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The Dead Media Project
mrbill writes, "One of the most interesting things I've seen in a long time is
the Dead Media Project
, about forms of information storage that are now 'dead' or
obsolete. Lots of cool stuff; wire records, television in England
in the 20s, pneumatic tube systems, etc." This is pretty nifty; it's inspired by Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto.
I sit here amidst a collection of machines that are on the far side of the MBTF curve.
A Mac 512K and an Ensoniq Mirage from 1985 (the Poor Man's Fairlight), their systems, programs, and my data bit-rotting away on 400K floppies...
Six open-reel analog tape decks (16- 8- and 2-thrack) and two pre-DAT digital recorders (PCM on VHS videotape)...
"Classic" drum machines and synths, most with 8- and 16- bit microprocessors (M68k, Z-80) and audio cassette backup...
Crates of mother tapes striped with a pre-SMPTE FSK sync code that only one particular box can translate into MIDI clock...
I've given up fighting entropy. Once I've transferred what I can to CD-Audio I'm going to have a huge toxic bonfire. Streamers of burning Ampex 456 1/2" will festoon the trees. Diskettes will melt like a Dali pocketwatch.
This is great stuff.
This kind of preservation the motivation for M.A.M.E.?
Also, some catalogs specialize in old movies that have escaped the gravitational pull of corporate greed, and become public domain. Unfortunately it's expensive to preserve these.
What is really criminal however is the same companies that will sue to prevent "fair use" of their copyrighted materials... or worse pay off Congress to extend copyright law (hello Disney!). Without corporate support for preservation, these films are food for mold.
"Wire recordings have the advantage that they can last forever
steel wire. no plastic base to deteriorate. No oxide to flake off. Just smooth,
corrosion-proof, stainless steel."
It's my understanding this is what flight recorders are based on. If that is so, is the medium dead yet?
I also seem to remember an episode of Hogan's Heroes where they used one of these things...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Randomly-placed doors on crudely-built structure to avoid interpretation as a useful or valued building.
Ah! Now I get it! Those "crude-looking" buildings we periodically unearth from past millennia are actually the product of civilizations so incredibly advanced that they knew exactly what we'd be looking for and sent us a carefully coded message!
And I thought they were mere huts.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Personally, I'm more into classic computers.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
a tech tape/backup company that was just recently mentioned in another subject I know had a p-tube system installed in their new building built maybe 7 or so years ago. Lots of drive-up banking uses them too.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
At the risk of being a troll, if we all had pneumatic tubes, you could be enjoying hot grits right now!
I want one of the cameras, myself.
... floating in full 3D!
Go look on eBay. Do a search on "stereo realist". Expect to pay about a hundred bucks.
I have one of these cameras. They work very well. You'll also need a film cutter, and a viewer, all available on eBay on a regular basis. The viewers are somewhat expensive. You'll need blank slide mounts, which can be obtained from here for $8.00 per hundred. These cameras use ordinary slide film -- I use professional Kodachrome, which gives fantastic results.
You'll also need to know how to use a manual camera, as these cameras are all from the 1950s, and have no built-in light meter. You have to set the exposure, f stop, and focus yourself, and you set them just like an ordinary camera.
Once you've taken 3D pictures, you'll never want to go back to "mono" photography again. The 3D effect is absolutely stunning. I took a picture of some kids playing in a water fountain, and when I got the film back, I was astonished when I saw that the water drops were suspended in mid air
Cool!
Bruce Sterling has lots of neat ideas. Not only was he one of the starters of the Dead Media Project and Mirrorshades creator, he's started/is pretty involved in Viridian.
Pretty cool stuff, sort of a clunky internet, the cool part is they had it in place around the end of 1929 and left it operational for 10 years. Don't know why they canned the idea, they had something like 15,000 customers.
:) and so you'd probably have to wait 10 minutes after turning the darned thing on before you could even get your newspaper.
Probably to difficult to use. Remember that in 1929 they didn't have digital radio tuners that would lock the signal in like they do today. You would have had to have tuned the signal in, and if it was just a little a bit out of sync, I'm sure you would have a scrambled newspaper. Plus don't forget that radios in those days had TUBES (gosh, remember those?
