Digital Data Storage
Digital Data Storage is a computer data storage technology, based upon the digital audio tape format, developed during the 1980s. DDS is intended for use as off-line storage for generating backup copies of working data. A DDS cartridge uses tape with a width of 3.81mm, with the exception of the latest formats, DAT-160 and DAT-320, both which use 8mm wide tape. The tape was 60 meters or 90 meters in length. Advancements in materials technology have allowed the length to be increased in successive versions. A DDS tape drive uses the same process used by a video cassette recorder. Backward compatibility between newer drives and older cartridges is not assured. Drives can read and write tapes in the prior generation format, with most able to read and write tapes from two generations prior. Notice in HP's article that newer tape standards do not consist of longer tapes. At one time, DDS competed against the Linear Tape-Open, Advanced Intelligent Tape, VXA, Travan formats. However, AIT, Travan and VXA are no longer mainstream, the capacity of LTO has far exceeded that of the most recent DDS standard, DDS-320.
Stores up to 1.3 GB uncompressed on 2 GB uncompressed on a 90 m cartridge. The DDS-1 cartridge does not have the -1 designation, as it was the only format, though cartridges produced since the introduction of DDS-2 may carry a -1 designation to distinguish the format from newer formats. A media recognition system was introduced with DDS-2 drives and cartridges to detect the medium type and prevent the loading of an improper medium. From 1993, DDS-1 tapes included the media recognition system marks on the leader tape—a feature indicated by the presence of four vertical bars after the DDS logo. Stores up to 4 GB uncompressed on a 120 m cartridge. Stores up to 12 GB uncompressed on a 125 m cartridge. DDS-3 uses PRML to minimize electronic noise for a cleaner data recording. DDS-4 stores up to 20 GB uncompressed on a 150 m cartridge; this format is called DAT 40. DAT 72 stores up to 36 GB uncompressed on a 170 m cartridge; the DAT 72 standard was developed by Certance. It has the same form-factor as DDS-3 and -4 and is sometimes referred to as DDS-5.
DAT 160 was launched in June 2007 by HP, stores up to 80 GB uncompressed. A major change from the previous generations is the width of the tape. DAT 160 uses 8 mm wide tape in a thicker cartridge while all prior versions use 3.81 mm wide tape. Despite the difference in tape widths, DAT 160 drives can load DAT-40 cartridges. Native capacity is 80 GB and native transfer rate was raised to 6.9 MB/s due to prolonging head/tape contact to 180°. Launch interfaces were Parallel USB, with SAS interface released later. In November 2009 HP announced the DAT-320 standard, which stores up to 160 GB uncompressed per cartridge; the next format, Gen 8, was canceled. ECMA-139 ISO/IEC 10777:1991, Specification of DDS. ECMA-146 ISO/IEC 11321:1992, Specification of DATA/DAT. ECMA-150 ISO/IEC 11557:1992, Specification of DDS-DC. ECMA-151 ISO/IEC 11558:1992, Specification of DCLZ. ECMA-170 ISO/IEC 12447:1993, Specification of DDS. ECMA-171 ISO/IEC 12448:1993, Specification of DATA/DAT-DC. ECMA-198 ISO/IEC 13923, Specification of DDS-2.
ECMA-236 ISO/IEC 15521, Specification of DDS-3. ECMA-288 ISO/IEC 17462, Specification of DDS-4. Digital Audio Tape Magnetic storage Magnetic tape DAT Manufacturers Group
Videotape
Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either digital signal. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders or, more videocassette recorders and camcorders. Videotapes are used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram; because video signals have a high bandwidth, stationary heads would require high tape speeds, in most cases, a helical-scan video head rotates against the moving tape to record the data in two dimensions. Tape is a linear method of storing information and thus imposes delays to access a portion of the tape, not under the heads; the early 2000s saw the introduction and rise to prominence of high quality random-access video recording media such as hard disks and flash memory. Since videotape has been relegated to archival and similar uses; the electronics division of entertainer Bing Crosby's production company, Bing Crosby Enterprises, gave the world's first demonstration of a videotape recording in Los Angeles on November 11, 1951.
