The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  “The Most Famous Pneu in History “For generations the pneumatic letter-card was known affectionately as the petit bleu since, between 1897 and 1902, it was on blue paper and it was under this name that a ‘Telegramme’ was a vital piece of evidence in the enquiries which led to the eventual acquittal of Dreyfus. At a court-martial in December 1894 he had been found guilty of passing military secrets to the Germans and was transported to Cayenne. In 1896 the contents of a waste paper basket in the office of Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache in Paris, were taken to the French Intelligence Staff and found to include a torn-up pneu which had never been sent.

  “When pieced together, it was found that the petit bleu contained a message to another French officer, Esterhazy, implicating him in the offences attributed to Dreyfus. Thus started the chain of events which culminated in 1906 with the ceremonial restoration of his commission to Dreyfus in that courtyard of the Ecole Militaire lying just behind the Pavillon de l’Artillerie which had housed the telegraph office Ecole Militaire until its closure in 1891.

  “The standard work in France on the pneumatic post is ‘Cent ans de tubes pneumatiques’ J Boblique, Echo de la Timbrologie, 1966.

  “The engineering aspects of the service are recounted in ‘Le reseau pneumatique de Paris’ M Gaillard, Revue des PTT de France, 1, 1959.”

  Source: The Pneumatic Post of Paris by J.D. Hayhurst O.B.E. Edited by C.S. Holder Prepared in digital format by Mark Hayhurst Copyright1974. The France & Colonies Philatelic Society of Great Britain.

  Dead synthesizers: the Hazelcom McLeyvier

  From Richard Kadrey

  “Like an object caught in the Starship Enterprise’s malfunctioning transporter, the McLeyvier shimmered between existence and Limbo for a few years beginning in 1981. Designed by composer/technologist David McLey and aggressively (not to mention prematurely) marketed by Hazelcom Industries of Canada, this high-end digital system was to be another all-in-one box performance/production wonder machine.

  “’Only a few people really know the McLeyvier intimately,’ says composer Laurie Spiegel. She worked on later versions of the instrument. ‘In many ways they were absolutely wonderful, and in many other ways absolutely infuriating.’ “The McLeyvier’s functions reportedly included notational score display, editing, and printout (‘push a button and printed sheet music appears in publishable form’). A disk memory was capable of storing six hours of music material, and played it back via analog hardware with up to 128-voice polyphony.

  “The computer was to accept commands ‘in any language’ including Braille. Priced between $15,000 and $30,000 depending on the options, the McLeyvier appeared at successive trade shows as the Interactive Music Processor and the Amadeus, before sinking without a trace. ‘With the indomitable spirit of David facing Goliath,’ in the words of the press release, Hazelcom proved itself not quite up to the job.

  “’One of the big problems,’ Speigel states, ‘was that the company put out a computer-controlled analog system in the very year when digital synthesis was becoming the big thing.’ When McLey decided that music was more important to him than instrument manufacture, Spiegel was put in charge of redesigning the software to fit the proposed new digital hardware. Soon after, however, Hazelcom’s attention became diverted to other ventures, and the project was scrapped. According to Spiegel, ‘Only about eight of them were ever in serious use.’

  “’It was a very special instrument,’ she goes on. ‘It was unbelievably reconfigurable, on the assumption that there is no best way to set up an instrument; it varies from person to person, and from piece to piece. Instead of coming up in any fixed way, the first thing it did when the program booted was to run an initialization program so that the user could customize it completely. As an integrated music environment, I don’t think there’s anything as good out there. You memorized a couple hundred commands, and you could use them at any point, so your world wasn’t chopped up into a lot of separate editors. You had random access to everything all the time. Also, it was a musical language, an operating system for music composition. The vocabulary consisted of things like ‘invert,’ ‘ostinato,’ and ‘transpose.’ It had certain limitations,’ she concludes, ‘but it could do things that nothing else today can.’”

  Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

  Dead Synthesizers: the Con Brio ADS 200

  From Richard Kadrey

  “The ADS (Advanced Digital Synthesizer) system comprised a dual-manual splittable keyboard, a video display for envelopes, a ‘control cube’ the size of a filing cabinet for disk drives and computer hardware, and a rainbow-buttoned front panel for 64-oscillator additive synthesis and real-time sequencing that would have looked at home on the Starship Enterprise of the Star Trek of your choice. The analogy is apt, in fact, the ADS 100’s most notable public appearance was in the sound effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. No price was given when the ADS 100 was introduced, but it sure looked expensive.

  “Well, to reduce a three-year tale to a few words, it was (expensive). ‘We wasted three years,’ (Tim) Ryan recalls.

  “We never made a dime off the thing.’ “A midget all-in-one box version, the ADS 200, followed soon after. Its display now sported musical notation, the sequencer played back four tracks, the rear panel offered CV and gate interfaces, and the microprocessor count had jumped from three to five. Happily, the multicolored buttons remained and the filing cabinet was nowhere in sight. With the ADS 200, Con Brio’s synthesis facility finally rated a description: ‘Additive synthesis, phase modulation, frequency modulation, nested phase and frequency modulation, and combinations of all modes.’

  “’It was totally configurable in software,’ Ryan says, ‘and we had 16 stage envelope generators for both frequency and amplitude, so it was kind of like the grandfather of the Yamaha DX7. On ours, you could build your own algorithms, using any of all of the 64 oscillators in any position in the algorithm. If you wanted additive, you could add 16 of them together. The phase modulation was similar to what Casio did with their CZ series. You could designate any tuning you wanted and save it. You could split the keyboard, stack sounds, model different parts of the keyboard for different parts of the sound, and save that as an entity - the kind of things that are common now.’ “Compared with the first version, Con Brio’s second model was a hit: of the three instruments manufactured, one was actually sold, for $30,000.

  “By 1982, the Con Brio had dropped one of its two manual [keyboards] and, with it, a few thousand from the price tag. The ADS 200-R featured a 16-track polyphonic sequencer with 80,000 note storage capability and editing functions available from the scoring screen. The 32-voice version, expandable to 64, sold (or rather didn’t sell) for $20,500, with an additional $25,000 worth of options. Only one was ever built.

  “Why did Con Brio turn up an evolutionary blind alley, while other companies have had great success with similar concepts? ‘It was a labor of love,’ Ryan says reflectively. ‘We didn’t have much sales savvy, and that was eventually our downfall. Another thing was the intimidation factor: it had something like 190 buttons on it. We figured that no musician would ever want to enter commands, so we went to the trouble of putting on all those buttons. But obviously that approach was as cryptic as a computer language would have been. It was an amazing feat technologically, but with complete disregard for the people we had to sell the thing to.”

  Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

  Dead synthesizers: ARP 2600

  From Richard Kadrey

  “ARP’s founder, Alan R. Pearlman, recognized the importance of teaching musicians how to use the technology, so he designed a new instrument with a fixed selection of basic synthesizer functions. This instrument, dubbed the Model 2600, was an integrated system with the signal generating and processing functions in one box and the keyboard in another. “Pearlman believed that schools with small or medium- sized
music departments were the main market for this new instrument. To further enhance the 2600’s educational value, Pearlman put the graphics on the console’s front panel so that the signal paths were easy to follow, and used sliders and slide switches so that the control and switch settings were easy to see.

  “The first production run had blue panels, painted sheet-metal cases, and polished wood handles. ‘That’s not what I wanted,’ Pearlman recalls. ‘I wanted the instrument to be housed in a rugged case that would travel safely. But those were the days when nobody listened to you if you were over 30, so the young designer had his way.’ Musicians and retailers however quickly shot down the ‘Blue Marvin’ or ‘Blue Meanie’ design in favor of the vinyl-covered luggage-style case with the dark gray panel that remained in production from 1971 to 1981. ..

