Slashdot Mirror
Thomas Edison's Kindle
harrymcc writes "In 1911, Thomas Edison bragged that he could make a 40,000-page book by printing the pages on thin pieces of metal. In the mid-1930s, newspapers experimented with transmitting special editions into homes via early fax machines. In 1956, Chrysler tried to sell Americans on buying 7-inch records that could only be played on a tiny turntable built into its cars' dashboards. Over at Technologizer, I rounded up these and a dozen other fascinating, forgotten gadget ideas that didn't work out — but which foreshadowed products and technologies that eventually became a big deal."
Pages 1/20,000th of an inch thick? What exactly keeps you from lopping off your fingers?
Success is timing as much as great ideas. Your customers have to be ready for it. It happens on the macro level, with mass produced products, and on the micro: I learned long ago that if my clients aren't ready to adapt a new technology, it is a waste of time to push it on them. Usually they come around to it a few years later. :)
'Ready' usually means that it is a small mental step forward and they see a pressing need for it.
Sounds kind of like Ayn Rand's slashdot.org. Oh wait, we already have that.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Don't forget the iPod and iPhone!
In France, by a guy named Caselli, called a Pantelegraph:
http://www.telephonecollecting.org/caselli.htm
The author of TFA seems to have misunderstood what he has posted:
Even the pages of books may be made of steel, though Edison regards nickel as a better substitute for paper”Why not?” asks Edison. “Nickel will absorb printer’s ink. A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book-paper. A nickel book, two inches thick, would contain 40,000 pages. Such a book would weigh only a pound. I can make a pound of nickel sheets for a dollar and a quarter.”
Hereis a prospect of real culture for the masses Forty thousand pages in a volume! A single volume the equivalent in printing space of two hundred paper-leaved books of two hundred pages each! What a library might be placed between two steel covers and sold for, perhaps, two dollars!
He wasn't talking about having a small device that could 'download' content remotely. He was just talking about using nickel as a substitute for paper, but the book would still essentially be a printed one and the content would be 'hard coded' in ink, albeit you'd still get a lot more pages in there.
Either that or I'm missing something.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
...was breaking up your article into four arbitrary pages on the web.
Or at least, I *hope* that's what people will think in the future.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Using Slashdot to hype your own damn blog!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The Telenewspaper and Electric Writer described in the article is the first imagining I have ever seen of what we now consider the browsing experience! It look slike it is alst Two-Way as the console has the ability to send information out as well.
Cool...
Hellscrhreiber was used in the 1930's. It uses a font to send text over a wire (or radio) link, as off-on pulses for pixels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber
Some hams still use it, for kicks. It's got good performance in noise (weak signal mode).
It's amazing how far backwards we managed to go.
Shame on the Dark Ages for, erm, being dark and on the Greek for not making their knowledge public.
They probably had laws against export of secrets... bummer!
But this could create a whole new extreme sport : EXTREME READING!
This would be fantastic with fantasy books like LOTR. Now you too can have your own fingers chopped off JUST BY READING! AWWE-!
This book turns it beyond 11, one stare at this book and your eyeballs will explode with so much awesome that you'll create another universe.
captcha: glazing. See, because even Slashdot agrees.
Edward waits impatiently for the letter carrier to arrive. "Where is he?", Edward musses, checking his watch.
Every day this week, Edward had rifled through the mail as soon as it had arrived, hoping to see that special envelope. And every day this week, the postman brought only bills and grocery store circulars.
But today - certainly today - would be the day he would receive the results of his climate modeling simulation. It just had to come today!
Edward sees the postman coming down the street. His mailbag seems a bit heavier today ... Could it be? Why doesn't he walk faster!?
Finally, the mailman reaches Edward's house and pulls out a bundle of letters. Edward anxiously grabs the lot from the hands of the postman. One of the envelopes is notably thick; Edward pulls it out and checks the return address. "YES!", he exclaims, seeing it was from Popular Science. He hands back the rest of the pile and dashes up the stairs with his precious packet.
Edward gives himself a paper cut opening the envelope, but is oblivious to the pain. His mind is focused on one thing - the test results: "Is global warming real?" Surely these results will show it beyond any reasonable doubt!
Examining the first page, Edward's heart sinks...
"FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...."
In 1911, Thomas Edison bragged that he could make a 40,000-page book by printing the pages on thin pieces of metal
Man, how many blades? That Gillette guy is gonna shit himself.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
He seems to be still coming into the picture every day
"Hey, is this metal? I've got a bet with Joe."
