The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  A major advantage of the digital medium is that so long as the physical media is readable, copies made from it will be identical. There is no degradation from generation to generation as there is with analog reproduction processes such as microfilm and photocopying. Nothing is fugitive. And unlike books, which are produced in finite (often rather small) numbers that decrease over time, there never need be such thing as a “rare” digital document, so long as it is periodically copied and made available.

  Digital media may not hold up as well as paper to adversity and neglect, but its content can be much more widely distributed. Local disasters (wars, fires, floods, hackers, budget cuts) would have a much less lasting impact on a properly managed digital archive than on a conventional library. As soon as the event is past and the equipment is replaced, identical copies of the data can be restored from other unaffected archives.

  The third and most intractable issue affecting computer documents is, as William Schleihauf pointed out, the coding scheme in which the data are recorded.

  “Everything stored in a computer is stored with a specific coding scheme. You need to have the “magic decoder ring” to get it all back. If you create a file/document with Word Perfect v.6 today, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to read it 10 years from now.”

  The real problem here is the use of non-standard “proprietary” document and database formats by DBMS, word processors, page layout programs, and typesetting systems. They tend (often deliberately) to be mutually incompatible as well as changing over time.

  A solution to this problem was agreed upon eleven years ago by the international standards organization, but is only gradually gaining wide acceptance, primarily in the publishing industry, government, large corporations, and the European Common Market. The solution is SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), ISO 8879 (1986) which defines a single international standard for coding documents that is hardware, operating system, and software independent.

  Electronic documents in SGML format avoid the problems of proprietary formats and obsolescence, but can be converted to a proprietary format if this is necessary to perform a particular task. Most commercial typesetting and CD-ROM display software now accept SGML documents directly, without conversion. Actually, WWW browsers are quasi-SGML viewers in that HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files are SGML documents. The new buzz word in publishing circles is “repurposing” documents. That is, taking a computer file (the manuscript for a reference book, for example) and using it to produce a CD-ROM or online database.

  If the text is in SGML format, it can be used for all three purposes without modification. What allows this to be done is that in SGML, it is the content, rather than the appearance, that is marked. In any other text markup systems, one would say [start italic] Astraea undosa [end italic] to put the name in italic. In SGML you would say [start genus] Astraea [end genus] [start species] undosa [end species]. The rule “print genus in italic” (or red or 14pt gothic) is defined separately from the document, and can be changed without changing the document itself.

  There are a variety of SGML editors that allow documents to be created and maintained directly. Unfortunately, it’s still pretty much a “big boy” technology, the software expensive and clunky, and the conversion of existing electronic documents labor intensive. But this situation should improve in time, as more companies enter the arena. The bottom line to all this is that digital documents are, and will continue to become an ever more useful supplement to the published literature, and an inexpensive method of distributing large volumes of data, but are not likely to take the place of paper any time soon.

  Given that digital storage methods will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future, I would want to witness digital librarians staying ahead of the technological wave, maintaining the security and utility of their holdings, for a generation or three before I will have as much confidence in them and their holdings as I do in paper, conventional libraries, and old fashioned librarians.

  Officially Deleted Digital Documents

  From Bruce Sterling

  [A group of historians and librarians has filed suit against Mr John Carlin, the official Archivist of the United States. Their complaint is that historically valuable email and other governmental electronic documents are being wantonly destroyed despite their manifest historical value. The following is a much-edited communication on this topic from Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, and an activist in this lawsuit against the US National Archives and Records Administration ]

  “Public Citizen, Historians, and Librarians File Suit Against The Archives Challenging Policies that Allow Destruction of Electronic Records “On December 23 Public Citizen, joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Library Association, filed a complaint against the National Archives in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

  “The suit challenges the Archivist’s promulgation of a ‘General Records Schedule’ authorizing all federal agencies, at their discretion, to destroy the only electronic version of Federal agency records stored on agency electronic mail and word processing systems, provided the agency has printed a hard copy of the electronic record on paper or microform.

  “The complaint states that the Archivist has ‘improperly ignored the unique value of electronic records’ and ‘has abdicated his statutory responsibility to appraise the historical value of such electronic records.’ The complaint asks the court to declare the General Records Schedule 20 null and void, and to prevent agencies from destroying electronic records created, received or stored on electronic mail or word processing systems.

