The year was 1994 when Fast Multimedia AG (Munich Germany) announced the Fast Video Machine. The Fast Video Machine was a hybrid editor, which is a product category that’s now all but disappeared to the filmmaking world.
Linear Editing was the standard, two or more video tape recorders (VTR’s) connected to a device that allowed you to record video linearly in real time from deck to deck. The new wave, of course, was Non-Linear Editing, which was the full digitization of your video assets which allowed you to cut entirely within the computer. For 1994 though, Non-Linear Editing was impossibly out of reach for most editors, besides the quality of the digitized video was not all that great, and you needed to go back to tape for the online edit. Hybrid-Editing was a crazy marriage of linear deck control, and the select digitization of certain parts of video (such as transitions), which allowed you to use the actual video tape signal for high quality, and married it with the digital transitions for flexibility. It actually worked remarkably well.