earlyradiohistory.us · Domains

Re:A piece of PR confused nonsense by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-05 19:28 · Score: 0 · on Drone Crashes, Missing Champion Skier By Inches (cnn.com)

> A "drone" by its very definition has the capability to fly itself

I don't know where you idiots get this horse manure.

The term was coined in 1936 to describe remotely-piloted unmanned aircraft

Re:Not a narcisisst by westlake · 2014-10-12 10:17 · Score: 1 · on Ask Slashdot: Best Books On the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla?

Because Edison was a Jobs-like narcissist who used people to elevate his status and promote himself. Tesla was too busy working in the lab to revel in fame and build a populist legacy.

The short list:

1877. The phonograph.

Edison and Bell both began in at a time even almost no one believed that reproducing the human voice across vast distances of time and space would ever be possible.

Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines [1909]

The Carbon Microphone. [1877-78]

No more need to shout into the phone. First Long Distance calls. New York to Chicago, 1892.

Then an inventor named Michael I. Pupin invented (and patented) the loading coil, a device made of electromagnets that could strengthen an electronic signal; with enough loading coils wired into a circuit, and wired properly, the signal could reach 1,500 miles---from New York to Denver---before degrading so far as to be unfathomable.

Calling a country far, far away

The Incandescent Light Bulb (1879)

The Edison lamp could be wired in parallel, making it easy to service and drawing down relatively little power. It was reasonanly long lived. affordable, bright, without being blinding ---- of the twenty or so previous examples the geek has likely read about, all would fail on one or more counts.

Edison was both a system builder and an entrepreneur.

Residential lighting demanded a whole new way of thinking about electricity. On-site generation wasn't likely to be practical. You needed switches safe enough for a child to use. Wiring standards.

Things like fuses. cords, plugs and sockets ---

all designed for users who had never in their lives seen a fire ignited by a man-made electrical spark or over-heated wire, never experienced anything more dangerous than a mild static shock.

That makes you both the advocate and the educator. You use every resource the 19th Century has to offer to demonstrate what you have to offer and how to use it safely. You banish the candle and put up Christmas tree lights. You illuminate theaters, department stores, fairs and expositions.

Not enough electricians around to wire every home?

You recruit and train them yourself.

Re:Get a Clue! by westlake · 2009-09-17 11:47 · Score: 1 · on IPv6 Adoption Will Grow With Smart Grid Adoption, Hopes Cisco

The internet and especially all the Linux nodes on the internet are designed from the ground up to have a static IP addresses and IP names and be their own DNS and own Mail smarthost and web server and ....

Thirty years of experience ought to have taught the geek that almost no one wants to manage systems and services on that level.

the vast majority of machines being dumb emasculated drones begging for content from the big media industries.

Wilmington, Delaware had a music-by-wire service in 1909:

The rate of charge for this service is very reasonable. It is three cents, for each ordinary piece, and seven cents for grand opera. The subscriber must guarantee $18 per year.
In most cases the actual amount of music used makes that revenue greater than the regular telephone rent. In addition to this, pay stations are installed in restaurants, cafes, hotels and other public places, where selections can be obtained by depositing a coin in the box.
The returns from residence stations run from fifteen to twenty cents per day, while pay stations have averaged as high as $10 in a week. On the whole, it has been estimated by its introducers that the service will pay local telephone companies from thirty to thirty-five per cent on their investment. Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines

KDKA began broadcasting in 1920. RCA launched the first national radio network in 1926. The geek who complains that users want prime media content from the major providers was born 100 years too late.

The only fundamental difference between the geek's pristine Linux machine and the "emasculated" HP running Vista or Win 7 is that the HP will likely ship with a Blu-Ray drive, a licensed Blu-Ray player and an HDMI output for multichannel theater sound and HD Video.

Amazon. Blockbuster. iTunes. Pandora. Songbird. WinAmP. Rhapsody. YouTube.

Protected content. Unprotected content. Free services. Subscription services. It all works just fine with the native Windows clients.

an a tightly controlled web where peer to peer traffic is being squeezed out.

The real threat to P2P is the instant download stream.

The Netflix client built into the HT receiver, the 65" Vizio HDTV, the Samsung Blu-Ray drive.

Radio Music Box by QuietLagoon · 2006-12-23 02:58 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Broadcast Radio Turns 100

"Radio Music Box" Memo, David Sarnoff, November, 1916/January, 1920(?):

"I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a 'household utility' in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless.

