn was chosen as a European guinea pig.

High marks for strategy. Very low marks in many other respects.

The system was based - I think for cost reasons - on a version of PDP computers of which DEC had just decided to end production. So you can guess what happened to spare parts.

The computers were installed in the cellar of a 19th century building in Bonn. No-one had been able to imagine air conditioning at the time when the building was constructed. It was well over 30 degrees Celsius in the cellar during the summer. The cellar was tiny, far too small for cooling units.

The effects of static in the building would have been amusing had they not been so catastrophic. On one occasion I introduced a visitor to an English journalist. As the journalist rose to greet the visitor his thigh happened to jolt the table on which his keyboard rested. So his half-written English story was immediately transmitted to all our German-language customers.

The one technician at Reuters Bonn had been hired some years previously because of his expertise in maintaining mechanical devices such as teleprinters. He hadn’t a clue about electronic devices. He had to get help from Düsseldorf, more than an hour’s drive away when the right bloke was available.

Reuters’ financial future in Germany clearly lay in what was then called “German News Retrieval”, i.e. providing news stories on-screen which the customer could retrieve. That meant expansion of the video editing system. But the system had been designed so that no expansion was possible, neither in terms of the number of work-places nor in terms of connectivity.

Things could only get better. ■