  “This new lawsuit builds on the Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President (Civil Action No. 89- 0142). The inadequacy of National Archives’ guidance to agencies on the preservation of e-mail was at the heart of that case, frequently called the PROFS case. [The PROFS computer email of Lt. Col. Oliver North and others, which they had assumed to be deleted, eventually became central evidence in the Iran-Contra scandal in the United States, bruces] “In 1989 the National Security Council, as well as other agencies, routinely destroyed e-mail, which according to the National Archives did not meet the standard of a ‘record”Ķ

  “In general practice, before a government agency may destroy its records, it must give public notice and the Archivist must appraise the records to determine whether they warrant continued preservation. “Many in the historical and archival community. stressed that the National Archives was abdicating its role in appraising records with these regulations. There are values to records that go beyond their administration and operational use, and agencies are sometimes shortsighted in apprising the long term and historical value of records. The regulations give enormous authority to agency heads. “Additionally, with the changes in technology, some archivists are now recommending that information systems be appraised, not just individual records.”

  Source: NCC Washington Update, vol. 2, #43, December 27, 1996; article by Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History

  the Baby Mark I Computer

  From Charlie Crouch & Albin Wagner

  “Enthusiasts rebuild 7ft Baby computer that changed world” by Russell Jenkins

  “A primitive forerunner of the personal computer has been rebuilt by a team of engineers as a 50th anniversary tribute to the unsung pioneers whose genius founded the electronic digital age.

  “The computer was officially born on June 21, 1948, when Tom Kilburn, a young research engineer, ran the first program through the Mark 1 machine, beating the Americans and making Manchester the birthplace of the computer.

  “The Mark 1, or Baby, as it came to be known, was the world’s first electronic digital computer capable of storing a program. Its mass of cathode ray tubes and more than 500 valves were part of a machine that stood 7ft high and 18 ft
long.

  “Volunteer computer archivists, led by Chris Burton, a retired engineer, have recreated over three years the earliest model of Baby at Manchester Computing, part of Manchester University, several hundred yards from where it all began.

  “The replica will be switched on in its own gallery at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry in June next year as the centerpiece to the city’s birthday celebrations of the computer age.

  “Mr Burton, of the Computer Conservation Society, was inspired to rebuild Baby as a homage to the men he believes were as important as James Watt to the advent of the steam age. They were ‘modest, clever’ men, he said, who never received the acclaim they deserved.

  “Mr Burton, a retired ICL computer engineer from Oswestry, Shropshire, said: ‘The first objective is to recognise the achievement of men whose light has never been allowed to shine out. I want to make manifest a triumph of British innovation to counter the general misunderstanding that computers were an American invention. They were not.’

  “Another aim is to show today’s computer-literate youngsters what it was like to be one of the handful of people with a vision of how information could be stored electronically, and to give them an idea of the conditions in which the pioneers worked. The equipment was always in danger of overheating and exploding.

  “Contemporary photographs show earnest, white-coated young men adjusting dials and checking cathode ray tubes. They were men like the late Professor Freddie Williams, who oversaw the project as holder of the Chair of Electrotechnics.

  “The guiding force behind Manchester’s success was Tom Kilburn, a Yorkshire man then aged 26. He was joined by Geoff Tootill, Dai Edwards, Alec Robinson and Tommy Thomas. They were following on the work of Alan Turing on Colossus, the Second World War code-breaker based at Bletchley Park. The team was in a race between Cambridge and the United States. In America, the ENIAC computing machine boasted 18,000 vacuum tubes (valves) but it could not store a program.

  “The Manchester team perfected the use of cathode ray tubes for storing data. The prototype had a memory of 1024 bits - tiny by modern standards.

  “Professor Williams once said: ‘A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was the dance of death leading to no useful result. But one day it stopped and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. Nothing was ever the same again.’”

  Source: The Times (London) February 18, 1997, page 8

  The Readies

  From Bruce Sterling

  [The following article originally appeared in the literary avant-garde magazine transition in 1930. While the article was clearly satirical in intent, many of its insights seem strikingly prescient in describing the future characteristics of electronic text on the Internet.

  “The Readies” remain an imaginary medium, but this is one of the few works of science fiction to examine the technological basis of literature, the medium of print]

  The word “Readies” suggests to me a moving type spectacle, reading at the speed rate of the day with the aid of a machine, a method of enjoying literature in a manner as up-to-date as the lively talkies. In selecting “The Readies” as title for what I have to say about modern reading and writing I hope to catch the reader in a receptive progressive mood, I ask him to forget for a moment the existing medievalism of the BOOK (God bless it, it’s staggering on its last leg and about to fall) as a conveyor of reading matter, I request the reader to fix his mental eye for a moment on the ever-present future and contemplate a reading machine which will revitalize this interest in the Optical Art of Writing.

