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Technology

The Dead Media Project 155

Posted by emmett from the bring-out-yer-dead dept.
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.
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The Dead Media Project More

The Dead Media Project

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  • Re:Information (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Informative? WTF!

    First off using a subject line as "Information" is a moderator troll. Duh. And you Bit, hook line and sinker. Second, mister karma whore here didn't even read thru the site referenced, and apparently neither did the moderator. The site is chock full of information on dead media, shit I never even knew that much was out there. The site is NOT a mailing list primarily, the hosts of the site are collectively writing a book on dead media and the site is the clearing house.

    Lastly Mr. Whore here posts a link to a T-80 and you guys mod him up, Visit the site, there are over a thousand links to stuff like the T-80.

  • Kittens direct to the desktop.

    That's what the internet is all about: Terrified kittens hurled at supersonic speeds.

    It brings a new slant to the term fat pipe. How exactly do you measure that bandwidth ? kps (kittens per second?)

  • for half the cost

    Maybe, but since the disk rotates in the oposite direction and all the crud previously caught in the dust filter gets redeposited on the disk and increases the chance of failure, that saving can come at a high price. Not to mention that the 2nd side may have been screwed up in manufacture and what could have been double sided was made single sided because of quality.

  • Records? (Score:1)

    by cout ( 4249 )
    What's a record?
  • It got scored at my usual +1, which is what anybody logged in under their user name gets, and that was the whole idea, to boost the AC I quoted from a 0 to a 1. I wasn't too worried about being penalized by a moderator, as they (myself excepted) don't usually worry about anything that gets posted so far down the line in terms of time or order of arrival number.
  • Quoting the post to which I reply--
    "What about marathonians? At my knowledge, there was only one sample of this media type. Others were not made of the same stuff, only the very first one was motivated enough to die after message delivery."
    The above deserves at least a +1, it is funny and insightful. If it had been posted earlier, it probably would have been moderated as both, but, as they say in comedy, timing is everything.
  • the Home Depot near my home has them @ every cash register
  • The hospital I work at (UCLA) uses them too.

    They're used to connect the cyclotrons (radio-isotope produces) to the PET scanners (radio-isotope consumers).

    When some of the stuff used has a half life of 2 minutes, it's quite useful to have something fast.
  • Fine, but you're the one responsible for resurrecting Disco then. ;)
  • There was FAT-12, used on floppy disks and small hard disks. FAT-16 was for larger disks. The number is the bit size of the entry in the FAT table.
  • I never bought the punch... I just did it with sicsors or the occasional x-acto knife. Though, i did cut too deep more than a couple times and ruined a few disks that already had some data on them.
  • the allow copy bit will be ignored the first time, but if you try to copy your copy, that's where you're going to have many headaches using consumer recorders.
  • I don't see any neglect on my part to remeber who he is, I *did* mention he was creator of Mirrorshades didn't I? Mirrorshades being the essential Postmodern Cyberpunk archive and all.. "If it's in MIRRORSHADES, it'll be science fiction in a year. In two years it will be in WIRED magazine. In three years teenage girls will be wearing it. In four years it'll be mentioned on CNN. In five years it'll be 'discovered.'"
  • Not that it helps your situation but one of the first ones things I ever did when I got my CD writer was to hook up my old 5¼" floppy and put 'em all - the ones without copy protection that is - onto a CD.
  • The University of Chicago Hospitals uses pnematic tubes. They send samples to the lab. The results came back on a printer. I remember hearing nurses carefully explain that vial had to be surrounded by padding of things would be messy and dangerous. Some nurses were notorious for hoarding the containers used to shuttle samples around.
  • >>Kittens direct to the desktop.

    >That's what the internet is all about: Terrified
    >kittens hurled at supersonic speeds.

    >It brings a new slant to the term fat pipe. How
    >exactly do you measure that bandwidth ? kps
    >(kittens per second?)

    Exactly. Make sure that all your cable is up to CAT5 standards, or you might experience purrity errors.
  • Yeah, that's how drums were made. The axis of rotation was horizontal and the r/w head moved from side to side to access different tracks. The only picture I can think of to describe it is that the drum spins like the wheels on a slot machine. So when the forklift turned sideways, the drum tried to maintain the axis of rotation and the only way it could do it is by tilting.

