The Dead Media Notebook (25 page)

Source: @Discovery.ca the magazine show of the Discovery Channel Canada), May 28, 1996.

From Eleanor J. Barnes

A hybrid medium aimed at children was the GE Show ‘N Tell, a device for simultaneously playing a phonograph record and displaying a synchronized filmstrip. The record was the size of a 45, but played at 33 1/3 rpm. The filmstrip, with about 12 frames on what appeared to be 16mm film, was housed in a rigid cardboard or plastic strip, with a tab at the top for easy removal from the player. The display resembled a television screen, but was actually nothing more than a magnifier for a given frame of the filmstrip. The phonograph was on the top of the “TV” set. It could also be used to play 45-sized records (at either 33 1/3 or 45rpm) without viewing a filmstrip. Each topic consisted of a folder containing a filmstrip and accompanying record.

The “A” side of the record was to be played synchronized with the filmstrip. The “B” side was related audio (such as a song) on the same topic, but was not intended to be played with the filmstrip. A “light-saver” switch allowed the video display (i.e. the lightbulb) to be turned off while playing the “B” side, or any record not designed for filmstrip synchronization. To play a record with filmstrip, one started by turning on the set, setting the turntable speed switch to “N”, and rotating the turntable by hand until an indicator line appeared in a small window next to the turntable. Otherwise synchronization could be off. One then set the record “A” side up on the turntable, and set the tone arm by hand at the beginning of the record. The slot for the filmstrip was in the top of the set, to the right of the turntable. One had to move the tone arm to gain access to the slot, one reason why you had to set the tone arm on the record before inserting the filmstrip. One slid the filmstrip into the slot as far as it would go, limited by the large tab at the top of the filmstrip; then adjusted so that the first frame of the film was properly centered on the screen. A lever in the side of the set adjusted the focus. Moving the turntable speed switch to “33” started the record. Synchronization of the film to the audio was then automatic.

Well over 100 filmstrip/record sets were available for the GE Show ‘N Tell. Categories included Disney characters, Fairy Tales, Children’s Classics (Heidi, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, etc.), Christmas, Fun with Facts (Dinosaurs, Indians, Wright Bros., etc.), and Captain Kangaroo. Some titles that surprised me were “Hans Brinker and [sic] the Silver Skates” (properly “Hans Brinker, or, the Silver Skates”), “Huckleberry Finn,” and, most surprising of all, “Jane Eyre.” Needless to say, longer and more complex stories such as “Jane Eyre” suffered even greater oversimplification than “Children’s Classics” such as “Treasure Island.”

Source: I own one. GENERAL ELECTRIC SHOW ‘N TELL ® Phono-Viewer and Phonograph

From Bruce Sterling

[This article by Tony Sale came my way through the Fringeware list. Mr. Sales’ narrative illustrates just a few of the steep technical, financial and social difficulties involved in resurrecting dead Big Iron. Presumably the reborn Colossus is now up and running. I’d be interested in an eyewitness account of the appearance and function of this living media fossil.]

The Colossus Rebuild Project Helping to save Bletchley Park by Tony Sale, FBCS. The switching on of the rebuilt Colossus on Thursday 6
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June 1996 by His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent KG. Briefing notes. Colossus was the first large electronic valve computer in the world and it was fully operational in the Spring of 1944, helping to break the German Army High Command messages enciphered using the Lorenz cipher machine.

By the end of WW II, ten Colossi were operating in Bletchley Park, the home of Allied code breaking operations. Each one of them used 2,500 electronic valves and they represented a major technological triumph for British invention. Designed by Dr Tommy Flowers and his team of engineers at the Post Office research labs at Dollis Hill, and manufactured at great speed, they contributed significantly to the war effort by the intelligence that they revealed before and after D Day, 6
^th
June 1944. The Colossi were special purpose, high speed logic calculators of great reliability. They were kept switched on and running 24 hours a day and operated by girls from the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the WRENS.

