And I did actually edit 2 inch tape on occasion. The idea of the physical splice in sound, video or movies is long forgotten - though not the small of film cement.

You can't be me, I'm taken

We had an MCI 24 track.  I had used an Ampex 440 two track for mixdown.  I loved the isoloop drive of the 3M.  Later, when they were developing the Digital Recorder, I was the project manager for the development of the editor, which synched two machines together with SMPTE time codes and executed up to 32 digital crossfades simultaneously.

The problem was that the technology, which they were given by the BBC, utilized a Hamming code for dropout protection.  You could loose up to .2" of media off of the tape and not loose any sound.  The Hamming code took a 16 bit digital word, waited for approximately 200ms, took another word, added them together and formed a check sum word.  The original could be extracted from any two of these words.  But if you tried to do a razor blade edit, you got a giant pop.

My editor took a word from one track, multiplied it by a coefficient from the start of my cross fade PROM table, pop the result into a TRW TDC1010J which would multiply two words in 110ns and put them into an accumulator, do the same thing for the destination track, except starting from the other end of the PROM, and then step through the PROM in opposite directions.  It could do this 32 times in less than 20 micro seconds.  I spotted the chip from an ad in Electronic Design Magazine, hired an MIT EE to design the logic and three Motorola 6800 programmers to program the four seperate microprocessors which had to work together in my design.  I knew the application.  They could do the work.

Without ever signing away my patent rights, I never-the -less became the not so proud author and assignee of a basic patent in digital assembly editing.  That is another story.  I also ended up in debt, naturally.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."