The Dead Media Notebook (26 page)

From the Last Whole Earth Catalog’s review of Indecks, by Stewart Brand:

“What do you have a lot of? Students, subscribers, notes, books, records, clients, projects? Once you’re past 50 or 100 of whatever, it’s tough to keep track, time to externalize your store and retrieve system. One handy method this side of a high-rent computer is Indecks. It’s funky and functional: cards with a lot of holes in the edges, a long blunt needle, and a notcher. Run the needle through a hole in a bunch of cards, lift, and the cards notched in that hole don’t rise; they fall out. So you don’t have to keep the cards in order. You can sort them by feature, number, alphabetically or whatever; just poke, fan, lift and catch. [.]

“We’ve used the McBee cards to manipulate (edit) and keep track of the 3000 or so items in this CATALOG. They’ve meant the difference between partial and complete insanity.” The subsequent (1980) issue of the Whole Earth Catalog is full-to-bursting with information about personal computers, but contains no mention of the Indecks system. Sometime between 1971 and 1980, this medium seems to have died...

Source: The Last Whole Earth Catalog

From Charles Stross

While bumming around my local remainders shop I came across a fascinating book: “Century of the Typewriter”, by Wilfred A. Beeching (Director, British Typewriter Museum). It’s an edited re-release of an earlier edition (1972) which was considered one of the definitive texts on typewriters. Is the typewriter a dead medium? Arguably, yes. They’re still around, but they no longer occupy a central role in the office, or even in society at large, and the humble manual portable has all but been killed by cheap dot-matrix print heads. And some varieties of typewriter are definitely dead:

PNEUMATIC TYPEWRITERS

“Various attempts were made from 1891 onwards when Marshall A. Wier in London, produced a typewriter with a pneumatic action. The object of such a machine was to eliminate the hard work involved in typing and to reduce the noise and increase the speed. It was also thought to be a substitute for such power as electricity.

“One of the disadvantages of pneumatic machines has always been typebars that did not return fast enough, and although this problem could most likely have been overcome the fact is, it just seemed to present insurmountable difficulties.

“It would appear that the last real attempt to manufacture a pneumatic machine was made in 1914, by a man called Juan Gualberto Holguin in Mexico. This machine was known as the ‘Burbra’, and used compressed air cylinders as a source of power. In spite of much time and money spent on the production of compressed air typewriters, very little result of any importance has ever been achieved.

“There are reports of various designs of pneumatic typewriters having been produced by large organizations, both in American and in Germany in recent years. Most of these consisted of an electrically propelled plunger which compressed oil in a tube, fired the typebar forward in a sharp thrust, had the advantage of being very quiet and also eliminating most of the moving parts of the conventional machine. The idea seems to have been abandoned due to the high cost and probably to lack of interest.

While Wilf Beeching is an admirable old gent, his book is not considered “definitive” by typewriter collectors. It has a lot of good stuff such as serial number lists, and a multitude of photos (many from the massive collection at the Milwaukee Public Museum), but it is frought with inaccuracies. Much more “definitive” is “The Writing Machine,” by Michael Adler, written in 1973. Adler is about to release a revised edition. My own book on typewriters (“Antique Typewriters and Office Collectibles”) should be on the street next spring. It will feature 100% color photos (many from the Milwaukee Public Museum collection). Is the typewriter dead? Hmmm, I suppose so. But as you compose your next computer message, be aware that the QWERTY keyboard under your fingertips was there at the birth of the typewriter industry. QWERTY has been with us since 1872

Source: Century of the Typewriter by Wilfred A Beeching, ISBN 0 9516790 0 7

From Stefan Jones

For many years, Stan Veit edited the original incarnation of The Computer Shopper, a newsprint computer hobbyist want-ad monthly that was the last place die-hard Atari, Commodore, Osborne and Apple II users could find sources of hardware and software. The classified ad section of this tome was worth the cover price alone, but it also had articles for the major dying computer standards, and Veit’s own history column.

