The Dead Media Notebook
Page 9
2. MECHANICAL MEMORIES
Built by A.D. Booth in post-WWII, mechanical memory consisted of a series of rotating disks, each of which contained a tiny pin which was allowed to slide back and forth through the hole, and as the disk rotated, a solenoid was used to push the pins so that they protruded from one side of the disk or the other. A small brush made electrical contact with those pins which were sticking out of one edge of the disk. It was this brush which enabled it to read the binary number stored by the pin positions.
“By putting a number of such disks together on one shaft, it was possible to produce either a serial storage unit (where one number is stored on each disk and the readout is done bit by bit as the disk rotates) or a parallel storage unit (where one number is stored on the corresponding positions of a series of disks and the readout of all the bits of a number takes place at the same instant).” [Booth constructed a ‘disk-pin memory device’, which looks like a small typewriter. About 20 reading heads are lined up along the spool, which houses the rotating disks. Booth’s ARC computer used this technology at one point in its early development.) pages 308-311
3. ACOUSTIC MEMORIES
The first reliable memory system.. Utilized in the following computers: EDSAC EDVAC UNIVAC 1 the Pilot ACE SEAC LEO 1
“The basic concept behind the device was to attempt to delay a series of pulses, representing a binary number, for a few milliseconds which, although a very short time, was a relatively long period as compared to the electronic cycle time of the machine. After they had been delayed for a short time, the pulses would be fed back into the delay system to again store them for a further short period. Repeated short delays would add up to a long-term storage.”
“The mercury delay-line was developed by William Shockley of Bell Labs and was improved upon by J. Presper Eckert, one of the people who designed and built ENIAC..
“(T)he mechanism would take a series of electrical pulses and convert them into sound waves by the use of a piezoelectric quartz crystal. The sound waves would then make their way, relatively slowly, down the mercury-filled tube. At the far end of the tube, the sound waves would be detected by another quartz crystal and the pulses, amplified and reshaped, would then be fed back into the front of the delay again.”
[Various problems including computer temperature, modulation/demodulation electronics, and delay time ultimately doomed this memory format. In the 1950s, advances led to the magnetostrictive delay, extinct by the 1970s.]
OTHER DEAD MEMORY STORAGE SYSTEMS:
4. Electrostatic storage (early CRT based systems)
5. Rotating Magnetic Memory (used in proto-disk drives, as in the ‘Mail-a-Voice’ recording machine)
6. Static Magnetic Memory (magnetic cores)
Source: A History of Computing Technology by Michael R. Williams; Prentice-Hall, 1985. LOC#QA71.W66 1985
Victorian talking pictures: the Kinetophone
From Andrew Siegel
“I was quite amazed to learn in Mark Schubin’s September column [’Synching Fast’] of the existence of sound films dating back before 1900. Yet more amazed was I to read that said films had been transferred successfully to videotape. “Can you tell me where I might see these films, or better yet, acquire copies? Joe Salerno Industrial Video Services Bellaire, TX
“Mark Schubin responds: In 1894, Century Magazine carried an illustration of a projection room with a phonograph attached to a film projector for synchronized sound. The process was known as either Kinetophone or the Kinetophonograph. William Dickson claimed to have demonstrated sync-sound motion pictures as early as 1889, but that date has been disputed by others. Between the Century illustration and other American and European sources, however, there’s little doubt that there were sound movies sometime in the Nineteenth century.
“More recently, while poring through the archives of Sveriges Radio (the Swedish Broadcasting Corp.), American Art Shifrin came across some Edison sound recording cylinders of unusual size. These turned out to be Kinetophone cylinders. Searching various archives, Shifrin found 48 existing Kinetophone cylinders and seven existing Kinetophone films, six of which match sound cylinders.
“Films were transferred to 1-inch videotape, and, after much construction of appropriate playback mechanisms, the sound was synchronized to the images and recorded on the same tape. The results were shown at a meeting of the New York section of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 1983. Neither picture nor sound quality match today’s standards, but there’s no question that they are sync-sound movies. Exact dating of these films has not yet been determined.
“Shifrin would be willing to show you the tape version if you are in the New York area. He would also very much like to continue to pursue the “Kinetophone Project,” improving the transfer of both sound and image with modern digital techniques and searching for more old sound movies.
Source: Videography Magazine, December 1995, Letters to the Editor, pp. 20-21.
Clockwork wall animation—living pictures
From Bill Wallace
“Animated or ‘living’ pictures made by Schoenhut, a Philadelphia toy maker, adorned Victorian walls. In one entitled A Good Joke (ca 1890) two clerics enjoying their wine move their arms and jaws while rocking with laughter. Concealed behind the lithograph is an array of clockwork, string belts, cardboard cams, and wire levers with counterbalancing weights. The scene is animated by a belt-driven cam from a slow-moving shaft in the clockwork while the highest speed axle carries a fast-moving fan that acts as a governor.
