The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  “This track was recorded at the Edison Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey on an Edison wax cylinder recorder. We performed this and other songs in front of a small audience, singing and playing acoustic instruments as loud as we could into a pair of enormous metal cones, the larger of which was perhaps twelve feet long, which fed the sound into a hundred year old non-electrical recording device created by Thomas Edison in the 1890s. The wax cylinder recorder carves a groove into a rotating tube of softened wax with a needle that is vibrating from the sound pressure collected at the small end of the cone. That is the best we can explain it. It looked very cool.”

  The recording doesn’t sound as bad as I would have expected, having never heard a wax cylinder recording.

  Source: They Might Be Giants web press release

  Kids’ interactive television: Captain Power

  From Lauri Christopher Gardner

  I remember when I was in the U.S in 1987, I played a game called “Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.” It was a game that came on VHS videotape. You used a starship-shaped gun to fire at the screen; when you were hit, you “died,” causing the canopy, pilot, and the chair to eject, thereby ending the game. In many ways this game was heads above others, especially considering how good the graphics were.

  Here’s the advertisement:

  DON’T JUST STAND THERE. FIRE BACK!

  [picture]

  “Lord Dread™ is threatening the future of the human race!

  Captain Power™ battles him in every week on TV and he needs your help.

  “Grab your PowerJet XT-7™. Fire invisible beams at enemy targets on his TV show.and SCORE! Or be hit!

  “This is not a test. The TV show WILL FIRE BACK!

  “Sure, you’re good.but are you great? Get Captain Power interactive videotapes with three different skill levels. Practice with the PowerJet XT-7. And practice some more.

  “Are you going to help Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future™? Or are you just going to stand there? “

  The Power of the future is in your hands!”

  Source: Marvel Amazing Spiderman comics issue #300, May 1988

  the Dubroni instant camera

  From Bruce Sterling

  ‘Instant’ Camera from 1864 When Dr. Edwin H. Land announced the ‘instant’ camera in 1947, many people proclaimed that the Polaroid Land camera was the first instant camera. It was the first camera to use a paper roll to produce pictures right after they were taken, but there were earlier inventors who were able to make other types of ‘instant’ pictures.

  “W.H.F. Talbot suggested a daguerreotype camera in 1839 with extra parts to hold mercury. The mercury was vaporized to develop the image almsot as soon as the picture was taken. One camera in 1855 had a built-in ‘darkroom’ so the photographer could reach inside to develop the photographic plates.

  “The first successful instant camera was patented in England in 1864 by G. J. Bourdin. It was called the ‘Dubroni.’ The developing fluids were put into the camera back with a small tube. The Dubroni was made in at least five sizes.

  “It is very rare. A complete camera with the entire developing kit would sell at auction for $10,000 to $15,000.”

  Source: Antiques column by Ralph and Terry Kovel Austin American Statesman May 12, 1996

  the Singing Telegram; the death of George P. Oslin

  From Paul Di Filippo

  “George P. Oslin, the Western Union executive who created that durable art form, the singing telegram, in the grim Depression year of 1933, died on Thursday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 97.

  “Mr. Oslin is credited with sending history’s first singing telegram, sung by a Western Union operator named Lucille Lipps, to the star vocalist Rudy Vallee on July 28, 1933, which was Vallee’s birthday.

  “At that magical moment, Mr. Oslin was the public relations director of Western Union, then based in New York. He held the post for 35 years, retiring in 1964.

  “In an interview after he died, his wife, Susanna Meigs Oslin, noted that by the time Lucille Lipps sounded her first note, telegrams had come to convey mixed associations. During World War I, Mrs. Oslin noted, ‘To a lot of people, the telegram was a scary thing because it meant you were being told you lost a loved one.’

  “And Mr. Oslin recalled in 1993 that back in 1933 he had thought that he had to convince people ‘that messages should be fun.’ But he reported in his book The Story of Telecommunications (1992, Mercer), that when he invented the singing telegram ‘I was angrily informed that I was making a laughingstock of the company.’

  “Mr. Oslin also liked to accentuate the positive in singing-telegram history. He once said that the message he sent to Vallee, which was chronicled by the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, ‘started America on a zany musical binge.’ .