    As you pointed out, translating that axis is no problem, and so lifting the drive up caused no trouble whatsoever. It was only when they tried to rotate the axis of rotation that difficulty ensued.

    Of course, this still doesn't mean that the story isn't apocryphal. I wasn't there to see it, I only heard someone else telling it at the ALS.
  • I wonder if some of these markers may actually be counterproductive. If future archaeologists are anything like present ones, they'll take one look at them and go "Oooo, wonder what these are for. Let's dig it up and find out."

    Maybe that's what the pyramids in Egypt really are, or the symbols on the Nazca plains in Peru. Ya think?

  • She also has a stereopticon, which is sort of like those ViewMasters that I used to play with as a kid. It has a viewport with two lenses that look through at a little mounting place where you place a card that has two identical (or nearly identical) pictures side by side. The effect is that when you look through the viewer at the card, the two identical photos merge into a 3D picture. It blew my mind to think that my grandpa was playing with 3D when he was a kid.

    This effect was achieved by taking the the two photos from slightly different angles. The idea is that you see in 3d because you are able to see any given scene from two different angles at once, allowing you to perceive depth.

    By using a camera with two lenses, spaced apart much as the eyes are, and exposing images from both lenses onto the paper in the proper manner, you can fool the brain into thinking that the two images are actually one, with appropriate depth signals.

    I want one of the cameras, myself.

    paperbacks.homepage.com [homepage.com]

  • One of the members of that commission was science fiction author and physicist, Gregory Benford. He wrote a rather interesting book, Deep Time [amazon.com], on the concept of trying to leave markers ten of thousands of years in the future to warn of such things as nuclear waste disposal sites, for example.
  • We actually turned up one of these odd little tape cartridges just a couple of years ago. It was hiding under a sheet of paper on someone's worktable. Nobody could recall what became of the drive.
  • They do have a "working note" on the St. Louis radio news-paper.

    http://www.wps.com/dead-media/notes/37/378.html
  • Diamond Slicer said:
    "I think that preserving types of "Dead Media" is crucial to science - the ideas that they represent my one day be useful again."

    Most of the "dead" media that I looked at on the site were just earlier implementations of ideas that are still in use: Magic lantern-->24 fps cinema, for example. Typewriters are still in production/ use.

    I think scientists -- and businessmen -- can learn a lot from looking at the way things were done in the past. But I'm racking my brains trying to think of a dead medium that is not represented in some current, living incarnation. I suppose chemical film and analog audio media are on the way out in the next 20 years, but can anyone think of a "missing link" medium, or media technology, that at one time contributed much to communications, and now is not represented?
  • Actually the fax machine began in 1843 [thinkquest.org] and was in use in France in 1856.
  • Actually, tonight I'm scanning my wedding photos to digital form. First archive goes on CD-R. I know I'll have to copy it to new media every 5-10 years, but at least the data won't degrade now.
  • If you'll read the article you'll see that they examined what indicates importance and value, then designed to avoid those indicators. No vertical pillars, to avoid looking like a historical or other marker of pride. Nothing in the center, to avoid making the center seem overly important. Randomly-placed doors on crudely-built structure to avoid interpretation as a useful or valued building.

    Also, reminders that if you have trouble reading the warnings to erect new markers in the present language and of longer-lasting materials. And buried duplicates of warnings, which erosion will expose at various periods.

  • You could've installed Debian instead... it has both 1.44 and 1.2 install floppies.

    Same goes for Slackware... :)

  • The trick about things with a lot of angular momentum is that they have a certain axis (vector) about which that angular momentum exists, and that AXIS resists rotation. Translating the axis but keeping it pointing in the same direction is easy.

    One example of this is that if you were to make a flywheel-powered automobile, and you set the flywheel spinning with a vertical axis of rotation, then your car will be able to turn corners without difficulty but transitioning from a level road to a hill will be a disaster (incidentally, the solution is counter-rotating flywheels).

    Before this gets even more off topic, the point is that the story about the drum drive either has some details wrong, or it is apocryphal. If the drum drive has a vertical angular momentum vector, than the forklift should have no troubles unless it tries to go up a ramp. If the drum is mounted with a horizontal rotation axis, then the forklift WOULD have difficulty turning, but the drive would NOT stand on one leg -- it would simply resist the turn, probably holding its orientation while the forklift turns underneath it (of course, it could fall off the edge of the forklift....)