Still, pretty cool stuff.
My journal has hot
Not all media is destined to be dead media. Dead media doesn't mean that it is no longer popular, it canotes that you can not access the information stored. Last time I checked, we can still see prehistoric cave paintings, and read stone carvings. Dead media is dead, because the means to read it are no longer in service.
Some treasure films are now being transferred to DVD.
Anything formatted with FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS is a dead media... or at least they will be in due time...
Lets face it, with a few exceptions, a film made more than a few years ago is almost worthless. Not enough people will want to see it in a theatre or want to hire or buy the video to make it economic for the copyright owner to release it. The same is true for books, software, etc etc etc.
However, the majority of companies will hold onto their almost worthless assets 'just in case' they do find a way to make money off of it. That means that eventually the content will die.
There are games available for emulators, eg this archive. The games are nearly 20 years old. No one could possible make a cent trying to sell them, and in most cases the copyright owners have dissapeared into the mist of time, yet there are enthusiasts around who will keep copies of their old games.
There should be a way for stuff to become public domain in a reasonable amount of time for as much as possible. Maybe like trademarks, if you don't defend them, you loose them. Also, there should be an incentive to avoid loosing archives like this. Perhaps a tax credit for every accesable item properly stored in a company museam.
With the current rules, we are not promoting artistry, we are maximizing profits for a few companies at the expense of our heritage.
This reminds me of the project a few years back where they funded research to figure out how to leave an interpretable message on top of toxic waste so hypothetical future civilizations would know to leave it alone. The issue there was a) permanance and b) clarity across cultual lines (the idea of a post-holocaust scenereo was there as a subtext).
Imagine hundreds of years from now when future archaeologists dig up old video collections (now blank from degredation)... "I wonder what these little black talismans were for..."
-- I'm not evil, I'm
People share their information on dead media and list sources. They have a section of 'Working Notes' with all the information that can be found here.
Altogether, it looks very cool. They even have an article about the radio shack trash-80.
Its funny, in the lab I work in, we still have those big floppies (you know, the ones that were as big as lp's) lying around. Or how 'bout those optical drives on NeXT Cubes? I've got one at home (although I never use it). They were so slow writing that you have to wait forever. Oh, well...
-- Moondog
Oh, very cool! A perfect example of where decades-old technology can still be the best solution to a problem. The obvious moral here is that new technology shouldn't be adapted solely because it's new.
(of course, I'm suffering with a client who refuses to upgrade from SunOS 4.1.4. Ugh)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Don't know if I'd call it a comeback, but they're definitely still in use. Costco has 'em, Home Depot has 'em, and so on. They're great in an environment like that--big warehouse and a need to move items (i.e. money from the cash registers) around quickly.
:-)
Besides that, they're kind of cool. Good enough for Grim Fandango at any rate.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Bob Carver, the well-known amplifier designer, once took a well-thought-of tube amp, characterized its transfer function with appropriate test gear, and built a transistor amp which couldn't be distinguished from the tube amp in double-blind listening tests. But it didn't sell. So, almost as a joke, he designed the Carver Silver Seven, a tube amp with three separate chassis per channel, chrome-plated everything, and priced at an incredibly high price. It sold well.
OK, OK, enough tweaking the High End Audio types for tonight.
Radionewspaper: "Arrival of the afternoon 'radio newspaper,' on schedule at 2 P.M., rain or shine, is the signal for the folks at home to gather around the facsimile receiver to see the cartoons, news photos, etc., that regular radio programs leave to the imagination."
Todays internet: "Arrival of the afternoon 'internet newspaper,' on schedule at 2 P.M., rain or shine, is the signal for the folks at home to gather around the Windows 98 box to see the cartoons, news photos, pron, warez etc., that regular programs leave to the imagination."