The very existence of the Colossi was kept a closely guarded secret and unfortunately all but two of them were totally destroyed at the end of 1945. The reasons for this are still not clear. A blanket of silence descended on everything to do with Bletchley Park and this has, until now, prevented Colossus taking its rightful place as one of the greatest achievements of British technology. It has also allowed the Americans, for far too long, to claim that their ENIAC computer, which first ran in 1946, was the first large electronic valve computer in the world.

The first revelations about Colossus appeared in 1970 when Jack Good, one of the wartime code breakers, gave a brief description in a journal article. This was followed in 1972 by further revelations by Donald Michie, another of the code breakers, and then by the researches of Prof Brian Randell.

But even then Colossus was classified as secret and only a few photographs and general details were allowed out.

In 1993 Tony Sale had just finished working at the Science Museum in London restoring some early computers back to working order. Having studied all the available meagre details about Colossus, he decided that given his early career in valve electronics, his involvement with Ml5 and subsequent long career in computing, it would be possible to rebuild a working Colossus.

An approach to GCHQ resulted in all the hardware details about Colossus being declassified, and a further set of wartime photographs emerged from GCHQ archives. Some of the original engineers were still alive, including Dr Tommy Flowers, and they were all enthusiastic about such a project.

Work began in November 1993 to reproduce machine drawings from the photographs. (All the original drawings had been destroyed in 1960).

All attempts at getting sponsorship for the project failed, and Tony Sale and his wife Margaret decided to put their own money into it in order to make a start since, in view of the age of the original engineers, time was of the essence.

By July 1994 all the gathering of information had been done and the construction phase of the project was inaugurated by His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent KG in Bletchley Park on the 18
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July.

The Bletchley Park Trust, of which Tony Sale is Museums Director, has kindly made space available and the construction has taken place in the actual room in H Block where Colossus number 9 stood in WW II.

Two years of hard work helped by an ever growing band of volunteers, including some members of the Computer Conservation Society, and some gratefully received financial donations has resulted in 90% authentic rebuild of Colossus which will now be able to demonstrate its code breaking feats of WW II. His Royal Highness has kindly agreed to switch on Colossus at 10.00 am on Thursday 6
^th
June 1996, an auspicious occasion since it is the anniversary of D Day for which Colossus helped to provide vital intelligence information.

Source: Tony Sale, FBCS.

From Bruce Sterling

[Through happy accident I have found an eyewitness account of the newly resurrected Bletchley Park Colossus, as mentioned above. This report is by Brian Randell and was distributed on Dave Farber’s “Interesting People” list]

The Colossus Rebuild Project by Brian Randell

Yesterday I attended the ceremony at Bletchley Park for the formal switching on of the recreated Colossus computer. It was a glorious day, attended by about two hundred people, many of whom had worked on code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war.

The project is essentially due to one person, Tony Sale, who is I’m sure uniquely qualified for such a project. He was for many years with M.I.5 (including a period as technical assistant to Peter Wright, of “Spycatcher” fame/notoriety) and so has a very high security clearance. He is expert on ancient electronics, he was for several years a Senior Curator at the Science Museum, London, (where he led the project which got a Ferranti Pegasus and an early Elliott computer operational again) and he has an unbelievable ability to get things done.

The recreated Colossus is remarkably authentic, though not yet finished. (It was in fact complete enough to read encrypted messages from the 5000 character per second paper tape, do some basic processing using an electronic version of the Lorenz (Tunny) rotors, and output counts onto an electromechanical typewriter, all very impressive.

There are also a whole series of rooms in which the various aspects of the wartime work, from radio interception, through to processing and indexing the results of the codebreaking, are portrayed and explained.

When I succeeded in getting the Colossus partly declassified, and some photographs of it released, I never dreamt that, over twenty years later, I would actually see a real, albeit recreated, one!

Source: Brian Randell

From Paul Tough

Hey there, Bruce. I received this press release (with a cassette tape) in the mail yesterday, and thought immediately of the list. The dead medium is the 16” aluminum Transcription Disk, but as you’ll see, the story is a much about a dead cultural medium as a dead technological one.