"While this has been tried in the past by wires, it has been a failure because wires do not lend themselves to this scheme. With radio, however, it would seem to be entirely feasible. For example--a radio telephone transmitter having a range of say 25 to 50 miles can be installed at a fixed point where instrumental or vocal music or both are produced. The problem of transmitting music has already been solved in principle and therefore all the receivers attuned to the transmitting wave length should be capable of receiving such music. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple 'Radio Music Box' and arranged for several different wave lengths, which should be changeable with the throwing of a single switch or pressing of a single button.

"The 'Radio Music Box' can be supplied with amplifying tubes and a loudspeaking telephone, all of which can be neatly mounted in one box. The box can be placed on a table in the parlor or living room, the switch set accordingly and the transmitted music received. There should be no difficulty in receiving music perfectly when transmitted within a radius of 25 to 50 miles. Within such a radius there reside hundreds of thousands of families; and as all can simultaneously receive from a single transmitter, there would be no question of obtaining sufficiently loud signals to make the performance enjoyable. The power of the transmitter can be made 5 k.w., if necessary, to cover even a short radius of 25 to 50 miles; thereby giving extra loud signals in the home if desired. The use of head telephones would be obviated by this method. The development of a small loop antenna to go with each 'Radio Music Box' would likewise solve the antennae problem.

"The same principle can be extended to numerous other fields as, for example, receiving lectures at home which be made perfectly audible; also events of national importance can be simultaneously announced and received. Baseball scores can be transmitted in the air by the use of one set installed at the Polo Grounds. The same would be true of other cities. This proposition would be especially interesting to farmers and others living in outlying districts removed from cities. By the purchase of a 'Radio Music Box' they could enjoy concerts, lectures, music, recitals, etc., which may be going on in the nearest city within their radius. While I have indicated a few of the most probable fields of usefulness for such a device, yet there are numerous other fields to which the principle can be extended...

You give them too little credit. by Kadin2048 · 2006-12-10 17:32 · Score: 5, Insightful · on Vista the End of An Era?

I think maybe you're not giving those folks back in centuries past too little credit. From the New York Times, December 17, 1906:

[T]he telephone is a nuisance as well as a convenience and a blessing without which, it seems now, life would be almost impossible and business quite so. When we ourselves "call up," of course it is all right, but when others do it the rightness is often rather deeply veiled, and we resent not a few of the demands upon our time. And yet everybody "answers the 'phone," interrupting almost any occupation to do it. How will it be when we're told, not that somebody's "on the wire," but that somebody's "on the air," and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?

That statement was made an easy 80-90 years before cellphones became ubiquitous, but yet easily foresaw the convergence of two distinct and at the time emerging technologies (the telephone, just reaching critical mass at the time, and radio, relatively new).

So anyway, a bright person a century ago would probably have believed, given sufficient explanations, most of the technology we have today. Cellphones are just radios plus telephones; televisions just small movie screens; automobiles are significantly faster but still easily recognizable for what they are. It is only when you start to drill down into the underlying technology and infrastructure that enables modern devices that they truly would astound someone living a century ago.

The "futurists" of the late 19th and early 20th century predicted many of the technological developments of the past 100 years remarkably well (obviously not in detail, but conceptually in many cases they were right on). You would have to go back further than that, to eras when people were not used to continuous change -- where it was not expected that the world one grew up in would be different than the world one's children would inherit -- in order to find people who would be unable to conceive of our current state.

To be perfectly honest, I think many a person from the early 20th century would be a little disappointed if they were suddenly transported forward to the current day. Although many things have changed, a great many other things have not or are at least recognizable equivalents of devices or activities present 100 years ago. Someone who expected the rate of progress seen during the period from 1800 to 1900 to continue and increase, might find life in 2000 startlingly familiar (and sadly devoid of flying cars).

Re:Can you host a LAN party with ONE 802.11n route by 3-State+Bit · 2006-04-25 06:36 · Score: 1 · on First 802.11n Products Breaking Out

"Are you serious? Ok if we are talking laptops I'd agree. But for desktops (which the average gaming machine is). Wired is the way to go. Why sacrifice speed for a very small convience."

