SE Labs (EMI) Ltd
SE Labs (EMI) Ltd. Early History
SE Labs Holdings was acquired by EMI in 1966 and renamed SE Labs(EMI) Ltd. The Company produced transducers in Feltham, Middlesex and expanded to share a site with EMI Electronics in Wells. The Wells site took on the instrumentation tape recording development and production from EMI Electronics, starting with the SE5000/TD9/TD10 range. The flagship product and the driver for rapid expansion was the SE7000 recorder, the world’s first truly portable instrumentation tape recorder. This was made possible by world-leading innovations in power supply, servo and magnetic tape head technologies,together with high-precision manufacturing. Headquartered in the Feltham factory, which also produced innovative electronics including chart recorders, oscilloscopes and modems, the Wells facility was run as an (almost) separate entity.
The instrumentation section also produced oscilloscopes. The innovation here was the first use of switched mode power supplies, that dramatically reduced the size and improved portability for these instruments. The EM102 was the first 500MHz bandwidth oscilloscope.
A number of businesses spun out of this original business, including Avalon Electronics, M5 Data, Somerdata and Phi Labs, all engaged in some form of data recording.
Products
The initial success of the Company was based around the SE7000 portable instrumentation tape recorder whose design formed the basis of many variants and successors. At the same time, the emerging digital tape drive market created a demand for the computer drive storage systems, (much beloved of film-makers wishing to show ‘computers’ working ).
The early line-up of SE Labs (EMI) Ltd Wells products looked like this.
Original Caption
‘1. The SE5000, a Laboratory based recorder which was introduced in 1971. This was of modular construction so enabling the recorder to be tailored to customers requirements.
2. The SE Eight-Four, a low cost general purpose portable machine. Applications have included physiological monitoring, noise measurement, vibration analysis etc.. With suitable anti-vibration mounting the SE 8/4 can be used in a variety of environments.
3.The SE8000. This is a computer-compatible magnetic tape equipment, which includes buffers, formatters and interface units as well as the actual tape transport. The SE8000 is used in large numbers on EMI Scanner installations.
4. The SE7000 combines high technology with low weight and enables laboratory type performance to be taken into the field.‘
Product Information and Brochures.
Inseight Bulletins were quasi-technical applications info, designed as marketing material for the range of products made by SE Labs (EMI)/Thorn EMI Datatech. Although listed under SE Labs(EMI) and Thorn EMI Datatech separately, they are part of a sequence and were probably just reprinted when the name changed.
The GCHQ Connection
The development of multi-track magnetic recording was of particular interest to GCHQ. EMI Electronics was frequently tasked to advance the art, creating techniques and equipment that eventually found its way to the commercial sphere. This from 1963.
Magnetic Tape Head Pre-amplifier circuit board
People
SE Labs(EMI) was an important employer in Wells, here is a 10th anniversary tribute, published in 1978. Some of the people mentioned- Alan Robson, Mike Perry, Robin Wilcox, Malcolm Jones, John Doyle, Stella Woods, Hazel Bailey, Maisie Ashman and many more. EMI News Page1
The original S.E. Labs(EMI) team at Wells was led by Managing Director Mike A. Perry, with Engineering Manager Geoffrey C. Nottley, assisted by Harry M. Harrison. The notable team of Engineering talent behind these products included Alan R. Robson, Len Barratt, L.E. (Ted) Lickiss, W.A. (Bill) Vigar and Les Kirbey all recruited from the main EMI facility.
In 1993, retiring former Managing Director Mike Perry issued the following invitation to a reunion, which also summarised SE Labs presence in Wells.
Other links
One of the most significant developments and contracts for the Company was the award of a contract to provide satellite ground station recorders for NASA, to record digital data download data streams at 50Mbps (I&Q) image data from various earth observation and military observation satellites. At the time, there was no digital data system capable of recording such high data rates for lengthy periods, so a development was undertaken, codenamed Jupiter, to wrap a digital formatting system around an analogue instrumentation tape recorder, splitting the high data rate serial stream into multiple (28 track) parallel data streams. This required serial to parallel conversion, encoding to a robust error detection encoding self-clocking format (3-position modulation) for recording, then a sophisticated replay system to provide automatic bit synchronisation, decoding and error detection/correction, deskewing to realign the parallel tracks, and parallel to serial conversion. The system was capable of variable rate replay to cope with the relatively slow computing speeds available at the time, with the ingest clock being supplied by the processor.
This was a considerable feat of Engineering at the time and laid the foundation for the company’s rapid expansion and worldwide sales as a primary supplier of satellite downlink recorders.
Here are some pictures of some of those early modules, using TTL logic and some of the first microprocessors in production.
There is no affiliation with any other later organisation named SE Labs.