The Dead Media Notebook (29 page)

“By 1895, Britain had its own equivalent of the French Theatrophone. It was called the ‘Electrophone’ and it offered subscribers a similar service via their telephone lines and as well as receiving ‘local’ relays from theatres, churches and London’s Royal Opera House, they could also switch to exchange programmes from Europe via a link-up with the French company. The Theatrophone idea might have proved a great success as an entertainment and news broadcasting medium if it had not been for the appearance of the wireless which nipped it in the bud.”

Source: RADIO ART by Robert Hawes, photography by Paul Straker-Welds Green Wood Publishing Company Ltd, London 1991 ISBN 1-872532-29-2 page 24

From Stephen Herbert

Not too much in print about peepshows, but the following are worth having: ‘Peep Shows’, written, printed and published by Paul Braithwaite. The author uses his own pen-and-ink sketches of peepshow engravings, photos,and paintings to guide us through the enormous range of peepshow types, from 17
^th
to 20
^th
centuries; ‘back’ peep shows, ‘caravan’ types, etc. Includes notes on panoramas, dioramas, and mutoscopes.

Five German specialists in pre-cinema contributed to this well- researched and beautifully colour-illustrated hardback (in German). Megalethoscopes, Polyorama lorgnette, Engelbrecht cut-out views, etc. Excellent.publisher: Fusslin Verlag, Stuttgart, 1995 ISBN 3-9803451-2-2 Fax 0711 339903. ‘Die Welt im Kasten’ by Thomas Ganz.

Ganz is third generation from a Swiss family that started in the audio- visual field making magic lanterns, well over a century ago. This book is based on his premise that for centuries we have been looking at the world through (and by means of) a series of boxes = the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the perspective box, the Peepshow, the photographic camera, the Cinematographe, etc. Conceptually important and jam-packed with illustrations of dozens of types of dead media;Physionotrace portraits, panoramic cameras, Zograscopes. Includes early magic lantern chronology.

From Pat Lichty

Nintendo Virtual Boy

In the halcyon rush to capitalize on the pop cultural fad of virtual reality, Nintendo produced what amounts to a cross between a Super NES and a head-mounted display.

The gaming device is two to three times the size of other commercial head mounted display devices. Furthermore, due to its bulkiness and weight, the Virtual Boy sits perched atop a table stand. This causes the player to sit hunched over the device, reminding me of the old Edison Kinetoscopes.

The Virtual Boy rests comfortably atop the face if it’s used in a reclining position, with the stand resting on the viewer’s chest. The display itself is a monochrome red of fairly high resolution (well above 320x200), and offers personal adjustments for optical parallax and focus. The control has six buttons and two “joypads”, much like those offered on the Sony PlayStation.

In July 1996, there were only about 20 games extant for this platform. According to discussions with various local and regional retailers, the Virtual Boy sales were lackluster, and were not up to Nintendo’s expectations. I would speculate that the Virtual Boy’s market failure was due to its monochrome display, its cumbersome ergonomics, and the fact that no one else can watch the user play.

The competitive spirit is a big part of the enjoyment of gaming. Currently, the Virtual Boy is still on the shelves, retailing for around $95. The used apparatus are commonly available for around $40, with games selling for about $25.

One ironic point of note: as I sifted through the Virtual Boy titles on the shelves, the title displayed most prominently was “Water World.”

Logitech CyberMan (3D Mouse)

Another entry in the race to capitalize in the VR craze of the mid-nineties was the Logitech CyberMan mouse. A three-buttoned horn-like appendage connected to an ovoid base, the Cyberman was a masterpiece of design aesthetics. The user could push, pull, turn, and twist the mouse- like control horn to control movement and rotation in three axes, with six degrees of freedom. Furthermore, the Cyberman featured tactile feedback in the form of vibration through the “mouse.” To sense its location, the device read its position through pressure- sensitive resistive films. These materials also allowed the CyberMan to sense the degree of twist in the control horn, enabling it to control the rate of spin during game play. The tactile feedback was created by a motor with an offset weight, which vibrated with an often startling thrumming noise. In operation, the CyberMan was extremely inaccurate. Its location method was imprecise, and its plastic construction was flimsy. It was difficult to operate in graphical user environments, such as Microsoft Windows. However, the CyberMan was supported by game manufacturers, such as ID and Apogee. In games such as Descent, the Cyberman performed wonderfully. It’s still my personal favorite I/O device for 3D games, along with the Virtual I/O glasses’ head tracker. The CyberMan was discontinued by most national retailers in mid-1995, and hasn’t been heard of since.