Developed by John T. Mullin and Wayne R. Johnson since 1950, the device gave what were described as "blurred and indistinct" images using a modified Ampex 200 tape recorder and standard quarter-inch audio tape moving at 360 inches per second. A year an improved version using one-inch magnetic tape was shown to the press, who expressed amazement at the quality of the images although they had a "persistent grainy quality that looked like a worn motion picture". Overall the picture quality was still considered inferior to the best kinescope recordings on film. Bing Crosby Enterprises hoped to have a commercial version available in 1954 but none came forth; the BBC experimented from 1952 to 1958 with a high-speed linear videotape system called VERA, but this was unfeasible. It used half-inch tape on 20-inch reels traveling at 200 inches per second. RCA demonstrated the magnetic tape recording of both black-and-white and color television programs at its Princeton laboratories on December 1, 1953.
The high-speed longitudinal tape system, called Simplex, in development since 1951, could record and play back only a few minutes of a television program. The color system used half-inch tape on 10-1/2 inch reels to record five tracks, one each for red, green and audio; the black-and-white system used quarter-inch tape on 10-1/2 inch reels with two tracks, one for video and one for audio. Both systems ran at 360 inches per second with 2,500 feet on a reel. RCA-owned NBC first used it on The Jonathan Winters Show on October 23, 1956 when a prerecorded song sequence by Dorothy Collins in color was included in the otherwise live television program. In 1953, Dr. Norikazu Sawazaki developed a prototype helical scan video tape recorder. BCE demonstrated a color system in February 1955 using a longitudinal recording on half-inch tape. CBS, RCA's competitor, was about to order BCE machines when Ampex introduced the superior Quadruplex system. BCE was acquired by 3M Company in 1956. In 1959, Toshiba released the first commercial helical scan video tape recorder.
The first commercial professional broadcast quality videotape machines capable of replacing kinescopes were the two-inch quadruplex videotape machines introduced by Ampex on April 14, 1956 at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Chicago. Quad employed a transverse four-head system on a two-inch tape, stationary heads for the sound track. CBS Television first used the Ampex VRX-1000 Mark IV at its Television City studios in Hollywood on November 30, 1956 to play a delayed broadcast of Douglas Edwards and the News from New York City to the Pacific Time Zone. On January 22, 1957, the NBC Television game show Truth or Consequences, produced in Hollywood, became the first program to be broadcast in all time zones from a prerecorded videotape. Ampex introduced a color videotape recorder in 1958 in a cross-licensing agreement with RCA, whose engineers had developed it from an Ampex black-and-white recorder. NBC's special, An Evening With Fred Astaire, is the oldest surviving television network color videotape, has been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
On December 7, 1963, instant replay was used for the first time during the live transmission of the Army–Navy Game by its inventor, director Tony Verna. Although Quad became the industry standard for thirty years, it has drawbacks such as an inability to freeze pictures, no picture search. In early machines, a tape could reliably be played back using only the same set of hand-made tape heads, which wore out quickly. Despite these problems, Quad is capable of producing excellent images. Subsequent videotape systems have used helical scan, where the video heads record diagonal tracks onto the tape. Many early videotape recordings were not preserved. While much less expensive and more convenient than kinescope, the high cost of 3M Scotch 179 and other early videotapes meant that most broadcasters erased and reused them, regarded videotape as a better and more cost-effective means of time-delaying broadcasts than kinescopes, it was the four time zones of the continental United States which had made the system desirable in the first place.
However, some classic television programs recorded on studio videotape still exist, are available on DVD – among them NBC's Peter Pan with Mary Martin as Peter, several episodes o
Compact disc
Compact disc is a digital optical disc data storage format, co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982. The format was developed to store and play only sound recordings but was adapted for storage of data. Several other formats were further derived from these, including write-once audio and data storage, rewritable media, Video Compact Disc, Super Video Compact Disc, Photo CD, PictureCD, CD-i, Enhanced Music CD; the first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan. Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres and can hold up to about 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or about 700 MiB of data; the Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres. At the time of the technology's introduction in 1982, a CD could store much more data than a personal computer hard drive, which would hold 10 MB. By 2010, hard drives offered as much storage space as a thousand CDs, while their prices had plummeted to commodity level. In 2004, worldwide sales of audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs reached about 30 billion discs.
By 2007, 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. From the early 2000s CDs were being replaced by other forms of digital storage and distribution, with the result that by 2010 the number of audio CDs being sold in the U. S. had dropped about 50% from their peak. In 2014, revenues from digital music services matched those from physical format sales for the first time. American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital information on an optical transparent foil, lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russell's patent application was filed in 1966, he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation and Philips licensed Russell's patents in the 1980s; the compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a focused laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Prototypes were developed by Sony independently in the late 1970s. Although dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled.