While The Computer Shopper is now a professionally managed, hernia-inducing monthly dedicated to the PC market, Veit’s columns are now available in book form. The chapters of Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer show their origin as magazine columns. The same incidents (e.g., the first months of Stan’s Computer Mart store in midtown Manhattan) are described again and again, albeit from slightly different perspectives. This isn’t a problem if you read the chapters one at a time and don’t expect a consistent narrative.

Each chapter covers Veit’s dealings with a particular company: Altair (the folks who arguably started it all), Sphere, IMSAI, and so on. Most of the systems and companies that Veit surveys are long dead; victims of the Apple II with its reliable disk drives and built-in video, or of IBM and its CP/M-squishing Personal Computer. Some of the firms passed on gracefully; others were frauds and cheats. The most entertaining chapter is the tale of the early days of Apple.

Veit rubbed elbows with the two Steves when they were still ragged, long haired hackers; he relates how his mother-in-law made Steve Jobs take off his jeans at a crucial early trade show so she could sew up the rents and tears. Veit also mentions the time that Jobs offered him a chance to buy a significant chunk of the nascent computer giant for $10,000. Had he not had the money tied up in his store, Veit probably would have taken him up on the deal and today would be worth billions...

Another highlight: The time that a computer graphics display - the Cromemco “Dazzler” - placed in the store window caused a late-night traffic jam on 5
^th
Avenue. Drivers were so amazed that they stopped and stared . . . and stared. until police rousted Veit’s landlord from bed to turn off the monitor.

Veit doesn’t neglect the experiences of his customers. The feats of soldering and switch-flipping the early computer hobbyists had to perform to get a working computer are explained in exquisite detail, making one damn appreciative for BIOS chips and floppy drives.

The tales of vaporware BASIC, dirty tricks, memory boards that periodically blanked and some systems that just plain didn’t work are almost enough to make one grateful for IBM and Microsoft.

The computerists of the mid seventies were a different breed, and true pioneers.

Source: Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer: From Altair to IBM, A History of the PC Revolution by Stan Veit Published by WorldComm, 65 Macedonia Road, Alexander, NC 28701 ISBN 1-56664-023-7 $19.95

According to Business Week in 1931, television broadcasters admitted “that interest in their efforts is confined almost entirely to the experimenter, the young man of mechanical bent whose principal (sic) interest is in how television works rather than in the quality of images received.” William Boddy, 1991

Fred Hammond, VE3HC, is a veteran Radio Ham who has been on the air since 1929. During the early 1930’s, he was one of a handful of radio experimenters in Canada to become interested in mechanical television, building his own mechanical kit vision receiver. As an active Radio Ham, he was able to audibly monitor the various mechanical television signals.

Always a sensation, television was hardly an overnight success. In 1926, New York Times radio editor Orrin Dunlap called the new medium “an inventor’s will-o’- the-wisp.”

A year earlier, a Scot, John Logie Baird, and an American, Charles Francis Jenkins, generated the first live pictures by pairing (or synchronizing) primitive mechanical scanning discs at transmitter and receiver ends. These demonstrations, soon conducted at department stores, trade fairs, and before invited audiences of scientists and government officials, attracted the curiosity of press and public. Especially interested were some of the quarter- million amateur “wireless” operators, whose numbers grew during the early 1920s, when “radio mania” swept North America. These hobbyists were among the original producers and consumers of both radio and television.

In 1928, Jenkins began irregular broadcasts of the crude silhouettes he called radiomovies. He described the thrill for his amateur audience as they “fished” for his signals on homebuilt contraptions: “thousands of amateurs fascinatingly watch the pantomime picture in their receiver sets as dainty little Jans Marie performs tricks with her bouncing ball, Miss Constance hangs up her doll wash in a drying wind, and diminutive Jacqueline does athletic dances with her clever partner, Master Fremont.”

At its inception, radio “listening-in” was an active, mainly male pastime, requiring technical know-how, and constant adjustments to the set.