  “Western Union ‘made millions’ in the years that followed, Mr. Oslin later reported, with messages being sung to numerous well-loved tunes. But it has been said that declining demand and curtailment in the number of telegraph offices led the company to discontinue its singing-telegram services temporarily in 1974.

  “In 1980, Western Union returned to the singing- telegram business, but nowadays Western Union will only sing a singing telegram, over the telephone, to one tune, ‘Happy Birthday’, although the customer, of course, gets to compose the lyrics. The cost begins at $16.95, plus applicable taxes, for a singing telegram of 1 to 15 words sing to a recipient in the United States.

  “Stagedoor Johnnies may want to know that all Western Union’s telegram-singers do their work these days in Bridgeton, Missouri.”

  Source: New York Times Obituaries, Tuesday October 29, 1996 “George P. Oslin, 97, Father of Singing Telegram, is Dead “by Eric Pace

  Children’s Dead Media

  From Stefan Jones

  A lot of the Dead Media examples Bruce provided are from the deep dark past. Here are some from a more recent epoch… kid media from when I was growing up, now dead and forgotten.

  FILM LOOPS

  A proto-VCR contraption, developed for schools. The media was a film cartridge: An endless loop of super 8mm film in a sealed, asymmetrical transparent plastic case. The player was about the size of a carousel- type slide projector. Operation was marvelously simple; the operator merely jammed the cart into a slot in the side of the projector and hit play. I seem to remember a reverse and still frame setting. There was no sound; running time was about five minutes. My high school had a few dozen of these; the ones I remember involve demonstrations of biological processes (cell division, metamorphosis, reptile homeostasis). There was also one of “Galloping Girdy,” the bridge in Washington state that wiggled itself to death. Major flaws: Bulbs burned out frequently; my teachers took about five tries to get the cartridge inserted properly.

  KIDDIE FILM STRIP PROJECTOR

  When I was a kid, a cousin got a swell visual storytelling gadget for christmas. The projector was a TV-shaped box with a rear-projection screen up front and a turntable up top. The media was a 35mm film strip enclosed in a stiff plastic holder; I seem to remember these “sticks” having gear teeth along one side. Each stick was accompanied by a 45 RPM (?) record. There may have been nine or ten slides per “show.” Operation was not quite foolproof. The stick was inserted in a slot up top, and the corresponding record queued up; lots of leeway for error and accidental breakage, there. Once inserted properly, the stick descended into the machine, one frame height at a time; this in itself was fun to see. I don’t know what synchronized the sound and pictures, but it worked quite well. The stories were kid stuff: Raggedy Ann & Andy, etc. The one that interested me most at the time was a quickie adaption of Doyle’s The Lost World. Very dramatic. The “production values” of the stories were pretty good: Nice narration and music, plus brightly colored cartoon artwork.

  VIEW-MASTER KNOCKOFFS

  I was going to describe the View-Master here, but I recently learned that the things are still in pr
oduction! Indeed, gift shops at historical landmarks and scenic wonders still carry View-Master reels for touristas to bring home. I find this really remarkable. Who would buy the things, in this age of Game Boys and cynical, post-literate youngsters? Perhaps they’ve become “old fashioned” enough to be acceptable to Amish families. (After all, the classic View-Master ran on ambient light, and the reels were strictly rated G.) While the View-Master struggles on, its many variants and knockoffs have passed on. Here are a few: -- View-Master itself released a “talking” version when I was a kid; I think it had small strips of magnetic tape next to each slide. The viewer was a beast, from what I remember; it had to contain a tape player, batteries and loudspeaker.—I remember a friend getting a knock-off of the View-Master. The media were rectangular cards, and inserted into the viewer vertically. Notches along the edge allowed the advance mechanism to get a grip on the card. This strikes me as a much saner scheme than the View-Master proper, which had circular reels.—Another knockoff, which I remember being advertised on TV under the name “Captain Stereo”, also had rectangular cards. This variant had no slides; the color pictures that formed the stereo pairs were simply printed on the card! I imagine the viewer somehow projected light on the front of the card.

