Eventide

So we had a name. An improbable name by the standards of the day, it being 1970. Now we needed a business. The stuff we had been making wasn’t particularly inspiring. Our original “product” was a tape search unit for the Ampex MM1000 multitrack recorder. Eventide had its start in a small New York studio where there was no room for a “tape op.” Co-founder Steve Katz requested co-founder Richard Factor to build a gadget that Katz could use to return the tape to a specific location. Co-founder Orville Greene, owner of the studio, financed the initial unit. The unit was an immediate success, allowing Katz to engineer records solo. In a spasm of zeal he presented the unit to the Ampex representative, who notified the factory, which said “we need some of them!” Hence we survived for a while OEMing tape search units and a handful of other low (very low) volume products such as a two-second delay line for telephone research and an electrostatic deflector for dispensing nanoliter quantities of chemical reagents.