Online Portfolio of Michael Wach

The original Sony Walkman was marketed in 1979. It was engineered by Sony for co-chairman Morita so he could listen to opera music on long flights. A few years before this in Germany, Andreas Pavel invented a portable cassette player, the “stereobelt”. Andreas patented the stereobelt in 1978 in numerous other countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan. For years Andreas fought Sony in legal battles and the Walkman brand expanded to other media formats. Discman and MiniDisc players were popular for a couple years until replaced by flash memory and hard drive based players. By 2003, Sony finally closed the case with Andreas Pavel. Sony agreed to compensate 10 million dollars and recognize Andreas Pavel as the original inventor of the Walkman. Pavel agreed to never file any Read More...

“Shake it like a Polaroid picture”… something that is being forgotten by more and more people today. Instant photography was at once considered the wave of the future. Today, digital cameras have been outselling film for a number of years now. You can still purchase a Polaroid camera for around $30 to $40, but don’t count on the film being available for very much longer. Polaroid recently announced that they would discontinue film production and close four U.S. factories.

About 60 years ago, Polaroid was towards the peak of its success. Edwin Land released his original “Land Camera” and instant film that developed in less than a minute. The photographic medium was used by some of the most famous name fine art photographers such as Ansel Adams, David Hockney Read More...

Now that my semester is over, I have a lot more free time to work on all of those long lost projects. I’m basically finished with my website for now, besides going back and uploading older content. So the next project is my dad’s website.

For those of you that don’t know, Wach Gallery is the name of my father’s business. He buys and sells “Fine 19th Century, 20th Century & Contemporary Photography”. Last year I built him a custom tailored PHP and MySQL content management system. Since then, I’ve learned a lot of new things. Now, I plan to take this intermediate site to professional.

The front end mainly Read More...

There were a number of problems with the 78 revolutions per minute record. The records only stored about 3 minutes of audio. This required song writers to be ‘a little more economical’ with the length of their track. Many artists realized they could record not only sheet music but also on vinyls as long as they could fit the music in the 3 minute duration. The Starr Piano Company in Indiana shifted gears and changed the music recording industry. Towards the 1920s, the Starr Piano Company founded Gennett Records, after producing a number of recordings under the Starr Records label. Gennett Records saved many of the original and most famous jazz and blues songs onto gramophone records. Gennett wasn’t like other record labels; Gennett would record any artist as long as they paid for the studio time and any other production Read More...