  “As Roger Powell says, ‘The 2600’s main assets are the same things that made it hard to sell initially. The 2600 boiled down virtually all analog synthesis capabilities into a single box. You could experiment with it or use it pre-patched. It was a magic matrix, definitely enough stuff to use musically. On top of that, it stayed in tune and was reasonable robust and roadworthy.

  “As analog synths went, it was easy to use. You could easily see and recognize panel setting patterns, even in the darkness of the stage. As one well-known 2600 user said many years ago, ‘It’s the only synth that I can operate when I’m drunk.’”

  Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

  Dead synthesizers: the Adaptive Systems, Inc. Synthia

  From Richard Kadrey

  “The Synthia was yet another bid for the obviously limited high-end market for computerized all-in-one-box ultra-keyboards. Although the Synthia’s projected price was a mere $20,000, few musicians seem to have had a close encounter with a working model.

  “The most, um, interesting aspect of the Synthia was its touch-responsive plasma screen, a computer display- cum-data-entry device that followed the user’s finger as he or she sketched around bar graphs, the ultimate in intuitive user interfaces. “Among the touch-responsive displays were editing screens for harmonic content (up to seven partials), envelope parameters, keyboard setups, controller assignments, and, once again, an implementation of the timbre window concept (called ‘time slices’).

  “The Synthia’s controller section was also particularly impressive. Four panel positions were available for sliders, joysticks, and touch plates, which could modulate a number of parameters including the pitches of individual harmonics. There were also three expression pedals, three switch pedals, and of course a velocity-and-aftertouch-sensitive keyboard. The accompanying computer, or ‘control unit,’ was housed in a separate box, and could accommodate incoming data from four keyboards.”

  Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

  the library card catalog

  From Albin Wagner

  “WASHINGTON, A library card catalog from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond is poised to become history at the Smithsonian.

  “It’s a commonplace item you probably never thought about, an increasingly outmoded relic like the manual typewriter.

  “And it’s quietly slipping into another era, replaced by computerized catalogs.

  “A rescue effort mounted on the Internet, however, will guarantee that the card catalog doesn’t fade without a fanfare. “The National Museum of American History is the proud new owner of the handsome oak cabinet, bought by the seminary in the 1920s. “’I think there already are some youngsters who have not seen a card catalog,’ remarked Alva T. Stone, head cataloger at the Florida State University law library in Tallahassee.

  “She said the widespread use of card catalogs ‘was undoubtedly a significant factor in the evolution of American libraries from 19th century repositories staffed by curators to the democratic, accessible, and user- responsive institutions’ of today.

  “By e-mail, Stone contacted a Smithsonian official in March about the idea of preserving ‘a representative card catalog as an artifact of what we call ‘modern’ civilization.’” “When a positive reply and specifications came from the American history museum, Stone used an Internet library network to find a prime candidate in Richmond.

  “Peggy Kidwell, a specialist at the American history museum, said she was interested in an oak unit that had 60 drawers and book cards, that was near Washington and could easily be moved there, and that was made by the Library Bureau.

  “That company was one of a group that banded together to form Remington Rand, one of the first manufacturers of computers, Kidwell explained.

  “Enter the UTS library. It had an oak, Library Bureau card catalog containing cards that spanned decades, ranging from hand-written to manually typewritten.

  “’It is so representative. And it is unusual that it’s in such spectacularly good condition,’ Kidwell said.

  “The seminary was about to move to a new library and wasn’t taking its card catalog, according to head cataloger Thomason. UTS uses a computerized catalog in its $11.8 million, nearly 300,000-volume William Smith Morton Library. “In December, the American Library Association published an article by Alva Stone of Florida State, in which she wondered: ‘Will all of the card catalogs disappear from the face of the earth?’ “Not yet, said the Smithsonian’s Kidwell.