  • If the drum is mounted with a horizontal rotation axis, then the forklift WOULD have difficulty turning...


    Oops, I had typed in the last sentence as an afterthought, but I just realized that the part about it not tilting was wrong. If the axis of rotation of the drum is horizontal, of course the drive would tilt if the forklift turned, just like a precessing gryoscope. Duh. So it must be that the drum drive had the platter mounted vertically (horizontal axis of rotation), since if it were mounted like a dinner plate, there would be no problem.

  • Is anyone aware of a repository for "current" file formats

    Perhaps something like Wotsit [wotsit.org], but without the offsite links?

  • I thought pneumatic tubes were making a comeback. No, really. There is an elaborate tube system at the medical center I go to (Kaiser).
  • Many of these 'quirky' inventions show prior art in various areas.

    Hope the USPTO has this resource bookmarked!

    See:

    The collection of
    dead media working notes [slashdot.org] is the current purpose of the mailing list; the accumulated, archived, (and soon, collated) collection of submissions from list members; an ad hoc database of the deceased, the slowly-rotting, the undead, and the never-lived media.
  • Ok, I'd have to say that this is dead media: a few years ago at school, I was looking around the computer lab for cool ancient things, and I came across a floppy disk that had to be something like a foot square in dimention. I can't remember it's volume, but it was pitifully low.
  • That's an 8 inch floppy - and yes, by today's standards, the capacity was low.

    We have a place here in Phoenix, Arizona called Apache Reclamation and Electronics - THE place where old computers come to die. I have many times found old 10 meg disk packs in the junkyard out back, and sometimes, the drive they went in!
  • I got a chance to hear a couple of Edison wax cylinders, played on an original player, after finals at the end of my senior year (almost 10 years ago). My history teacher at the time was an antique collector, and he had one. He brought it in for a little "show-and-tell". I can't remember what was played, but I remember that it was scratchy, but played pretty well for its age...
  • #46.1 Portable pneumatic tube, early multi-media

    Kinda misleading - talks about a system call ARTOC - a primitive war planning/operations multimedia device using funky projector/digitization technology, and pneumatic tube information retrieval - and it's portable (portable being relative here, of course)!

    Be sure to check out this link:

    http://wps.com/texts/ARTOC/

    Which has numerous scans taken from an old book (proposal?) detailing the device and how it was to work - extremely fascinating!
  • The odd thing is, looking for durable, transparently obvious storage methods is one of the most important things in long term data preservation.

    If you pour hot grits in your lap, they biodegrade in a few weeks.

    If your carve you dedication to hot grits pouring into stone, in the three different languges, making a Gritsetta Stone, your dedication will last centuries.

    But the moderators always overreact when you talk about teenage girls.

  • PAL and SECAM VHS machines have three tape speeds which offer, on a T-180 (the PAL/SECAM version of the NTSC T-120), 3 hours, 4.5 hours and 6 hours of recording time (correct me if I'm wrong, PAL/SECAM users).

    The multi-system VHS VCR my parents used to have recorded NTSC in all three speeds, but only two (SP and LP) were available in PAL, and at the time we had it, most PAL-only VCRs that other people had used SP only. When we brought a PAL tape recorded at LP speed to a friend's house, we were surprised to find it didn't play. (This was in the late 80s...things might have changed since then. If the Brits have more than four TV channels available to them nowadays, anything is possible. :-) )

    Also, E-180 tapes (VHS videotapes for use in PAL equipment have their sizes start with E, not T) are closer in length to T-160s than T-120s. The speed at which the tape moves past the heads is slightly lower for PAL than for NTSC. (525*30=15750. 625*25=15625. In each second, PAL writes fewer scanlines than NTSC.) The difference is slight, though...if you put an NTSC signal on an E-180 tape, it'd get only about a minute and a half less recording time than if you put a PAL signal on it. Come to think of it, E-180 tapes would be closest to T-180 in length.