End of lesson. You may press the button.
First thought that popped into my mind when I read about the Edison book was the Orange Catholic Bible.
Which brings up a related question for me. A bible the size of the OC Bible couldn't be physically thumped, so you can't call Orange Catholics "bible thumpers." "Bible plinkers" maybe?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
That's not entirely accurate. Variations of "fiche" technology were quite common in university libraries. When doing reports with newspaper citations, "Microfiche" (flat film plates) and/or "Microfilm" (scrolled film) were quite common into the mid 1990's. This was cheaper than storing gajillion actual newspapers and magazines, especially in bigger cities where floor-space is a premium.
Thus, "the trend only lasted a few years" is off because it had about a 25-year run and was quite successful in its heyday.
An interesting variation that allows computerized retrieval is the aperture card. However, it's not as compact.
Table-ized A.I.
maybe next year, when Linux is ready for the desktop.
/ducks/
I listened to a lot of tunes in a friend's car way back when, that had an in dash record player. It was in a 64 (IIRC) Buick "deuce and a quarter" or 225. Worked OK, did skip on really nasty bumps, but less then what you might think.
Nah, just leave the main URL blank and it will go through, even if someone has sent in a crappy submission before you. Or find another source to use as your main link (pretty much everything gets reported on several different sites these days). But do NOT try to rewrite AP or Reuters stories. I think their EULA thingy is BS, but Slashdot seems to feel otherwise, so don't even bother and don't link directly to them, either. You can almost always find a better source than them, anyhow, if you Google the story. This generally only matters if you're linking to reuters.com, so don't worry too much if you're linking to some newspaper website with AP credits or something.
Also, they're definitely NOT beholden to posting the first guy to submit the story. There's at least some small window before they've accepted any story on the subject where anyone has a shot at it. It's really not that hard to get stories submitted here, though you do have to be able to find hot news while it's still (relatively) new. If the story is important enough and you do a decent job on the writeup (at least as compared to anyone else who sent it in), you have maybe a 1-in-4 shot of getting accepted. What you do need (sadly) is to hype the story a bit. Like that in that Facebook story, the big deal was how open your data was to insiders, but the most eye-catching detail was that stupid thing about how the internal master password spelled out 'Chuck Norris'.
If all you want is to say that you've successfully submitted a story here, just trawl the main geek news sites, find something hot, and give it a decent writeup. Back when I was really trying to find news, I could get several submissions per day more often than not. Just one caveat: be careful of oversimplifying anything. Some people will get upset over the smallest things, even if you bend over backwards to try and write decent stories reasonably quickly and do your best to cram all the important details from a long story into a tiny summary. It gets to be quite a bit of work for each story once you start doing things like looking up the names of the researchers who rarely get named in the stories about their discovery, or adding Coral cache links for small sites and Wordpress blogs, etc. These days, I simply don't have enough free time to report as much as I used to. I mean, I don't get paid for this and I don't even have a blog to advertise.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
How old is the author of this article?
They seem to think that all of these things only finally got workable in the 90s, yet in many of the cases there was a perfectly working substitute in place in the 80s, 70s, or even earlier.
Advanced users are users too!
Lots of prior art to many things here. How many US patents does this lot invalidate?
The portable TV is $200 ($1400 in 2010 dollars). The VCR is $400 ($2700 in 2010 dollars).
Um, anyone else think it's funny that the average car cost $2,650 in 1965 and $26,500 in 2010, a median home cost $21,000 in 1965 and $210,000 in 2010 and yet the government figures claim prices rose 7 times?
How'd they do that? That's because in 1965 you bought a car. But in 2010 you bought a car, an airbag (which is counted as extra because it wasn't on the 1965 version), and anti-lock brakes, and long lasting tires, and etc, etc. There's a technical term for this money-saving (and people-screwing) accounting trick, it's called 'LYING LIKE A RUG.'
"Um..yeah, I'd like to return this book. I was making a cake, and the recipe spreads over opposite sides of a page, and as you can clearly see, the pages stick together from 'Mix dry ingredients together in large bowl' all the way through to the Book of Revelations. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until after I'd already added the brimstone and the lake of burning sulphur, and it was the worst birthday my five-year-old ever had."
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Roll the printed metal into a cylinder and enclose it in a open-faced box with scrolling wheels at the top and bottom. Mechanically switch to a high gear ratio for fast forward / reverse.
The FAX machine was invented in 1843. How a 1930's FAX machine could be considered "early" escapes me.