Amsterdam, Netherlands – As our friends, customers and suppliers know, after more than 30 years in the same location, Vector 3 headquarters have moved just a “stone throw away” from Rambla de Catalunya. For those that have been through this kind of upheaval, the packaging for a move is a trip back down “memory lane” when things long forgotten in the day-to-day frenzy of many years appear in the bottom of storage boxes or on the higheest shelves, out of sight and out of mind. In our case we found manuals of Borland, proceedings of the 1987 edition of Sighgraph, hardware from the 90s, a VTR and even a Centronics cable for a printer that used ribbon cable, amongst many other objects. One of the things we found which was a surprise and might be of interest for many professionals of the TV industry, was a memory of our first participation at IBC.
It is, as far as I know the first mention of the channel-in a-box concept ever published. The photo was taken by the self-appointed “official photographer” of the IBC, an industry veteran who ploughed the corridors dragging a big tripod and a bulky camera, the tools of his trade. When weeks after we received the photo we probably had a quick look in mild embarrassment about our attempts at out first booth and “filed” it in its original manila paper with which was just as we found it this summer.Amongst the myriad claims over the years to being the “Original” Channel-in-a-box, Vector 3 has never made a big case about who invented the concept. We knew it, our customers knew it, and our expertise was not based (only) in having been the very first. When the debate started, not so many years ago, we had already overcome the channel-in-a-box concept and were building big multichannel facilities using what is now called OTS (off-the-shelf) hardware. From time to time, whilst being interviewed by various magazines we did point out that we had been the first but none of these articles saw they light of day. Today, with this photograph discovery in our hands, it seems the perfect opportunity to publicly state that we were the first and that our dealers in UK and Bulgaria were the second and third (perhaps not in this order). Here, for the record is the photo of Roman and Pau Ceano in the Vector 3 stand of the IBC 1995 where the first commercial server that played video, graphics and effects using a board intended for editing (a Matrox Illuminator Pro) installed in a PC was demoed. Also for the record, 17 systems were installed some weeks after the show to work as barker channels for a company called Cablevision.