Say, how does a computer with six ethernet lines, a keyboard and a mouse cable snaking out of it look compared to a case with power in, monitor cable out, and bluetooth and wireless for, respectively, peripherals and as many directed wireless signals going off in different directions as it takes to achieve the same bandwidth and connectivity of the six ethernet lines? (Radio signals also move at c so of course your latency issue is with the quality of the signal, and speed is just a matter of how many you multiplex.) Let's try an analogy:

From Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines (Telephony, December 18, 1909, pages 699-701):

Wilmington, Delaware, is enjoying a novel service through the telephone exchange. Phonograph music is supplied over the wires to those subscribers who sign up for the service. Attached to the wall near the telephone is a box containing a special receiver, adapted to throw out a large volume of sound into the room

Now let's try your argument in refutation: "Symphony over radio? Maybe for a portable (battery-powered) radio, but if your radio is going to be plugged in, symphony over telephone wires makes much more sense. No tuning, no interference, etc etc."

Granted, for historical reasons this analogy is of course weaker, since symphony over telephone wires did not vastly predate symphony over radio, it was not of much higher quality and lower latency in a typical reception scenario, etc. But you get the idea.

P.S. Your speed issue is just a matter of tuning to five, ten, fifteen, twenty radio stations, however many you need to get as much music as you want, in the analogy. Whereas adding another telephone line for each additional bandwidth multiplier (say you want to listen to ["download"] five different symphonies at a time) is a different proposition indeed! At the end of the day, any cable, be it power, USB, ethernet, a keyboard cable, whatever, is going to only carry signal between two points, which you must manually walk from source to destination (somebody needs to plug in both ends), it is going to be fixed length (even if you're close, in which case the lines just looks like a jumbly mess, and if you're a tad too far, too bad), and of course cost pretty much proportional to its length, which does not hold true for increasing wireless gain. Imagine how much a satellite dish costs compared with an equal distance in some kind of cable, nevermind how you connect it with its destination. A wireless solution does not require a human to manually set the exact point that is at each end, it is not of fixed length, it does not take up physical space, and, therefore, multiplying the number of these signals looks nothing like multiplying the number of ethernet lines.

I realize we're not quite where we need to be on the wireless front, but that's what the article is about, and, after all, neither was the horseless carriage when introduced.

Re:Letter Imperfect by SPY_jmr1 · 2005-06-10 13:09 · Score: 2, Informative · on 70th Anniversary FM Commemorative Broadcast

Two seconds on google... http://earlyradiohistory.us/recap.htm

Re:Giant Cell Phone Tower? by mattspammail · 2005-05-05 06:37 · Score: 1 · on Space Needle To Become WiMax Antenna

No knowledge of that, but it is not unprecedented (using tall structures as giant wireless mounts). 1915 Phone call

Real Deal by LinuxGeek · 2005-01-23 08:59 · Score: 1 · on Wireless Power Recharging Nears Fruition

You have the order of Tesla's work backwards. He had the whole 3-phase AC system worked out before coming to the USA to work with Edison. He later developed the florescent light and wireless power distribution techniques.

Do a search on 'Wardenclyffe Tower' to see that you are incorrect about how far he took the wireless power and communication concept. Far beyond un-inked drawings indeed. It was destroyed in 1917.

It didn't have commercials -- it was a commercial by oneiros27 · 2004-04-18 03:28 · Score: 2, Informative · on Former Anti-Piracy 'Bag Man' Turns On DirecTV

After the directly commercial applications were persued (most notably, Marconi's radio telegraph), we moved to the period of finding other ways to make a profit off of radio ... such as stock fraud.

We didn't have widespead broadcast radio until after World War One, as the US government has outlawed private use during the war. Radio came back after the war, but it took some time before we had the birth of RCA, and a little while later before other companies figured out how to make a profit off of radio.

So why were they providing free broadcasts? To sell radios to people. You couldn't listen the broadcasts, without buying a radio. Well, you could go to someone else's house, but that'd be admitting you didn't have one. That's why RCA and the other radio manufacturers are the ones who are doing the broadcasts -- they spend money in one area, to make a profit in another.

The concept of 'toll broadcasting' [think of today's infomercials], came from AT&T, and the government came down on them, in a completely ineffective way. [Although, there are indications that there were other paid commercials before that point].

In europe, however, they wnt a different route -- which is why there are television taxes and the like today. The government provided the information broadcast, but they weren't going to do it at a loss, so they had to get some money for doing it.

Yes, there are problems with how the spectrum is sold to corporations. [for one, why is it 'sold', and not 'rented'... that was a major oversight on the Commerce Department]. And there are problems with the cable monopolies, and with the government being pushed by lobbyists who have the corporations, not the public's best interests in mind.

But it's just wrong to say that broadcast radio wasn't commercial ... broadcasts were made to sell radios. It's just that it was a short-sighted business plan, and once there was major market penetration, they had to move to something else to continue to make a profit.