    You might've noticed that T-180 tapes have been on the shelves here for just the past few years. E-180s have been available in Europe much longer than that (at least since the mid-80s) because it was more necessary for them, given that they were stuck for the most part with just SP. With the slower speeds available in most NTSC equipment, you were better off using more durable T-120s. (Why a multi-system VCR supported PAL LP recording when most PAL-only VCRs didn't is beyond me. Given that this particular multi-system VCR also boasted Dolby B noise reduction (it was a 4-head Hitachi with programmable digital tuning, infrared remote, and some other goodies...probably one of the better models available in 1984 or '85), maybe it was just some of the higher-end models that did PAL LP recording, or maybe they "borrowed" some of the capabilities put in for NTSC compatibility.

  • Here's a dirt simple way to save old spreadsheet programs. Paper. Write them down and save them in a secure spot. Works for Word docs too. As for the pictures why not have them printed out? Frankly though I'm at a loss to how to save the MP3's.


  • I still have some of the *single* sided 5.25 floppies, that I MADE double sided!!!

    You just use a regular hole punch to create a notch opposite the original write-protect notch.

    Then flip away, for half the cost!!!

    john
  • I don't know if anyone knows what these things are, but I was in a local second hand store the other day and ran across something called an Electronic Capacitance Disc player (or a Capacitance Electronic Disc player, something with Capacitance in there that's for sure). Oddly enough it looks like the predecessor to laserdiscs. You get a double sides casing with a moving inside. Basically you slide the casing in, the disc stays in and then you pull the casing out. It was a very funny looking machine. The inside disc part looked a bit like a record only a lot more flexible. I could've even bought The Terminator (original of course) for it.

    So then I poured hot grits in it. :)

  • How long before the human brains becomes an obselete storage mechanism?
    They're already obsolete as storage media; humans have long since added huge external memory subsystems, ranging from cave paintings to DVD's. On the other hand, they are still unparalleled as pattern-matching, processing and inference systems. Until someone figures out how to build something that works anywhere near as well out of silicon or holographic crystals or whatever, expect the brain to be in high demand.

    And maybe afterwards; after all, brains can be made by unskilled labor who enjoy their work, and may enjoy a cost advantage for some time.
    --

  • It is Tom Jennings!

    Anyone remember FidoNet?
  • What I wanna see is a home for all my arcane console video games that failed. The 3do, the jaguar, the saturn, the Virtual Boy, perhaps the turbo grafix 16. I've loved these machines. And now they've retired to a small box in my room. If only I had a digital camera....
  • The best thing we can look at media in this way is just like history learn from the good, put a cast on the average and prevent the bad.
  • The obvious danger of script-kitties abusing the well-known holes in mod_purrl will keep this from happening.

    A Distributed DoK attack would be more catastrophic than all the ping -f's in the world.

    (There's a good one in the procedure for dumping the delivery to STOUT but I can't formulate it right now.)

  • Live after Death can only be appreciated on the double vinyl. You have to be able to hear Phantom of the Opera with Bruce's vibrato stylings. :)

  • Check out line6 amps http://www.line6.com
    or the new Crate digitals. Beautiful and close, very close.
  • This was a technology created by RCA and was a competitor to laserdiscs. It sucked. :)
    Laserdiscs ruled when you didn't have to flip them over. I remember having an Iron Maiden Run to the Hills/The Trooper Video Disc.

  • A record is kind of like a big cd, but using amazing "analog" technology, which gives it theoretically infinite precison and resoloution. Woah.

    Also a record is what I buy about 10 of each week, and what most of the small music companies I deal with put out 99% of their output on.

    Long live vinyl :-)

  • There may not be any publicly-available repositories as such, but there are firms out there doing this sort of thing. My wife and I recently went on a search on behalf of a friend of ours, who was trying to get into some of her old Philips Videowriter disks and not having much luck.

    We found two good leads. One is a pure data conversion company, which has a huge list of formats up on its website which it can convert between. One would assume that they have a database of the format information, though the gods only know whether they'd release any of it. (If it's magnetic media, it's on that list, I think. Didn't take the time to look for drums or cores, though...) They're at pivar.com [pivar.com].

    The other one seems to be a one-man shop at www.macdisk.com [macdisk.com]. He sells a couple of utilities: one which reads your ancient floppy and generates an image of it on your Windows box or Mac, while the other can actually extract the individual files from that image. Presumably, he also has a list of the specs on these file formats.

