R. Fred Pfost & JoAnn Burr Pfost

June 20, 1928 – December 4, 2023 | Fred

December 30, 1931 – November 1, 2023 | Joann

R. Fred Pfost, the last surviving member of the pioneering 1956 six-member Ampex videotape development team, and winner of three Emmy Awards, died on December 4th at 95 from injuries sustained in a fall, just 5 weeks after losing his wife of 72 years, JoAnn Burr Pfost. 

JoAnn died on November 1st at 91 from complications from COPD and a short illness. She was living with her husband Fred in Lynnwood, Washington since 2022, after living in Los Altos and Mountain View, California for 72 years.

Fred was born near Boise Idaho to Robert Raymond Pfost and Hazel Hunt Pfost—a family of gold miners and poultry farming. Fred excelled in science and engineering projects and received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1951, the year he married JoAnn. 

JoAnn was a second-generation Californian born in 1931 and raised in Fresno by Edna Greeley Burr and Benjaman Burr. She attended Roosevelt High School and then UC Berkely until she married Fred in 1951. She was a real estate agent for thirty years at Whitecliff Realty and Coldwell Banker in Los Altos. JoAnn was an active member of Delta Zeta sorority, the Allied Arts Guild Auxiliary of Menlo Park and a contributor to the community and local schools. 

Fred’s First Emmy:  Fred Pfost was one of the team hired by Ampex to develop the world’s first commercial videotape recorder or “VTR”. The video team at Ampex included Fred Pfost, Charles Ginsburg, Shelby Henderson, Alex Maxey, Charles Anderson, and Ray Dolby, later the founder of Dolby Labs. 

In the 1950s, there was an industry-wide race for the development of the world’s first video recorder.  The recording bandwidth requirements for video were hundreds of times that of audio, and thus required much higher relative speeds for the recording head moving across the surface of the magnetic tape.  Fred’s contributions focused on the read-write head and related rotating head assembly which achieved the necessary high tape-to-head speeds.  The heads ran across the tape on a vertical path, instead of the approach of all the competitors of using stationary heads and horizontally moving tape.

The Ampex video tape recorder was launched at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in April of 1956 and went on to revolutionize the world of TV.  Ampex received the Emmy® award for “The World’s First Video Tape Recorder” in 1957.

Second Emmy: Fred then joined MVR Corporation, where another of his inventions made possible the world’s first video instant-replay and stop-action recorder, the MVR VDR-210CF, for which the company received an Emmy® award. 

On to the Video Cartridge Recorder (VCR): Pfost then developed the prototype of “Cartrivision”, the world’s first home videotape format. Cartrivision was later eclipsed by foreign companies, including Sony’s Betamax, Matsushita’s VHS, and the Dutch Philips’ VCR formats, all of which used Ampex video patents, including Pfost’s. 

Fred’s third Emmy® was awarded in 2005 as a Lifetime Achievement Award given to each of the six members of the original Ampex videotape team. 

The recipient of more than 50 U.S. and hundreds of international patents, Pfost was inducted into the Video Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame. He was also a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. 

After his work on video, Pfost applied his wide variety of engineering and material science skills to a number of non-video projects, including his coinvention of the Biomek® Laboratory Workstation. Infinitek Inc., the developer of the Biomek, and the team were acquired by Beckman Instruments in 1984, with the sixth generation Biomek still available. One of Biomek’s co-inventors was his son, Dr. Dale Pfost, a biotechnology executive. Another of his inventions was an “Automated Pool Cue” to add excitement for beginners shooting pool and billiards.

Pfost’s many interests outside the video field included astronomy, serving as a founding member of the San Francisco Peninsula Astronomical Society. He was a leader in local Little League Baseball and Boy Scouts and an active member of his college student society in Berkeley, the service-oriented Acacia Fraternity. 

His contributions to San Francisco Bay Area life were greatly aided by his wife and partner of 72 years who died just five weeks prior to his death.

Fred and JoAnn are survived by their three children, David Burr Pfost, Dale Robert Pfost, Kimberly Pfost, two grandchildren and one great granddaughter. They are predeceased by one grandson. The family remained close and were in frequent contact with Fred and JoAnn throughout their lives. They will be missed by many.