Source: Ownership, retail market observations.

From Candi Strecker

A cyclorama too new to be on your posted list of “Known Surviving Panoramas!” This is from a brochure I picked up on a recent visit to my ancestral state of Ohio.

“Behold Behalt in Berlin” (Behalt is German for ‘remembering’) is one of only three ‘cycloramas’ in the country, and it is located near Berlin [Ohio, USA], at the Mennonite Information Center.

“It shows the history of the Anabaptist movement, which includes the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites. Beginning with Christ, the paintings go through the early history of the church, through the Middle Ages and the rise of the Protestant movement, then the history of the Anabaptists.

“The circular mural is 10 feet high and 256 feet long, and it took artist Heinz Gaugel four years to paint it. The room is dimly lit, with lights only on the paintings. This adds to the drama, and some people like to sit on the chairs provided and absorb the story at length. Others walk around slowly and stop periodically to study a section.

You could visit Behalt many times and there would still be more to see.

“Gaugel is a self-taught artist. He was born near Stuttgart, Germany, in the Swabish Alps. He began sketching at 6 and did his first oil painting at 12.

After World War II, Gaugel started a career as an accountant in Germany, but was transferred to the art department of a factory where he designed metalware.

“Gaugel emigrated to Canada in 1951 and became known for his huge mosaics and large paintings outside churches and commercial buildings.

“He came to Ohio in 1971 to create a statue in Cambridge. That didn’t work out, but he connected with area Mennonite and Amish communities and stayed for 10 years. During that period, some Mennonite businessmen contacted him about developing their history through art.

“Gaugel moved back and forth between his Canadian studio and Holmes County, where the cyclorama was completed in 1992. [Bruce Sterling remarks: Among candidates who might revive the panorama/cyclorama form in the 1990s, one could scarcely pick a better group than the Amish and Mennonites. The cyclorama is a spectacular, immersive virtuality without moving parts]

Source: Amish Heartland, a tourist brochure dated June 1996 published by Spectrum Publications, P O Box 8, 409 Main Street, Orville Ohio 44667 Fax 330-683-2041

From Paul Di Filippo

The Tru-Vue was kid’s dead media, a View-Master rival for stereography. The ad’s black and white illustration shows a face-mounted (plastic?) viewer. Large square cards holding dual vertical rows of pictures apparently slotted down through the viewer from top to bottom, through the action of a fingertip lever.

Ad’s copy follows. “O-O-O-O! It’s SNOW WHITE and the SEVEN DWARFS “in Tru-Vue. ® “3-Dimension and Color “Yes, you’ll want your children to see Snow White. You’ll want to thrill them with the new Walt Disney album with Snow White, Peter Pan and Pinocchio. They’ll plead to ride with Wild Bill Hickok and Jingles; to laugh at Howdy Doody; thrill to scores of 3-Dimension adventures.

“Each Tru-Vue film card contains a complete 3-Dimension story in seven big color pictures. Story titles are printed right on the film itself. “For rainy days, shut-in days, any days, get Tru-Vue at toy counters everywhere.

VIEWER....$1.49 FILM CARDS...29c 3 cards or 3-card Album 85c Tru-Vue Company Beaverton, Oregon”

Source: The Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1954,

From Charlie Stross

Is it a computer? Is it a telephone? Is it a tape recorder? No, it’s the ICL One Per Desk (aka the ComputerPhone).

The IBM personal computer was slow to take off in the UK, where the personal computing scene lagged about 24 months behind the US for most of the eighties. Moreover, the Apple II never gained a dominant share of the market. Thus, many weird and eldritch designs for personal and business computers thrived before the dead hand of standardization clamped down in 1985-1986.

The British computing scene was dominated at the time by Clive Sinclair,whose ZX series of 8-bit home micros had out-sold everything else on the market.