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I'm glad they included this. AT&T developed it was the forerunner to the fax machine, although so crude it never took off and this was back around 1920. One that I thought would be on the list was the "Radio Newspaper" developed by a St. Louis newspaper, can't remember which one. Essentially It was newspaper content on demand broadcast over radio waves, a high freq. receiver in the home would tune to a specific freq and print out, (How I don't know) a customized newspaper. People would phone in their requests for comics x,y, and z, sports on team x etc. Someone at the broadcast station would customize the profile to just send these items. Pretty cool stuff, sort of a clunky internet, the cool part is they had it in place around the end of 1929 and left it operational for 10 years. Don't know why they canned the idea, they had something like 15,000 customers.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
We did the same with audio cassettes, for storage, you could buy the equivelant of a 30 minute audio cassette labeled "Data Storage Gold" or some bs like that for 15 bucks, or you could just get a 90 minute audio cassette for .25
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
So very true, to the not support part. Many companies hang on the this type of stuff for eons, just to say we were there first, many inventors hold on to it as well, to dispute Big Co.'s claim they came up with it. Reminds me of the guys that sued Chrysler. He was an inventor and came up with the delayed wiper mechanism. He tryed to sell it to the big car companies and when thay all said no, he gave up and went on to something else. This was like 1935. In the late eighties, he sued Chrysler and won, the same mechanism he had locked away in his basement was the same one they "announced" somwhere around 1973.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Redhat support was not much help, I think the easiest ways to proceed are either:
Granted 5 1/4" floppies have been around a long time, but it shows it doesn't take *too* long for media to fall out of favor.
-- It is my strong belief that it is a mistake to hold strong beliefs.
So the next time you crank up the Metallica or NIN(or the Who in cmdrTaco's case) realize that while making modern music, they are using 1930's based technology to create it.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
It sure as hell better be. After the first fourteen contracts I put out on it I had to go out and kill it myself (never send a boy to do a man's job). And let me tell you, the blood of a thousand 8-tracks (and the people who owned them) has long since stained my hands, and it will be the blood of a thousand more before I admit that carving on stone tablets is a bad way to communicate. Can an e-mail serve as an offensive weapon in time of need? That's what I thought. And how much art is required in hitting a key as compared to the mighty chisel. And don't try and talk to me about pens, young whippersnapper, I eat pens for breakfast. With a strawberry-cheese danish. And come coffee. I like coffee. And it makes the plastic go down so much nicer . . .
Okay, let's come out with it. The real issue here isn't collecting forms of media. It's about cannibalism. Now hear me out for a minute; researcher A develops a new form of storage (maybe a 75gig hard drive?). Researcher B had developed the current paradigm. He realizes that his work will be replaced. He is now a thing of the past. So what does he do? He eats researcher A. Meanwhile researcher C develops the next step, and in a moment of foresight, eats researcher B. No loose threads to bite him on ass later, pun intended. Researcher D comes up with the next medium, and the pattern repeats itself. Just as hate begets hate, cannibalisim begets overfed researchers. So the only way to break the cycle is to NOT support new forms of media. The current paradigms are not replaced, and no one has to eat anyone. If that's not reason enough to violently defend the existance of stone tablets, I don't know what is.
Sometimes the medium is not the message ~ Jhon Balance
The UIC hospital just installed a pneumatic tube system this year. I don't know what they use it for. Of course, you can't fax or email a blood sample, so there's still some things that pneumatic tubes do that can't be replaced by a computer ...
Anonymous Coward wrote:
What's the best way to preserve the fresh young beauty of teenage girls?
It would have to be a medium that can weather centuries of nature, be transparently obvious to the viewer, and easy enough to reproduce.
Any ideas?
This was moderated down to -1, but the question is valid.
The longest lasting photographic processes known are the earliest. Daguerreotypes and tintypes, stored properly, are practically immortal. Flexible negatives, slides, and print film all deteriorate over time.
- John
On Saturday, Wired News featured an interview with Bruce Sterling in mp3 format. In it he talks about Dead Media and other subjects.
Ideology is for ideots.
There are quite a few projects like this one out and operating to preserve forms of media long past.
An example is the Historical Film Society which is working to catalog 16 millimeter films taken in the early 1900's. MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) ran a feature on them. One of the things they mentioned was that it cost around 15,$000 to restore one silent movie (on average).