  In our aeroplane age radio is rushing in television, tomorrow it will be a commonplace. All the arts are having their faces lifted, painting (the moderns), sculpture (Brancusi), music (Antheil), architecture (zoning law), drama (Strange Interlude), dancing (just look around you tonight) writing (Joyce, Stein, Cumming, Hemingway, transition). Only the reading half of Literature lags behind, stays old-fashioned, frumpish, beskirted. Present-day reading methods are as cumbersome as they were in the time of Caxton and Jimmy-the-Ink. Though we have advanced from Gutenberg’s movable type through the linotype and monotype to photo-composing we still consult the book in its original form as the only oracular means we know for carrying the word mystically to the eye. Writing has been bottled up in books since the start. It is time to pull out the stopper.

  To continue reading at today’s speed I must have a machine. A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around and attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to. A machine as handy as a portable phonograph, typewriter or radio, compact, minute, operated by electricity, the printing done microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll which carries the contents of a book and is no bigger than a typewriter ribbon, a roll like a miniature serpentine that can be put in a pill box. This reading film unrolls beneath a narrow magnifying glass four or five inches long set in a reading slit, the glass brings up the otherwise unreadable type to comfortable reading size, and the reader is rid at last of the cumbersome book, the inconvenience of holding its bulk, turning its pages, keeping them clean, jiggling his weary eyes back and forth in the awkward pursuit of words from the upper left hand corner to the lower right, all over the vast confusing reading surface of a page.

  Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole, 100,000; 200,000; 300,000 or million words, spills out before his eyes and rolls on restfully or restlessly as he wills, in one continuous line of type, its meaning accelerated by the natural celerity of the eye and mind (which today are quicker than the hand); one moving line of type before the eye, not blurred by the presence of lines above and below as they are confusingly placed on a columned page.

  My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead, a chapter reread or the happy ending anticipated. The magnifying glass is so set that it can be moved nearer to or farther from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 points, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him. Many books remain unread today owing to the unsuitable size of type in which they are printed. A number of readers cannot stand the strain of small type and other intellectual prowlers are offended by Great Primer. The reading machine allows free choice in type-point, it is not a fixed arbitrary bound object but an adaptable carrier of flexible, flowing reading matter. Master-compositors have impressed upon apprentices for years that there is no rubber type. Well, now that the reading machine exists with strong glass to expand to contract the size of letters, compositors can’t ding on that any more.

  The machine is equipped with all modern improvements. By pressing a button the roll slows down so an interesting part may be read leisurely, over and over again if need be, or by speeding up, a dozen books can be skimmed through in an afternoon without soiling the fingers or losing a dust wrapper. Taken in high gear ordinary literature may be absorbed at the rate of full length novels in half hours or great pieces of writing may be re- read in half-lifetimes. The underlying principle of reading remains unaffected, merely its scope is enlarged and its latent possibilities pointed.

  To save the labor of changing rolls or records, a clip of a dozen assorted may be put in at a time and automatically fed to the machine as phonograph discs are changed at present. The Book of the Day or Book of the Hour Club could sell it output in clips of a dozen ready to slip into the reading machine. Maybe a book club called the Dozen a Day would result. Reading by machinery will be as simple and painless as shaving with a Schick razor and refills could be had at corner drug stores or telephone booths from dawn to midnight.

  Already we are familiar with news and advertisements reeeling off before our eye in huge il
luminated letters from the tops of corner buildings, and smaller propaganda machines tick off tales of commercial prowess before our eyes in shop windows. All that is needed is to bring the electric street signs down to the ground, move the show- window reading device into the library by reducing the size of the letter photographically and refining it to the need of an intimate, handy, rapid reading conveyor.

  The accumulating pressure of reading and writing alone will budge type into motion, force it to flow over the column, off the page, out of the book where it has snoozed in apathetic contentment for half a thousand years. The only apparent change the amateur reader may bemoan is that he cannot fall asleep as promptly before a spinning reading roll as he can over a droning book in his lap, but again necessity may come to the rescue with a radio attachment which will shut off the current and automatically stop the type-flow on receipt of the first sensitive vibration of a snore.

  My reading machine will serve as a wedge. Makers of words will be born; fresh, vital eye-words will wink out of dull, dismal, drooling type at startled smug readers. New methods crave new matter; conventional world- prejudices will be automatically overcome, from necessity reading-writing will spring full blown into being. The Revolution of the Word will be won. Reading-writing will be produced not so much for its sonorific sleep-producing qualities as its mental-eye-provoking pleasures.