“Other patterns for living pictures were provided on flat, lithographed printed sheets to be cut out and animated according to the pleasure of the assemblor.” Also intriguing, but brief, is the description of the serinette, a miniature hand-operated barrel organ “used by 18th century ladies to teach canaries to sing.” The illusionist Houdin allegedly built an automaton of a young lady winding a serinette, followed by her mechnical bird singing. Dead media within dead media.
Source: Mechanical Toys, by Athelstan and Kathleen Spilhaus, Random House, 1989, $7.99 ISBN 0-517-0560-4
Skytale, the Spartan code-stick
From Nick Montfort
Parker, Parageographer and Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, writes in a note to his 1964 translation of the Lysistrata, on page 121 of the paperback edition:
“Askytale, a tapered rod which was Sparta’s contribution cryptography. A strip of leather was wound about the rod, inscribed with the message, and unwound for transmission. A messenger then delivered the strip to the qualified recipient, who deciphered it by winding it around a rod uniform in size and shape with the first. Any interceptor found a meaningless string of letters.”
If I correctly recall my conversations with Professor Parker on the matter of this code-stick, the device is pronounced something like SCOO-TA-LA.
In the Lysistrata, the women of Sparta and Athens conspire to deny their husbands sex until the two cities end their ongoing war. The men, therefore, wander around with hard-ons the whole time. The code-stick appears in Aristophanes’s comedy in the following scene between an Athenian commissioner and a Spartan messenger: (From page 92 of Parker’s Translation)
COMMISSIONER [Throwing open the Spartan’s cloak, exposing the phallus.] You clown, you’ve got an erection!
HERALD Hain’t got no sech a thang! You stop this-hyer foolishment!
COMMISSIONER What have you got there, then?
HERALD Thet-thur’s a Spartan epistle. In code.
COMMISSIONER I have the key. [Throwing open his cloak.] Behold another Spartan epistle. In code.
Source THE LYSISTRATA OF ARISTOPHANES, a Modern Translation by Douglass Parker. Mentor Books, NY 1964, 1970.
the pigeon post of ancient Sumer
Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe is an extraordinarily interesting new book that deserves a place of honor on the shelf of any dead tech enthusiast. Some of its speculations (the
ancient Peruvians may have had hot-air balloons, the Parthians apparently had chemical batteries) seem a tad far-fetched; but the book is all the more interesting for that. This book is remarkably erudite, well- documented, very wide-ranging, over six hundred pages long, and its illustrations are particularly apt. The book’s brief chapter on “Communications” in very close in spirit to my idea of an eventual tome on Dead Media, if I ever get around to writing one.
“Airmail Service “The earliest mention of domesticated pigeons comes from the civilization of Sumer, in southern Iraq, from around 2000 BC. Most likely it was the Sumerians who discovered that a pigeon or dove will unerringly return to its nest, however far and for however long it is separated from its home. The first actual records of their use as carrier birds comes from Egypt. By the twelfth century BC pigeons were being used by the Egyptians to deliver military communications. And it was in the Near East that the art of pigeon rearing and trainind was developed to a peak of perfection by the Arabs during the Middle Ages.
“The caliphs who ruled the Moslem Empire after the death of Muhammed in AD 632 developed the pigeon post into a regular airmail system in the service of the state. Postmasters in the Arab empire were also the eyes and ears of the government, and with the local postal centers stocked with well-trained pigeons there was little chance of the caliphs failing to be warned of potential troublemakers in the provinces.
“The state airmail was occasionally employed for more lighthearted purposes. Aziz, the caliph of North Africa between AD 975 and 976, one day had a craving for the tasty cherries grown at Baalbek, in Lebanon. His vizier arranged for six hundred pigeons to be dispatched from Baalbek, each with a small silk bag containing a cherry attached to its leg. The cherries were safely delivered to Cairo, the first recorded example of parcel post by airmail in history.
“The Arab pigeon-post system was adopted by the Turkish conquerors of the Near East. Sultan Baybars, ruler of Egypt and Syria (AD 1266-1277), established a well-organized pigeon post throughout his domains. Royal pigeons had a distinguishing mark, and nobody but the Sultan was allowed to touch them. Training pigeons for postal work became an industry in itself, and a pair of well-trained birds could bring as much as a thousand gold pieces. The royal pigeon post was also invaluable as an advance warning system during the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. When Timur the Mongol conquered Iraq in AD 1400, he tried to eradicate the pigeon post along with the rest of the Islamic communications network.
“The Chinese seem to have learned the art of pigeon training from the Arabs. Strangely, for a civilization with such a well-organized bureaucracy, the state never established an intelligence network using carrier pigeons, which were generally used only for commercial purposes. The Arabs also reintroduced the skill to medieval Europe, where it had lapsed after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. After the collapse of the Roman light telegraph system, the pigeon post was left as the fastest means of communication in the world. And so it remained unto the perfection of the electric telegraph (by Samuel Morse in 1844) and radio (by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895).
“It was normal practice, even well into this century, for navies, military installations and even businessmen to have pigeons on the payroll. The range of tasks for which pigeons have been employed has changed little since ancient times.”
