AMPEX: What happened?

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Gentlemen, I found some Ampex ads and it looks like they made terrific gear (if the marketing talk is to be believed) and then they disappeared. Can you shed any light?

Well, this is what we’ve found so far. "Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. Named after its founder Alexander M. Poniatoff who started the company in 1944, was hired by Bing Crosby Enterprises to manufacture the first USA tape recorder (but they were actually beaten to that target by Brush Development Company and Ranger) and they delivered their first tape recorder to BCE in 1948 and branched into the manufacture of instrumentation, data and video recorders in the 50's, were from then on and into the 80's the biggest USA based manufacturer in the professional AV market but the company found it increasingly difficult to compete with Japanese and European competitors and exited that market segment in the latter half of the 80's in order to concentrate on the still profitable data & instrumentation markets, this resulting in a name change to Ampex Data Systems, more information can be had on their history page. The Ampex media division was sold in the early 90's and existed for some 10 years as Quantegy"