In this chapter, we will recap, in condensed form, the history of the digital video disk recorder and its application to core industry technologies as we understood it up through the early 1990s. The original article, published in December 1994, has been expanded to provide more detail surrounding the uses and the technologies that formed the mold for disk recording between the early 1970s and start of the 1990s.

Recording images onto a rotating surface has a long history. Looking back in time, the first records of digital magnetic recording on a disk surface were made around 1951. Random-access video-on-demand was predicted as early as 1921 and was said to be available as early as 1950. Magnetic recording was proposed in 1888, only about 43 years after magnetic polarization rotation was discovered.

The concept of recording video onto a spinning platter was demonstrated in the later part of the 1950s, nearly in sync with NTSC ^[1] (1954) and videotape recording, which became commercialized in 1956. The first video recording standards (1959) and the early solid state computer (1958) were all-important markers that would contribute to the development of digital recording on magnetic disk drives.

For the professional broadcast industry, the introduction of the video disk recorder has functionally changed from a device used for sports replay to a common tool with extensions well beyond single purpose applications. The use of hard disk drives for still stores, animation and editing was just the beginning. Following the introduction of video compression in...