“Lookers-in” to early mechanical television patiently fished for signals. Sometimes they caught tiny, indistinct images. A separate radio set could be used to tune in sound with the picture. Radio entered most households only after it was domesticated. This meant that it came to resemble furniture instead of a gadget, became easier to operate, and could be enjoyed by more than one person at a time. Television followed a similar route into the home, but its complex and expensive assemblage dictated a lengthier experimental period before costs came down, and before the invention of larger screens and clearer pictures could domesticate “seeing at a distance.”

Despite these early limitations, the pioneers of crude mechanical television demonstrated basic principles of picture scanning and synchronization of transmission and reception. They also glimpsed the medium’s potential for storytelling. In 1928, the first live drama broadcast, a three-camera production called “The Queen’s Messenger,” was received on a General Electric Octagon set in Schenectady, New York. In 1931, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) broadcast experimental signals from the Empire State Building, featuring a familiar cartoon character, Felix the Cat. The first TV star was born. By 1935, mechanical television had reached a dead end in North America. Image resolution remained low, at best reaching 120 lines of picture definition. Transmission and reception standards were nonexistent. Available programming was unpredictably scheduled. Lacking an audience, advertisers were reluctant to purchase commercial time.

One of the earliest proposals for a mechanical television system was put forward by German researcher Paul Nipkow in 1883. When he developed patent No. 30,105, he was an unknown twenty-three-year-old student living in Berlin.

It proved to be the basis for most early television schemes in the world, although he never built the apparatus. In Nipkow’s patent, which he called an ‘electric telescope,’ a disc was punched with holes in a spiral near the outer edge. When the disc revolved, each hole vertically scanned a line of the image, allowing variations in light to reach a selenium cell. As one hole swept over a segment of the picture, the next in sequence tackled the portion next to it, until the complete subject had been scanned. The selenium cell transferred the light variations to an electronic signal. Pictures were reconstituted at the receiver by a similar disc which was synchronized with the transmitter. Jenkins One of the better known experimenters with mechanical television was Charles Francis Jenkins, a prolific American inventor.

In May 1920, at the Toronto meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Jenkins introduced his “prismatic rings” as a device to replace the shutter on a film projector. This invention laid the foundation for his first radiovision broadcast. He claimed to have transmitted the earliest moving silhouette images on June 14, 1923, but his first public demonstration of these did not take place until June of 1925.

Jenkins Laboratories constructed a radiovision transmitter, W3XK, in Washington D.C. The short-wave station began transmitting radiomovies across the Eastern U.S. on a regular basis by July 2, 1928.

Jenkins wrote in 1929: “This gave the amateur action-pictures to ‘fish’ for; and during August following a hundred or more had finished their receivers and were dependably getting our broadcast pictures, and reporting thereon, to our great help.” It was in this way that Jenkins actively promoted enthusiasm and experimentation in the short-wave radio community, and the U.S. experienced its first television boom, with an estimated 20,000 lookers-in.

Baird John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer and entrepreneur, achieved his first transmissions of simple face shapes in 1924 using mechanical television. On March 25, 1925, Baird held his first public demonstration of “television” at the London department store Selfridges on Oxford Street in London. In this demonstration, he had not yet obtained adequate half-tones in the moving pictures, and only silhouettes were visible. In the first week of October, 1925, Baird obtained the first actual television picture in his laboratory. At this time, his test subject was a ventriloquist’s dummy, “Stooky Bill,” which was placed in front of the camera apparatus.

Baird later recollected, “The image of the dummy’s head formed itself on the screen with what appeared to me an almost unbelievable clarity. I had got it! I could scarcely believe my eyes and felt myself shaking with excitement.” After much discussion with his business associates, and further improvements, Baird decided to publicly demonstrate television on Tuesday 26 January, 1926, again at Selfridge’s department store. This was the first opportunity for the general public to see television.

The Baird company continued to publicize this historic demonstration, and J. L. Baird’s other scientific breakthroughs as they feverishly worked to obtain financial backing and construct a line of home receivers. With Baird’s transmitting equipment, the British Broadcasting Corporation began regular experimental television broadcasts on September 30, 1929. By the following year, most of Britain’s major radio dealers were selling Baird kits and ready-made receivers through retail and by mail order.