Projects/Organizations like the Dead Media Project help society quite a bit. I feel the sad thing is that they do not get all that much publicity and very little funds. I for one have never heard of some of the types of "Dead Media" that are listed. - "The phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago."
An example of one is:
phenakistoscope - a toy that works on a scientific principle known as "persistence of vision - invented by Joseph Plateau in 1832.
Telefon Hirmondo - Telefon Hirmondo was a Budapest information service created by Tivadar Puskas - a Hungarian engineer who workded with Thomas Edison. Information was transmitted over telephone wires into homes of subscribers.
The few I have heard of I have heard little about. I think that preserving types of "Dead Media" is crucial to science - the ideas that they represent my one day be useful again.
(Funny that I find might find one of the listed above if I were to drive two miles away and open my great granddads attic...)
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith thought the same thing in 1900, and in fact, by 1916 there were 112 miles of tubes in place in Boston, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Philadelphia:
http://future.newsday.com/1/fbak0115.htm
Of course, he didn't take into account the $17,000 per mile per year cost for the system. Ouch.
Paris, on the other hand, had a fairly successful attempt (only given up in 1983):
http://www.ftech.net/ ~winlink/jdhayhurst/pneumatic/book1.html
There seem to be a fair number of people who think that Fax machines are sending the actual document across the phone lines...somehow. More than once in my days as a Kinko employee I came across people who were amazed I could fax their document and give the original back to them.
8 Track: "I'm not dead!"
CD: "shut up, you're not fooling anyone."
Bruce Sterling: "Sorry, I can't take him if he isn't dead."
8 Track: "I think I'll go for a walk!"
CD: "Look, do us a favor...?"
8 Track: "I feel happy! I feel..."
Bruce Sterling: *looks about* *!WHAP!*
8 Track: "...oof!"
CD: "Ah, thanks very much..."
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
It's much worse then that. The estimates are that more then 90% of all silent features no longer exist in any form, and that around 50% of all films made before 1950 are lost. Certainly one reason why so many films were lost is due to the fragile nature of the films. Another interpretation of what happened is that these works were destroyed because they existed only as closely held copies, by companies that didn't appreciate their value.
Here is an example of how a single shortsighted business decision resulted in a huge cultural loss.
Around 1978, the Technicolor corporation stopped using the dye imbibition process.
Dye imbibition printing was the first commercially successful color movie process. With this process, instead of shooting a single color negative, the camera contained three negatives, and color filters. The result was three sets of negatives, one for red, one for green, and one for blue.
To make the final prints, each of the three negatives had to be individually cut and assembled to make a final negative. Then the negatives were printed onto a special film stock called "matrix" film, and developed using a special chemical process that hardened the film in proportion to the exposed silver content, then washed away both the silver and the unhardened emulsion. The result was that instead of a visible image on the matrix film, the color density was represented by emulsion thickness. Finally, these three matrix films were used as printing plates to transfer dye to the final release films, one color at a time, cyan, magenta, and yellow. The thicker parts of the matrix would transfer more dye, and the result was "Glorious Technicolor." Modern color film uses organic dye couplers, which tend to fade over time. Because Technicolor was using a printing process, they had their choice of what dyes to use, and they chose very bright, intense, fade resistant, acid based dyes. A properly made Technicolor print from 1939 looks the same now as it did the day it rolled off the printer over 60 years ago.
When color negative film was invented, the process changed slightly. Instead of making a matrix film from each of three negatives, all three matrices were made from the same color negative, using different color light filters to pass the desired color.
This process was very gentle on the negatives. A single matrix could be used to print hundreds of release prints, so the original negatives only had to be run through a printer occasionally when a new matrix needed to be made. The matrix stock itself was estar based -- an extremely strong, durable film stock that does not deteriorate over time like nitrate and acetate film.
When Technicolor shut down their dye imbibition production line, they were left with warehouses of matrix film; the printing plates for nearly every feature film ever printed in Technicolor, all meticulously cataloged and carefully stored.
In many cases, the matrices represented the last existing color record of the films. Color negative film, especially early color negative film, fades away over time, and release prints wear out, but the black and white matrices were completely stable. In many cases, the original nitrate negatives for many color features had already turned to dust, leaving the matrices as the ONLY existing preprint material available for countless films.