  “Card catalogs still are used in many places, she said, and she recently heard from a company that makes a limited number of them. Albin Wagner, CA, CRM Chief, Bureau of Records Management New Jersey Division of Archives and Records

  Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch Monday, February 17, 1997, by Peter Hardin,

  the library card catalog

  From Bruce Sterling

  “Today is the last day that libraries can place orders for catalogue cards with the Library of Congress, which is halting production of the cards. Libraries wishing to maintain card catalogues will have to turn to commercial suppliers. The Library of Congress has since 1902 sold duplicates of its three-by-five-inch cards to libraries around the world.

  “However, card sales have declined since 1968, when cataloguing information became available in an automated format; they fell to 579,879 last year, from a peak of 78 million in 1968.

  “Critics of automated systems point out that errors in coversion have led to books’ being lost and have limited cross-referencing options, and that the cards themselves, many of which are being discarded, have inherent historical value.”

  Source: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 279 Number 2 February 1997 ISSN 0276-9077

  Dead Digital Documents

  From Patrick I. LaFollette

  [The following essay was part of a lengthy net discussion about the archival security of stored digital information. It first appeared in the “Mollusca” Internet mailing list. It was brought to my attention by Steve Jackson and is quoted by permission of Pat LaFollette]

  There are three separate issues involved in the archiving of digital documents. The first is captured in this quote from Steve Long: “About 2 years ago I threw away over 100 eight inch floppy disks because could no longer find machines to read them. Fortunately I was able to convert most of the important data to 5.25 inch floppy disks. Now, my computer has 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks but most users are replacing the 5.25 inch with CD-ROM drives and don’t have the space in their PC to include all three. In another couple of years, I will have to convert to 3.5 inch or CD- ROM for my information. After that, who knows, but you can almost guarantee that the storage medium will change again.”

  The physical media changes as storage technology advances. The marketplace requires that there be one or two “universal” formats at any particular time so that electronic products can be distributed. At present these are the 3.5 inch floppy disk and CD-ROM. The new DVD format is physically the same shape as CD-ROM and DVD readers will be “backwards compatible,”, able to read CD-ROMs, at least for a while. But after DVD has reached its planned maximum
capacity of about 15Gb, who can guess what will come next?

  The second issue is made clear by William Schleihauf.

  “The various media being talked about, tape in particular, has a lifespan of only a few years (and that’s not counting the operators playing frisbee with the tapes on the night shift!). Companies now are discovering that some tapes created only a few years ago are coming up with i/o errors, and thus the data is lost. The newer cassettes are better, but again, the half-life is measured in years, not decades. CDROM, guess what, maybe a century, on average, or so the forecasting is.”

  The currently available digital media are not of “archival” quality, unlike (acid free) paper. Perhaps it’s just as well that the physical format of the media keeps changing. It forces people to copy their data to new disks every now and then, while the old ones are still readable! I’ve read lengthy discussions of the archival properties of CD-ROM disks.

  Estimates for some CDR (CD- Recordable) media exceed 200 years, twice as long as commercially pressed CDs. But the glass masters from which commercial CDs are pressed might last millennia. On the other hand, how long are CD readers likely to be around? The first generation of DVD readers will be backwards compatible, but I doubt CD technology in its present form will last as long as the phonograph. (My LPs, and even some 45s and 78s, are still in playable shape, but my turntable died years ago).

  But all that kind of misses the point. One of the tasks performed by traditional librarians and archivists is to protect paper from the ravages of time, the elements, insects, fungus, fire, flood, and undergraduates. Paper can last for hundreds of years, but only if it is taken care of. Paper can also turn to dust in days or weeks. The analogous task for electronic librarians will be to protect their bits, independent of storage method or medium, by periodically transferring them all to whatever appears to be the most secure and accessible storage technology of the time, and by distributing copies of them to as many other widely dispersed locations as possible. But there does not yet seem to be an established tradition of digital librarianship to shoulder this responsibility and pass it on from one generation to the next. It’s very difficult to establish traditions and a commitment to the long term when the technology is in such a state of flux.