  PORTABLE FILM VIEWERS

  At least one company offered a kiddie film viewer when I was a youngster. Light was provided by the sun or a handy light bulb; the film was advanced by a hand crank. The carts, each about the size of a had a minute or so’s worth of 8mm film.

  The only one I remember was an excerpt from a Mickey Mouse cartoon. I’ve asked some friends to think about Dead Media. I’m getting some interesting feedback.

  Someone mentioned Teddy Ruxpin, the animatronic story-telling bear (who had two chances at life before snuffing it, and whose mechanism is still begging to be hacked and exploited for dadaist purposes), and QXL, the quiz robot.

  Both of these casette droids are toast, and these are just two of a growing legion of interactive dolls, video-watching puppies, and space fighters that react to stuff on cancelled TV shows.

  These things are really dead; unlike, say, an orphan computer platform, there’s no audience of obsessed users willing to churn out new software for these. If this trend continues, we’ll no doubt someday see semi-sapient robot robot things, perhaps in the form of animals with pee and spit-up proof plush shells, languishing unused in closets for lack of new programs. Or, maybe, covered in green vinyl and reprogrammed to do yardwork.

  Somewhere between live media and dead media is ephemeral media, something that might deserve a passing comment, if only to contrast it to the really dead stuff.

  Example: I’ve been working for a multimedia company. I get lots of trade junk mail. Every once in a while I get a thick envelope with a folding cardboard and plastic filmstrip viewer, a really nifty item. But after looking at the attached film strip once (I’ve seen ‘em advertise things like monitors, virus removers and data conversion services) the thing’s garbage. The thing’s too simple to become “dead,” but its usefulness is pfft!

  Dead Personal Computers

  The staggering speed of technological obsolescence in personal computing makes this perhaps the single most challenging area in dead media studies.

  The following list, garnered from several issues of “Historically Brewed,” a computer collectors’ fanzine, does not even begin to count the casualties. There is no pretense of accuracy or exhaustiveness here, although this is the best list I’ve seen to date.

  These machines were created for the American, British, and Japanese markets, with no mention at all of, for instance, Soviet Bloc computers. Nor are there any listings of workstations, mainframes, dedicated game computers or arcade console machines.

  The lacunae here are very obvious and I hope that knowledgeable Dead Media Illuminati will help to close those gaps.

  I was deeply disquieted to learn that the Historical Computer Society has a sister group known as IACC which specializes in collecting defunct calculators.

  A further wrinkle suggests itself when one surmises that the true “dead medium” in dead computation is not dead platforms (such as those listed here) but dead operating systems (for which I have no list at all).

  Dead Personal Computers (the first draft):

  Altair 8800

  Amiga 500

  Amiga 1000

  Amstrad

  Apple I, II, IIc, IIe, II+, IIgs, III

  Apple Lisa

  Apple Lisa MacXL

  Apricot

  Atari 400

  Atari 800

  Atari 520ST

  Atari 1200XL

  Basis 190

  BBC Micro

  Bondwell 2

  Cambridge Z-88

  Canon Cat

  Columbia Portable

  Commodore 128

  Commodore C64

  Commodore Vic-20

  Commodore Plus 4

  Commodore Pet

  CompuPro “Big 16”