These matrices could have lasted nearly forever. Now that Technicolor has revived the dye imbibition process (The new, beautiful re-issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is in true Technicolor), had Technicolor saved their matrices, they would have the ability right now to reprint nearly every film that they had ever made. In perfect color.
Instead, seeing no use for this "obsolete media", they destroyed them all.
Now, the cost of restoring a single Technicolor film, if it can even be done, can run into the millions of dollars. The result is that it is hardly ever done, except for a very few extremely high profile films, like, for instance, "Gone With The Wind" or "Rear Window". What a loss.
References:
"Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing", Richard W. Haines. McFarland & Company, 1993.
A site devoted to Technicolor Movies
The home page of a modern-day dye transfer artist
The wire was made of stainless steel and was incredibly tough. I have a lot of recording wires. I defy you to break one with your bare hands. It'll cut your hand to the bone if you try.
... the recommended (and only) way to splice a recording wire was with a square knot!
... it's just a stainless steel wire. no plastic base to deteriorate. No oxide to flake off. Just smooth, corrosion-proof, stainless steel. There is also no "tape hiss", because there are no individual magnetized particles. Just continuous wire. It's one of the best archival media ever invented. I have 50 year old wire recordings that sound absolutely fresh and new.
... yep ... dead media. Unfortunately.
They could break around SPLICES though
Wire recordings have the advantage that they can last forever
The disadvantages of wire recordings were that the format was mono-only, for obvious reasons, and the frequency response was limited.
But the recordings last forever. You can't say that about recording tape, CDRs, or DVDs.
The recorders, however, are old tube devices that have to be maintained like an old tube radio. -- tubes and capacitors need to be periodically checked and replaced, and god forbid I should have a crucial mechanical part break
You're thinking of the long-discussed issue of how to label nuclear waste which may be toxic for thousands of years (ignoring that deposits of poisonous elements are toxic forever, such as the arsenic in Bangladesh water wells which were created as a safe alternative to surface water with germs). Sandia actually had some possible messages created: Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
That kitten will be suffering from Post Pnumatic Stress Syndrome. (Oh my god, what a terrible joke.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I've long argued that this newfangled Internet thing won't really take off until a parallel network of pneumatic tubes is in place at every desktop.
The Internet's big flaw is its inability to trransport, say, kittens or french fries. Right now, if you want french fries over the 'net, you need to place an order which is then delivered by a person. Pneumatic tubes would make it possible to eliminate all human interaction.
With efficient digital switching systems in place, today's pneumatic tube networks could be made efficient enough to handle fully-automated person-to-person routing of the cargo cylinders.
Kittens direct to the desktop.
I overheard a funny story at last year's Atlanta Linux Expo. Seems that many years ago this company wanted to rewire the computer room without bringing the system down. So they got to the part of the room where the drums were located and needed to get into the floor panels underneath them. Now, if you've never seen a drum drive, it's similar to a big winchester disk only it uses a large drum spinning at fantastic rpms and the read/write head moves laterally across the face of the drum. We're talking massive amounts of angular momentum. The idea was to pick the whole thing up with a forklift, move it to one side then lift up the floor plates to do whatever they needed do there. (How many of you see this coming?) Now if you've ever done the experiment in physics class with the rotating bike wheel, you'll know that things with lots of rotational intertia don't wanna change axis of rotation very much (think gyroscope). They picked it up just fine, but when the forklift started to wheel around to move the drum off to the side, it promptly started to stand on one leg in order to maintain its rotational axis. Fortunately, the forklift operator saw what was happening just in time and spun back around before the whole thing tipped over and went bouncing around the computer room.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Someone should start a project that should rescue dead formats also. I'm assuming if you're getting some picture off a 20 year old tape, it's not going to be in PNG format. Or what about spreadsheets from old programs? There should be a way to convert this stuff into a new format so we have it available. Is anyone aware of a repository for "current" file formats, such as MP3's, Word97 documents, JPG's, Gif's, Png's all in one location? Gathering this information NOW would be easier than gathering it in 10 years, and will prevent information from becoming lost, even though we have the file.