In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980. After their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984. By 1988, CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, by 1992 CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music cassette tapes; the success of the compact disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, which together agreed upon and developed compatible hardware. The unified design of the compact disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company, allowed the CD to dominate the at-home music market unchallenged. In 1974, Lou Ottens, director of the audio division of Philips, started a small group with the aim to develop an analog optical audio disc with a diameter of 20 cm and a sound quality superior to that of the vinyl record.
However, due to the unsatisfactory performance of the analog format, two Philips research engineers recommended a digital format in March 1974. In 1977, Philips established a laboratory with the mission of creating a digital audio disc; the diameter of Philips's prototype compact disc was set at 11.5 cm, the diagonal of an audio cassette. Heitaro Nakajima, who developed an early digital audio recorder within Japan's national public broadcasting organization NHK in 1970, became general manager of Sony's audio department in 1971, his team developed a digital PCM adaptor audio tape recorder using a Betamax video recorder in 1973. After this, in 1974 the leap to storing digital audio on an optical disc was made. Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. A year in September 1977, Sony showed the press a 30 cm disc that could play 60 minutes of digital audio using MFM modulation. In September 1978, the company demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150-minute playing time, 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, cross-interleaved error correction code—specifications similar to those settled upon for the standard compact disc format in 1980.
Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on 13–16 March 1979, in Brussels. Sony's AES technical paper was published on 1 March 1979. A week on 8 March, Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduce Compact Disc" in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Sony executive Norio Ohga CEO and chairman of Sony, Heitaro Nakajima were convinced of the format's commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism; as a result, in 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by engineers Kees Schouhamer Immink and Toshitada Doi, the research pushed forward laser and optical disc technology. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the task force produced the Red Book CD-DA standard. First published in 1980, the stand
RCA
The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric. An innovative and progressive company, RCA was the dominant electronics and communications firm in the United States for over five decades. RCA was at the forefront of the mushrooming radio industry in the early 1920s, as a major manufacturer of radio receivers, the exclusive manufacturer of the first superheterodyne models. RCA created the first American radio network, the National Broadcasting Company; the company was a pioneer in the introduction and development of television, both black-and-white and color. During this period, RCA was identified with the leadership of David Sarnoff, he was general manager at the company's founding, became president in 1930, remained active, as chairman of the board, until the end of 1969. RCA's impregnable stature began to weaken in the mid-1970s, as it attempted to diversify and expand into a multifaceted conglomerate.
The company suffered enormous financial losses in the mainframe computer industry and other failed projects such as the CED videodisc. In 1986, RCA was reacquired by General Electric, which over the next few years liquidated most of the corporation's assets. Today, RCA exists as a brand name only. RCA originated as a reorganization of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. In 1897, the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, was founded in London to promote the radio inventions of Guglielmo Marconi; as part of worldwide expansion, in 1899 American Marconi was organized as a subsidiary company, holding the rights to use the Marconi patents in the United States and Cuba. In 1912 it took over the assets of the bankrupt United Wireless Telegraph Company, from that point forward it had been the dominant radio communications company in the United States. With the entry of the United States into World War One in April 1917, the government took over most civilian radio stations, to use them for the war effort.
Although the overall U. S. government plan was to restore civilian ownership of the seized radio stations once the war ended, many Navy officials hoped to retain a monopoly on radio communication after the war. Defying instructions to the contrary, the Navy began purchasing large numbers of stations outright. With the conclusion of the conflict, Congress turned down the Navy's efforts to have peacetime control of the radio industry, instructed the Navy to make plans to return the commercial stations it controlled, including the ones it had improperly purchased, to the original owners. Due to national security considerations, the Navy was concerned about returning the high-powered international stations to American Marconi, since a majority of its stock was in foreign hands, the British largely controlled the international undersea cables; this concern was increased by the announcement in late 1918 of the formation of the Pan-American Wireless Telegraph and Telephone Company, a joint venture between American Marconi and the Federal Telegraph Company, with plans to set up service between the United States and South America.