  Cromemco Z-2D

  Cromemco System 3

  DOT Portable

  Eagle II

  Epson QX-10

  Epson HX-20

  Epson PX-8 Geneva

  Exidy Sorcerer

  Franklin Ace 500

  Franklin Ace 1200

  Gavilan

  Grid Compass

  Heath/Zenith

  Hyperion

  IBM PC 640K

  IBM XT

  IBM Portable

  IBM PCjr

  IMSAI 8080

  Intertek Superbrain II

  Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1

  Kaypro 2x

  Linus WriteTop

  Mac 128, 512, 512KE

  Mattel Aquarius

  Micro-Professor MPF-II

  Morrow MicroDecision 3

  Morrow Portable

  NEC PC-8081

  NEC Starlet 8401-LS

  NorthStar Advantage

  NorthStar Horizon

  Ohio Scientific

  Oric

  Osborne 1

  Osborne Executive

  Panasonic

  Sanyo 1255

  Sanyo PC 1250

  Sinclair ZX-80

  Sinclair ZX-81

  Sol Model 20

  Sony SMC-70

  Spectravideo SV-328

  SuperBrain II QD

  Tandy 1000

  Tandy 1000SL

  Tandy Coco 1

  Tandy Coco 2

  Tandy Coco 3

  Tano Dragon

  TRS-80

  TI 99/4

  Timex/Sinclair 1000

  Timex/Sinclair color computer

  Vector 4

  Victor 9000

  Workslate

  Xerox 820 II

  Xerox Alto

  Xerox Dorado

  Xerox 1108

  Yamaha CX5M

  Possible sources of further insight: A Collector’s Guide to Personal Computers and Pocket Calculators by Dr Thomas F Haddock $14.95 from: Books Americana, Inc P O Box 2326 Florence, Alabama 35360 History of the Personal Computer by Stan Veit $16.95 from: Historical Computer Society 2962 Park Street #1 Jacksonville, Florida 32205 Encyclopedia of Computer History by Mark Greenia Lexikon Publishing

  Historical Computer Society’s Historically Brewed magazine Historically Brewed: Our First Year, $14.95 editor David Greelish Available from: HCS Press, 1994 2962 Park Street #1 Jacksonville Florida 32205

  Robertson’s Phantasmagoria

  From Bruce Sterling

  [Is it psychology? Anthropology? Feminism? Is it literary critism? Is it a densely footnoted and meticulously referenced technical history of the dead- media inventions of Enlightenment pseudoscience? Yes, it’s all this and more! in Terry Castle’s collection of essays in 18th-century culture studies,

  “The Female Thermometer.” [It’s a privilege to quote at considerable length from this terrific work by Professor Castl
e of Stanford University]

  “In Germinal Year VI (March 1798) a Belgian inventor, physicist, and student of optics named Etienne-Gaspard Robertson presented what he called the first ‘fantasmagorie’ at the Pavillon de l’Echiquier in Paris. [Footnote: “Robertson (originally Robert) was born in Liege. On his colorful career, see his Memoires recreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques d’un physicien- aeronaute (Paris 1830-34). I have used the modern reprint, introduced by Philippe Blon, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985) Stendhal describes one of Robertson’s provincial shows in his Memoires d’un touriste (1838), in the section entitled, ‘Nivernais, le 18 avril.’”]

  “Robertson, whose long and unusual career reflects the excitement and instability of his epoch, was both a brilliant eccentric and a tireless self-promoter. He first came to public notice in 1796 when he proposed to the Directoire a scheme for burning up the British fleet with a gigantic ‘miroir d’Archimede’, an assemblage of mirrors designed to concentrate solar rays on a distant object until the object caught fire. This particular plan was never put into action, but ‘Citoyen’ Robertson carried out a number of other public-spirited ventures in the years that followed. He experimented with galvanism and gave popular demonstrations in physics and optics in the 1790s and early 1800s. He was best known, however, as a balloon aeronaut, setting an altitude record in a montgolfiere in Hamburg in 1803. He later accompanied the Russian ambassador to China, where he demonstrated ballooning technique in the 1820s.

  “Robertson’s phantasmagoria grew out of an interest in magic, conjuring, and optical effects. As he recalled in his Memoires recreatifs, scientifiques and anedotiques of 1830-34, he had been fascinated in youth with the conjuring device known as the magic lantern, invented by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century. Kircher’s device, from which all our modern instruments for slide and cinematic projection derive, consisted of a lantern containing a candle and a concave mirror. A tube with a convex lens at each end was fitted into an opening in the side of the lantern, while a groove in the middle of the tube held a small image painted on glass. When candlelight was reflected by the concave mirror onto the first lens, the lens concentrated the light on the image on the glass slide. The second lens in turn magnified the illuminated image and projected it onto a wall or gauze screen. In darkness, with the screen itself invisible, images could be made to appear like fantastic luminous shapes, floating inexplicably in the air.”