In 1981, Sinclair began work on a new system, the QL or “Quantum Leap.” Equipped with a cut-down Motorola 68000 (actually a 68008) and microdrives (Sinclair’s miniature tape storage units, similar in design to a scaled-down 8-track audio tape), the Sinclair Quantum Leap was intended to be both a home and a business computer, and to take Sinclair into the world of 16-bit computing.

ICL, a large British mainframe company, wanted to gain a toehold in the business computing market. However, they had no experience of designing, building, or marketing personal computers. While the other business computer makers (such as Apricot) were working on (non- IBM-compatible) MS-DOS machines, ICL decided to build an incompatible version of the Sinclair Quantum Leap.

The ICL One Per Desk surfaced in 1984, and sank again around 1987, having sold a few thousand units. It was marketed in Australia by the telephone company as the ‘ComputerPhone’ and met with a resounding lack of interest. Indeed, the ICL One Per Desk probably ranks as the vermiform appendix of business computing; less useful by far than an IBM PC-jr or an Apple 3.

A One Per Desk is essentially a Sinclair Quantum Leap at heart, it boasts the same 68008 processor and operating system. However, its microdrives have been ruggedized and tuned for improved reliability by ICL’s engineers (who, in the process, adopted a new format which renders them wholly incompatible with the Sinclair version). It has an incompatible expansion bus and can load software in the form of plug-in ROM cartridges and microdrive (tape-loop) cartridges.

It has a single serial port unidirectional, for sending data to a line printer. Thus, it is totally impossible to get data onto or off of a One Per Desk (other than via the modem).

The main application suite bundled with the OPD was a version of the Psion Xchange integrated package supplied with the Sinclair Quantum Leap.

However, the One Per Desk couldn’t run ordinary Sinclair QL software; ICL had made just enough changes to the system to render it incompatible with its parent architecture, and supplied an inadequate cut-down BASIC interpreter. However, the most interesting aspect of the One Per Desk is its telephony integration.

Marketed in 1984, shortly after the privatization of British Telecom, the OPD was one of the first machines designed to plug into the newly demonopolized UK phone network, and the first computer sold in the UK with an integral modem. At that time, the transition to a free market was incomplete; for example, it was not legal to sell telephone answering machines in competition with BT (who leased them for a hefty profit). Thus, the One Per Desk’s telephony capabilities were curiously limited. The OPD came with an internal modem (300 baud and 1200/75 baud) and telephone handset, and could plug into two lines, acting as a sophisticated featurephone. Up to twenty pre-recorded announcements could be stored, and it could collect call logging and duration information but although it could play a message in response to incoming calls, it couldn’t record or store voice mail. The One Per Desk was also capable of connecting to Prestel (British Telecom’s videotex service) and of acting as a terminal for ICL’s mainframes, thus making it a handy peripheral for those centralized computing services. One Per Desks were also capable of calling each other and exchanging documents as ‘electronic faxes’ via direct modem connections, but had no built-in LAN connectivity options.

Towards the end, One Per Desks were marketed with more memory and ‘real’ floppy disk drives, but as the Sinclair Quantum Leap failed to gain a following as anything other than a games machine, and the ICL One Per Desk was crippled by total incompatibility with anything else on the planet, it never really went anywhere. The point of the One Per Desk as a study in dead media is that it showed a tantalizing glimpse of the way personal computing might have evolved. For a machine released in 1984 to have integral messaging and modem capabilities was pretty radical.

The idea of the One Per Desk; to be a centralized desktop information resource, with total access to online services, mainframes, and other One Per Desks—is one that is slowly being realized today by PC’s with built-in modems and internet connectivity.

Source: Sources: I own one, plus its manuals.

From Lars-Erik Astrom

Mr Sterling, In the late 1960’s or early 1970’s I came upon the PIP, constructed by Philips, Holland.

The PIP was a desktop-machine, not unlike an early Macintosh one-piece desktop computer, but with no keyboard, and a back projection screen replacing the monitor. The PIP contained a Super-8-cassette still-frame projector. It advanced to the next frame after one pulse from a pulse generator. The generator was triggered by inaudible pulses recorded on an audio compact cassette player, also integrated into the machine.