The Navy had installed a high-powered Alexanderson alternator, built by General Electric, at the American Marconi transmitter site in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It proved to be superior for transatlantic transmissions to the spark transmitters, traditionally used by the Marconi companies. Marconi officials were so impressed by the capabilities of the Alexanderson alternators that they began making preparations to adopt them as their standard transmitters for international communication. A tentative plan made with General Electric proposed that over a two-year period the Marconi companies would purchase most of GE's alternator production. However, this proposal was met with disapproval, on national security grounds, by the U. S. Navy, concerned that this would guarantee British domination of international radio communication; the Navy, claiming it was acting with the support of President Wilson, looked for an alternative that would result in an "all-American" company taking over the American Marconi assets.
In April 1919 two naval officers, Admiral H. G. Bullard and Commander S. C. Hooper, met with GE's president, Owen D. Young, asking that he suspend the pending alternator sales to the Marconi companies; this move would leave General Electric without a buyer for its transmitters, so the officers proposed that GE purchase American Marconi, use the assets to form its own radio communications subsidiary. Young consented to this proposal, effective November 20, 1919, transformed American Marconi into the Radio Corporation of America; the new company was promoted as being a patriotic gesture. RCA's incorporation papers required that its officers needed to be U. S. citizens, with a majority of its stock held by Americans. RCA retained most of the American Marconi staff, although Owen Young became the new company's head as the chairman of the board. Former American Marconi vice president and general manager E. J. Nally become RCA's first president. Nally's term ended on December 31, 1922, he was succeeded the next day by Major General James G. Harbord.
Harbord
Sony
Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan, Tokyo. Its diversified business includes consumer and professional electronics, gaming and financial services; the company owns the largest music entertainment business in the world, the largest video game console business and one of the largest video game publishing businesses, is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets, a leading player in the film and television entertainment industry. Sony was ranked 97th on the 2018 Fortune Global 500 list. Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, engaged in business through its four operating components: electronics, motion pictures and financial services; these make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. The group consists of Sony Corporation, Sony Pictures, Sony Mobile, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Music, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Sony Financial Holdings, others.
Sony is among the semiconductor sales leaders and since 2015, the fifth-largest television manufacturer in the world after Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, TCL and Hisense. The company's current slogan is Be Moved, their former slogans were The One and Only, It's like.no.other and make.believe. Sony has a weak tie to the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group corporate group, the successor to the Mitsui group. Sony began in the wake of World War II. In 1946, Masaru Ibuka started an electronics shop in a department store building in Tokyo; the company started with a total of eight employees. In May 1946, Ibuka was joined by Akio Morita to establish a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo; the company built Japan's first tape recorder, called the Type-G. In 1958, the company changed its name to "Sony"; when Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use to market themselves, they considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TTK.
The company used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. Another early name, tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech" until Akio Morita discovered that there was an American company using Teletech as a brand name; the name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words: one was the Latin word "sonus", the root of sonic and sound, the other was "sonny", a common slang term used in 1950s America to call a young boy. In 1950s Japan, "sonny boys" was a loan word in Japanese, which connoted smart and presentable young men, which Sony founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be; the first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955 but the company name did not change to Sony until January 1958. At the time of the change, it was unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji; the move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, had strong feelings about the name.
They pushed for a name such as Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however. Both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval. According to Schiffer, Sony's TR-63 radio "cracked open the U. S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid-1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5 million units by the end of 1968. Sony co-founder Akio Morita founded Sony Corporation of America in 1960. In the process, he was struck by the mobility of employees between American companies, unheard of in Japan at that time; when he returned to Japan, he encouraged experienced, middle-aged employees of other companies to reevaluate their careers and consider joining Sony. The company filled many positions in this manner, inspired other Japanese companies to do the same. Moreover, Sony played a major role in the development of Japan as a powerful exporter during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
It helped to improve American perceptions of "made in Japan" products. Known for its production quality, Sony was able to charge above-market prices for its consumer electronics and resisted lowering prices. In 1971, Masaru Ibuka handed the position of president over to his co-founder Akio Morita. Sony began a life insurance company in one of its many peripheral businesses. Amid a global recession in the early 1980s, electronics sales dropped and the company was forced to cut prices. Sony's profits fell sharply. "It's over for Sony," one analyst concluded. "The company's best days are behind it." Around that time, Norio Ohga took up the role of president. He encouraged the development of the Compact Disc in the 1970s and 1980s, of the PlayStation in the early 1990s. Ohga went on to purchase CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989 expanding Sony's media presence. Ohga would succeed Morita as chief executive officer in 1989. Under the vision of co-founder Akio Morita and his successors, the company had aggressively expanded in
Video tape recorder
A video tape recorder is a tape recorder designed to record and playback video and audio material on magnetic tape. The early VTRs are open-reel devices, they were used in television studios, serving as a replacement for motion picture film stock and making recording for television applications cheaper and quicker. Beginning in 1963, videotape machines made instant replay during televised sporting events possible. Improved formats, in which the tape was contained inside a videocassette, were introduced around 1969. Agreement by Japanese manufacturers on a common standard recording format, so cassettes recorded on one manufacturer's machine would play on another's, made a consumer market possible, the first consumer videocassette recorder was introduced by Sony in 1971. In early 1951 Bing Crosby asked his Chief Engineer John T. Mullin if television could be recorded on tape as was the case for audio. Mullin said. Bing asked Ampex to build one and set up a laboratory for Mullin in Bing Crosby Enterprises to build one.