    If anyone could persuade these folks to give up the goods on the formats themselves (not the conversion tools, since they've chosen to make their living off of them), it would probably do us all some good.

  • So when do the ignorant masses send off paper books as the next dead media?
  • I actually have some personal experience with some of these media. My mother (bless her little pack-rat heart) has kept a plethora of old things inherited from my grandfather. Most notatbly are a few wax tubes that were intended for one of those old Victrolas (which we have yet to recover).

    She also has a stereopticon, which is sort of like those ViewMasters that I used to play with as a kid. It has a viewport with two lenses that look through at a little mounting place where you place a card that has two identical (or nearly identical) pictures side by side. The effect is that when you look through the viewer at the card, the two identical photos merge into a 3D picture. It blew my mind to think that my grandpa was playing with 3D when he was a kid.

    I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person

  • Wow, this article is bringing back all the Good Old Stuff - Commodore 64s and old-school Iron Maiden.
    I gave away my old C64 so now I can't play Attack of the Mutant Camels (or whatever it was...) anymore. Then, my stupid Walkman ate my Live After Death tape in grad school. The CD of it only has about 2/3 the songs, so I can't even really replace it.

    I'd love to see my wife's face when I bought an Iron Maiden CD though ('Oh, you're so rebellious, BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH')

  • I was just commenting the other day at work that I wanted a pneumatic tube system in my building. I do tax returns that have to be signed by a guy in legal. problem is, legal isn't just on another floor, its ina different elevator section (ie, I have to go down to the lobby to take a different elevator up to his floor, then down and up again to get back.)

    I also have to get checks from another floor. I'd love it if they could just "tube" them to me.

    P-tube reclaimation army! bring back the tube!

    -Kahuna Burger

  • The Un-Constitutional Information Technology Act?
  • There is a working Pneumatic Tube System in a Nuclear Test Facility in chalk river ontario canada, I saw and asked about it on a school tour, I managed to get a demonstartion, the building also contains a working Nuclear reactor used for scientific research. (That was around a year ago.)

  • Dead media hell... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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. [retrogames.com]?

    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 ... it's just a stainless
    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...
  • 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.
  • Take a look at the Computers, Video Games, and Arcade Collector's Ring [mo5.com]. There is also a list of member sites [webring.org] available.

    Personally, I'm more into classic computers [sinasohn.com].

  • 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.
  • 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.

    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 [stereoscopy.com] 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 ... floating in full 3D!

    Cool!
  • Bruce Sterling has lots of neat ideas. Not only was he one of the starters of the Dead Media Project and Mirrorshades [well.com] creator, he's started/is pretty involved in Viridian [well.com].
  • 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.

    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? :) and so you'd probably have to wait 10 minutes after turning the darned thing on before you could even get your newspaper.

    Still, pretty cool stuff.
  • 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 media are worse than others for preservation. The silent film's nitrate film sometimes caught fire, as it was like guncotton. Its replacement, celluloid "safety film", now has on it many 1930 films but is brittle and discolored [mpr.org].

    Some treasure films are now being transferred to DVD [filmpreservation.org].

  • Anything formatted with FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS is a dead media... or at least they will be in due time...
  • And this is why copyright period is too long.

    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 [freeserve.co.uk]. 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..."

  • That's part of the reason why less than half of all silent films are still in existance. (Studios also had no idea that one day video would exist and make their film libraries profitable again, so they didn't want to pay the money necessary to store nitrate film properly. There are stories about studios using silent films as fuel when they needed bonfires for movies they were filming in the '30s...)

    There's a whole host of silent films that I'd love to see that just don't exist anymore; virtually all of Theda Bara [mdle.com]'s work is lost, for instance, and she was a huge star (as well as a cutie [bombshells.org]). Silent film is certainly one of the more spectacular media deaths of the 20th century, given how amazingly popular it was...

    --
  • The summary didn't give all that much information. This site basically hosts a mailing list for the discussion of dead media and a summary of information exchanged on that mailing list.

    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 [wps.com].

    Altogether, it looks very cool. They even have an article about the radio shack trash-80 [wps.com].