Source: Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe Ballantine Books 1994 $29.95 ISBN 0-345-36476-7
the pigeon post in the seige of paris
Since discovering this privately printed work, I’ve come to suspect that the strange story of the pigeon post during the seige of Paris is the sine qua non of dead media. In the 1870s the pigeon post was a hobbyist’s niche medium. Under the intense conditions of warfare between major industrial powers, this medium mutated and grew explosively.
With the energy of a whole nation diverted into a desperate need to communicate with the capital, there emerged a sudden technical nexus of hot-air balloons, magic lanterns, and photography (all of these were experimental technologies, all of them pioneered by the French).
Unknown entrepreneurs suddenly became the linchpin of a seamless national communications system, combining pigeons, balloons, telegraphy, trains, messenger boys, magic lanterns, typesetting, handwriting and microphotography.
There was explosive, repeated growth in bandwidth, until the message-space within one gram of weight suddenly became too cheap to meter (though it was still metered). Large-scale currency transfers took place through pigeons (via microdot mail-orders). Encoded, compressed post- cards were invented (the depeches responses). Cryptography was used (by and for the government). There was hacking by the system administrator (when Dagron the microfilmist and war profiteer suddenly became the de facto postmaster of Paris, he discovered that he had many friends who didn’t care to bother with normal allocation of channels).
And last but not least, information warfare took place, practiced by the besieging Prussians, who used forged messages sent through captured pigeons. It was all over in 6 months, a skyrocketing arc of development followed by near-total media extinction, commemorated with medals, folklore and bronze pigeon statuary, but never to be repeated on such a scale again.
John Douglas Hayhurst, O.B.E., would appear to be (or have been) primarily a postal historian and philatelist. His slender 45-page history is a real treasure
”As had been expected, the normal channels of communication into and out of Paris were interrupted during the four and a half months of the siege, and, indeed, it was not until the middle of February 1871 that the Prussians relaxed their control of the postal and telegraph services. With the encirclement of the city on 18th September, the last overhead telegraph wires were cut on the morning of 19th September, and the secret telegraph cable in the bed of the Seine was located and cut on 27th September.
Although a number of postmen suceeded in passing through the Prussian lines in the earliest days of the seige, others were captured and shot, and there is no proof of any post, certainly after October, reaching Paris from the outside, apart from private letters carried by unofficial individuals.
“Five sheep dogs experienced in driving cattle into Paris were flown out by balloon with the intention of their returning carrying mail; after release they were never again seen. [So much for “Sheepdog Post,” a truly abortive medium.]
Equally a failure was the use of zinc balls (the boules de Moulins) filled with letters and floating down the Seine; not one of those balls was recovered during the seige. [A pity for enthusiasts of floating zinc-ball media.]
“Millions of letters were carried outward from Paris by balloon but free balloons could not offer a reliable means of inward communication since they were at the mercy of the wind and could not be directed to a predetermined destination. The only balloon which made even a start of a return flight to Paris was the Jean Bart 1 which left Rouen on 7th November but, after a first hop which took it 20 km towards Paris, the wind changed and further attempts were abandoned. During January 1871, a fleet of free balloons was being assembled at Lille but the armistice prevented it from being put into operation. Self- propelled dirigible balloons were then in their infancy and whilst, on 9th January, the Duquesne, fitted with two propellers, left Paris bound for Besancon and Switzerland, it got only as far as Reims.
For an assured communication into Paris, the only successful method was by the time-honored carrier pigeon, and thousands of messages, official and private, were thus taken into the besieged city. “
“Savelon has deduced the monthly statistics as:
September & October 1870 : 105 released, 22 arrived
November 1870: 83 released, 19 arrived
December 1870: 49 released, 12 arrived
January 1871: 43 released, 3 arrived
February 1871: 22 released, 3 arrived
“The weather was not the only hazard facing the pigeons: there were their natural enemies the hawks and there were countr
ymen with their shotguns seeking food for their families. The best pigeons would have been the first to be used and as time passed the birds would have been less trained and so less likely to return safely to Paris. It was therefore no mean achievement that, on 59 occasions, they did succeed in getting back to their lofts. Their achievement was commemorated in the monument by Bartholdi and Rubin at the Porte des Ternes in Paris which was unveiled on 28th January 1906 and melted down by the Germans in 1944; around the central representation of a balloon were four pedestals each bearing a pair of bronze pigeons. “
Source: The Pigeon Post into Paris 1870-1871 by John Douglas Hayhurst Published by the author at 65, Ford Bridge Road, Ashford Middlesex 1970 Dewey: 383.144 H331p University of Texas Library
the pigeon post in the seige of paris, part 2
“The service was formally terminated on 1st February 1871
The successful operations must have been performed by about 50 birds only. These 50 pigeons served France well; they carried official despatches of great importance as well as an estimated 95,000 private messages which went far to keep up the morale of the besieged Parisians.
“The very last pigeon to complete its return to Paris must, if La Perre de Roo can be believed, have been one from Niepce captured in in November 1870 by the Prussians and which was presented to Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, the commander of the Second Army. He sent it home to his mother Princess Charles of Prussia who placed it on the royal pigeon cote. Two years later, tired of its Prussian lodging, it escaped and flew back to Paris.