In 1951 it was believed that if the tape was run at a high speed it could provide the necessary bandwidth to record the video signal. The problem was that a video signal has a much wider bandwidth than an audio signal does, requiring high tape speeds to record it. However, there was another problem: the magnetic head design would not permit bandwidths over 1 meghertz to be recorded regardless of the tape speed; the first efforts at video recording, using recorders similar to audio recorders with fixed heads, were unsuccessful. The first such demonstration of this technique was done by BCE on 11 November 1951; the result was a poor picture. Another of the early efforts was the Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus, a high-speed multi-track machine developed by the BBC in 1952; this machine used a thin steel tape on a 21-inch reel traveling at over 200 inches per second. Despite 10 years of research and improvements, it was never used due to the immense length of tape required for each minute of recorded video.
By 1952 BCE had moved on to multi-track machine, but found limitations in recording bandwidth at the high speeds. In 1953 BCE discovered; this problem bandwidths exceeding the 1 megahertz limit were able to be recorded. Since BCE and AMPEX were working together on the video recorder the new head design was shared with them, AMPEX used it in their recorder. In 1955 BCE demonstrated a broadcast quality color recorder that operated at 100 inches per second and CBS ordered three of them. Many other fixed-head recording systems were tried but all required an impractically high tape speed, it became clear that practical video recording technology depended on finding some way of recording the wide-bandwidth video signal without the high tape speed required by linear-scan machines. In 1953 Dr. Norikazu Sawazaki developed a prototype helical scan video tape recorder. Another solution was transverse-scan technology, developed by Ampex around 1954, in which the recording heads are mounted on a spinning drum and record tracks in the transverse direction, across the tape.
By recording on the full width of the tape rather than just a narrow track down the center, this technique achieved a much higher density of data per linear centimeter of tape, allowing a lower tape speed of 15 inches per second to be used. The Ampex VRX-1000 became the world's first commercially successful videotape recorder in 1956, it uses the 2" quadruplex format, using two-inch tape. Because of its US$50,000 price, the Ampex VRX-1000 could be afforded only by the television networks and the largest individual stations. Ampex's quadruplex magnetic tape video recording system has certain limitations, such as the lack of clean pause, or still-frame, because when tape motion is stopped, only a single segment of the picture recording is present at the playback heads, so it can only reproduce recognizable pictures when the tape is playing at normal speed.) But in spite of its drawbacks it remained the broadcasting studio standard until about 1980. The helical scan system overcame this limitation.
In 1959 Toshiba released the first commercial helical-scan video tape recorder. In 1963, Philips introduced its EL3400 1" helical scan recorder, Sony marketed the 2" PV-100, its first open-reel VTR intended for business, medical and educational use; the Telcan, produced by the Nottingham Electronic Valve Company and demonstrated on June 24, 1963, was the first home video recorder. It could be bought as a unit or in kit form for £60. However, there were several drawbacks: it was expensive, not easy to put together, can record for only 20 minutes at a time in black-and-white; the Sony model CV-2000, first marketed in 1965, is their first VTR intended for home use and is based on half-inch tape. Ampex and RCA followed in 1965 with their own open-reel monochrome VTRs priced under US $1,000 for the home consumer market. Prerecorded videos for home replay became available in 1967; the EIAJ format is a standard half-inch format used by various manufacturers. EIAJ-1 is an open-reel format. EIAJ-2 uses a cartridge, but not the take-up reel.