ON THE AIR: YIDDISH RADIO 1925-1955

A decade ago, ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik (credited with sparking the Klezmer music revival in the United states) tripped over a pile of 16” aluminum disks in a musty storage room in New York City. On the worn-away labels he could make out some writing: WEVD. WBNX. “Yiddish Melodies in Swing”.. “Stuhmer’s Pumpernickel Program”. “Bei Tate Memes Tish” (“Round the Family Table”).”Life is Funny with Harry Hirschfield, Sponsored by Edelstein’s Tuxedo Brand Cheese”.

In all, more than 100 discs. He paid $30 for the collection. The seller was thrilled. Sapoznik tracked down an old Transcription Disc turntable and sat down to listen to his find.

He put on the first disc. A clear, strong voice announced: “From atop the Loews State Theater Building, the B. Manischewitz Company, worlds largest matzo bakers, happily present Yiddish Melodies in Swing.” Fanfare. Drum rolls. Clarinets begin to swing. Two announcers continued: “They do it to Eli Melekh!” “They do it to Reb Dovidl!” “They even do it to Yidl Mitn Fidl!” “Who does what to which?” “Yiddish Swing takes old Yiddish folk songs and finds the groove for them in merry modern rhythms.. The B. Manischewitz Company proudly presents Sam Medoff with the Yiddish Swing Orchestra. Hit it, maestro.”

And the band launched into a raucous, swinging rendition of Dayenu. “It was simply unbelievable. Unlike anything I’d ever heard,” remembers Sapoznik.

“I felt like I was being transported back in time to this real living moment in history, it was unreal. I was transfixed.” He was also hooked. Sapoznik has spent the past eight years searching for transcription discs of Yiddish radio shows [a transcription disc is the single ‘air check’ of a program used for archival purposes before the era of tape]. He’s combed attics, flea markets, even dumpsters, in an attempt to rescue and preserve these remnants of Yiddish radio.

“You have to remember, these are one-of-a-kind recordings,” explains Sapoznik. “So much was so close to being lost forever. What choice did I have?”

Over the years, Sapoznik has amassed the largest (and only) collection of Yiddish radio in the world, more than 500 hours of material. Rich, wonderful and irreplaceable material from this critical and tumultuous era in American Jewish history. In its heyday in the 1930s, Yiddish radio flourished across America. Thirty stations in New York alone aired Jewish programming: advice shows, variety shows, man-on- the-street-interviews, news programs, music and game shows in both Yiddish and English. The programs in this collection afford us a snap-shot of American Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s, the collision of Yiddish and American cultures, the dawning reality of the genocide occurring across the ocean, the day-to-day lives of immigrants struggling to make it in a new land. The radio rescued in the Sapoznik collection exists by pure chance; aluminum disks that survived WWII scrap metal drives and the grinding gauntlet of time.

What’s been rescued is random. There are more than five hours of DER YIDISHER FILOSOF (“THE JEWISH PHILOSOPHER”) from the tiny Brooklyn station WFAB, and only 2 minutes of WEVD’s THE FORWARD HOUR, the most important and popular Yiddish radio program ever. But what serendipity has preserved is magical, one-of-a-kind documentary evidence of the explosive and fertile collision of Yiddish and American culture in the 1930s - the sparks of which, in books movies and music, continue to rain down upon us to this day.

Source: David Isay, Sound Portraits Productions, Inc.

From Candi Strecker

Database programs on personal computers have proven extremely efficient at organizing and manipulating certain kinds of everyday information. How did people store and sort this kind of data back in the dark ages before desktop computers, say, 25 years ago?

One method was to use the special sortable paper cards marketed as the “Indecks Information Retrieval System.”

Each Indecks card was approximately the size and shape of the old computer “punch card.” Like punch cards, Indecks cards had a diagonally-cut corner, so they could quickly be aligned before sorting. Each card face had two parts: a rectangular central area (where one would note down information), surrounded by an outer margin with about 80 numbered, punched holes. Each number could be assigned a subject appropriate to one’s project. A “notcher” tool was used to chop a notch in a card from any subject hole to the card’s edge. When a stack of cards was aligned and the Sorting Rod (sort of a knitting needle) was run through a particular subject hole, the appropriate cards, those notched at that subject’s hole, would drop down out of the deck into one’s lap. At least one competing product existed in this category, referred to below as “McBee cards.”