  • 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
  • These dead media featured aren't necessarily flops but have just been outmoded and outdated. This follows in the never ending cycle of creation. Eventually something will come along to replace what was the popular medium. Record -> Tape -> CD -> who knows what's next. Some could say holographic media some could say DVD. Either way, we find a way to replace them eventually. It reminds me of the race in Alice in Wonderland. There's no beginning or end, no losers or winner. It's just always going. muahahahaha

  • 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)

  • 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. :-)

  • Especially if you use speaker wires with specially oriented copper crystals.

    Bob Carver [sunfire.com], 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.

  • Very cool, thanks, I couldn't find it.

    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."

  • 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.
  • I like the history aspect to some of it. Some technologies just faded out for no apparent reason, maybe just a little ahead of their time, like the BetaMax for instance. Just kidding. Seriously It's cool to look at the motivations behind some of that stuff, unfortunately, just that one site would take a week to get through.
  • 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
  • he he LMAO, +5!

    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.

  • I tried to install Redhat 6.0 on my ~6 year old 486 recently -- problem is it doesn't have a 3.5" floppy. Redhat's boot disks don't fit on the old 5 1/4 inchers, and my old BIOS can't boot off of the (old, proprietary, sony, 1x) CDROM drive.

    Redhat support was not much help, I think the easiest ways to proceed are either:

    1. Install a 3.5" Floppy drive, cost is approaching zero
    2. Set up NFS on another system and install it that way.

    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.

  • Interesting little tidbit of info for you all... No one has ever been able to create a guitar amplifier that has sounds as good as an all-tube amp. Its a technology that has yet to be bested by anything transistor or digital, and many amp manufacturers have settled for trying to "recreate the sound of tubes" with their transistorized offerings, let alone trying to make something that sounded better than tubes.

    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.

  • dead media?!?! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, 2000 @08:42AM (#1197509)
    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

  • Re:p-mail (Score:3)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @10:29AM (#1197510)
    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 ...

  • Re:Preserving the beauty of teenage girls? (Score:3)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @02:18PM (#1197511)
    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

  • Sterling Interviewed on Wired (Score:3)

    by Trickster Coyote ( 34740 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @09:46AM (#1197512) Homepage
    The Dead Media Project has been on the go for over 3 years now and the list of items has become quite long. Here is the accumulated Master-List of Dead Media [islandnet.com].

    On Saturday, Wired News featured an interview with Bruce Sterling [wired.com] in mp3 format. In it he talks about Dead Media and other subjects.

  • Projects like this one... (Score:3)

    by Diamond Slicer ( 39462 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @08:52AM (#1197513) Journal
    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...)

  • Want Pneumatic Tubes? Try Paris (Score:3)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @12:58PM (#1197514) Homepage
    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 [newsday.com]

    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 [ftech.net]

    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.

  • I'm not dead! (Score:3)

    by Raymond Luxury Yacht ( 112037 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @12:08PM (#1197515) Homepage
    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..."

  • Re:The Technicolor story. (Score:4)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @11:35AM (#1197516)
    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 [att.net]

    The home page of a modern-day dye transfer artist [onlinephotography.com]

  • Re:"wire records" (dead media) (Score:4)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @11:49AM (#1197517)
    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.

    They could break around SPLICES though ... the recommended (and only) way to splice a recording wire was with a square knot!

    Wire recordings have the advantage that they can last forever ... 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.

    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 ... yep ... dead media. Unfortunately.

  • "Nothing valued is here." (Score:4)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @10:14AM (#1197518) Journal
    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 [bicn.com] 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 [halcyon.com]

  • Re:pneumatic tubes should be bundled with DSL (Score:5)

    by Accipiter ( 8228 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @11:34AM (#1197519)
    Upon arrival at your location, that kitten will be pretty unhappy.

    That kitten will be suffering from Post Pnumatic Stress Syndrome. (Oh my god, what a terrible joke.)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • pneumatic tubes should be bundled with DSL (Score:5)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @10:05AM (#1197520)
    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.

  • Drum storage (Score:5)

    by AstroJetson ( 21336 ) <.gmizell. .at. .carpe-noctum.net.> on Thursday March 16, 2000 @11:58AM (#1197521) Homepage
    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.

  • What about Dead Formats? (Score:5)

    by blogan ( 84463 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @09:44AM (#1197522)
    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.

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