Since the take-up reel is part of the recorder, the tape has to be rewound before removing the cartridge, a slow procedure. The development of the videocassette followed other replacements of open-reel systems with a cassette or cartridge in consumer items: the Stereo-Pak 4-trac
3M
The 3M Company known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation operating in the fields of industry, worker safety, health care, consumer goods. The company produces a variety of products, including adhesives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint protection films and orthodontic products, electronic materials, medical products, car-care products, electronic circuits, healthcare software and optical films, it is based in Maplewood, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. In 2017, 3M made $31.7 billion in total sales, the company ranked No. 97 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. The company has 91,000 employees and has operations in more than 70 countries. Five businessmen founded 3M in Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902. A mining venture, the goal was to mine corundum, but this failed because the mine's mineral holdings were anorthosite, which had no commercial value.
Co-founder John Dwan solicited funds in exchange for stock and Edgar Ober and Lucius Ordway took over the company in 1905. The company moved to Duluth and began researching and producing sandpaper products. William L. McKnight a key executive, joined the company in 1907, A. G. Bush joined in 1909. 3M became financially stable in 1916 and was able to pay dividends. The company moved to St. Paul in 1910, where it remained for 52 years before outgrowing the campus and moving to its current headquarters at 3M Center in Maplewood, Minnesota in 1962; the company began by mining stone from quarries for use in grinding wheels. Struggling with quality and marketing of its products, management supported its workers to innovate and develop new products, which became its core business. Twelve years after its inception, 3M developed its first exclusive product: Three-M-ite cloth. Other innovations in this era included masking tape, waterproof sandpaper, Scotch-brand tapes. By 1929, 3M had made its first moves toward international expansion by forming Durex to conduct business in Europe.
The same year, the company's stock was first traded over the counter and in 1946 listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and of the S&P 500; the founders original plan was to sell the mineral corundum to manufacturers in the East for making grinding wheels. After selling one load, on June 13, 1902, the five went to the Two Harbors office of company secretary John Dwan, on the shore of Lake Superior and is now part of the 3M National Museum, signed papers making Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing a corporation. In reality, however and his associates were not selling what they thought. Failing to make sandpaper with the anorthosite, the founders decided to import minerals like Spanish garnet, after which sale of sandpapers grew. In 1914, customers complained that the garnet was falling off the paper; the founders discovered that the stones had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean packed near olive oil, the oil had penetrated the stones.
Unable to take the loss of selling expensive inventory, they roasted the stones over fire to remove the olive oil. The company's late innovations include waterproof sandpaper and masking tape, as well as cellophane "Scotch Tape" and sound-deadening materials for cars. In 1947, 3M began producing perfluorooctanoic acid by electrochemical fluorination. During the 1950s, the company expanded worldwide with operations in Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom in large part by Clarence Sampair. In 1951, DuPont started purchasing PFOA from then-Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company for use in the manufacturing of teflon, a product that brought DuPont a billion-dollar-a-year profit by the 1990s. DuPont referred to PFOA as C8. In 1951, international sales were $20 million. 3M's achievements were recognized by the American Institute of Management naming the company "one of the five best-managed companies in the United States" and included it among the top 12 growth stocks. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, 3M published a line of board games under the "3M bookshelf game series" brand.
These games were marketed to adults and sold through department stores, with learned simple rules but complex game play and depth and with uniformly high-quality components. As such, they are the ancestors of the German "Eurogames"; the games covered a variety of topics, from business and sports simulations to word and abstract strategy games. They were a major publisher at the time for influential U. S. designers Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph. In the mid-1970s, the game line was taken over by Avalon Hill. 3M's Mincom division introduced several models of magnetic tape recorders for instrumentation use and for studio sound recording. An example of the latter is the model M79 recorder, which still has a following today. 3M Mincom was involved in designing and manufacturing video production equipment for the television and video post-production industries in the 1970s and 1980s, with such items as character generators and several different models of video switchers, from models of audio and video routers to video mixers for studio production work.
3M Mincom was involved in some of the first digital audio recordings of the late 1970s to see commercial release when a prototype machine was brought to the Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis. After drawing on the experience of that prototype recorder, 3M introduced in 1979 a commercially available digital audio recording system called the "3M Digital Audio Mastering System", which
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