The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  “DATA STORAGE: FROM DIGITS TO DUST: Surprise, computerized data can decay before you know it

  “Up to 20% of the information carefully collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA’s 1976 Viking mission to Mars has been lost. Some POW and MIA records and casualty counts from the Vietnam War, stored on Defense Dept. computers, can no longer be read.

  And at Pennsylvania State University, all but 14 of some 3,000 computer files containing student records and school history are no longer accessible because of missing or outmoded software. “The Information Age is creating a digital dilemma.

  For years, computer scientists told us that digital 1s and 0s could last forever. But now, we’re discovering that the media we’re using to carry our precious information on into the future are turning out to be far from eternal, so fragile, in fact, that some might not last through the decade.

  More is at risk than government and corporate records. The danger extends to cultural legacies: new music, early drafts of literature, and academic works originate in digital form, without hard copies.

  ‘Digital information lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first,’ says Jeff Rothenberg, senior computer scientist at RAND Corp.

  “Forget forever. Under less-than-optimal storage conditions, digital tapes and disks, including CD-ROMs and optical drives, might deteriorate about as fast as newsprint, in 5 to 10 years. Tests by the National Media Lab, a St. Paul (Minn.)-based government and industry consortium, show that tapes might preserve data for a decade, depending on storage conditions. Disks, whether CD-ROMs used for games or the type used by some companies to store pension plans, may become unreadable in five years.

  “For consumers, the biggest worry is CD-ROMs. Unlike paper records, CD-ROMs often don’t show decay until it’s too late. Experts are just beginning to realize that stray magnetic fields, oxidation, humidity, and material decay can quickly erase the information stored on them.

  “Says Robert Stein, founder of New York-based Voyager Co., which makes commercial CD-ROM books and games: ‘CDs have a tendency to degrade much faster than anybody, at least in the companies that make them, is willing to predict.’ Stein doesn’t expect the CD-ROMs Voyager sells to last more than 5 or 10 years, and neither, he says, should customers.

  “There’s another problem: the unrelenting pace of technology. Chances are good that the software needed to get at much of today’s data might not be readily available in 10 years. Anyone who has tried wrestling information from a 5 ¼-inch floppy disk knows that. Just ask scientists conducting rain forest research. Satellite photos of the Amazon Basin taken in the 1970s, data critical to establishing deforestation trends, are trapped on indecipherable magnetic tapes no longer on the market.

  “But even keeping a step ahead of data decay and software obsolescence is no guarantee of escaping the problem. Companies spending heavily on sophisticated new computers and software to beat the technology reaper say they’re beginning to run into a whole new problem. All too often, when they transfer information from one aging media or computer system to a newer one, not all bits make the migration.

  “Sometimes, just a footnote or spreadsheet is lost. Other times, whole categories of data evaporate. Says Rothenberg: ‘It’s like playing the child’s game of Telephone. It doesn’t take many translations from one media to another before you have lost significant aspects of the original data.’

  “The Food & Drug Administration reports that some pharmaceutical companies are discovering errors as they copy drug-testing data that back up claims of long-term product safety and effectiveness. In several recent cases involving data transfers from Unix computers to systems running Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system, blood- pressure numbers were randomly off by up to eight digits from those in original records, FDA and company data specialists report.

  “Sophisticated software can catch most of the errors, but ‘not all the time,’ says Rone Lewis, vice-president of business development of Surety Technologies, a data recovery and migration firm.

  “Some companies fear the problem could expose them to lawsuits. ‘In our litigation-prone age, it’s harder to defend yourself if you’re losing parts of your records when you migrate them,’ says Henry Perritt, dean of Chicago Kent College of Law. “Ray Paddock, a director for Storage Technology Corp., says the problem is so bad for some of his clients that they’re creating new databases just to decipher the data they have on tape and disks. Others, he says, are simply keeping the old version of the software used to create documents.

  “Meanwhile, the government is looking into establishing durability standards for digital media. A task force, including representatives of Eastman Kodak, IBM, and archivists at leading museums and universities, has agreed on a digital longevity test ultimately aimed at increasing the life span of CD-ROMs and other types of digital media. The only problem: So far, no manufacturer has tested its products using the age-test created by the task force. And the group is still working on a standard for magnetic tape.

  “Others are at work on new technologies to solve the problem. NORSAM Technologies in Los Alamos, N.M., for example, is promoting its HD-Rosetta project, which permanently stores historical documents, but only if they are converted from digital back to analog recording formats.

  “But at least one remedy being offered by researchers sounds a lot more like the distant past than the future: Cobblestone Software Inc. in Lexington, Mass., is promoting PaperDisk, which uses paper to print out complex patterns of dots and dashes representing digitized files. Cobblestone President Tom Antognini claims it should last for centuries, or about as long as old-fashioned, high- quality paper.”

  Source: Business Week magazine, April 20, 1998

  Winky-Dink Interactive TV

  From Julian Dibbell

  Winky Dink and You

  “Broadcast in glorious black and white beginning in 1953, this program featured the adventures of a cartoon lad named Winky-Dink and his dog Woofer, interspersed with the in-studio antics of a host and an audience of kids. The gimmick was that the boys and girls at home were asked to help Winky-Dink out of a jam by drawing a ladder or a rope on the TV screen. This was done with the aid of a Winky-Dink Kit which was sold by mail for fifty cents. ‘We sold millions of those kits’ the show’s host Jack Barry commented, ‘It was well thought out.’

  “You could place the clear piece of plastic that came in the kit over the television screen and connect the dots to create a bridge for Winky Dink to cross to safety, and trace the letters to read the secret messages broadcast towards the end of the show. Which I guess makes Winky- Dink the world’s first interactive video game. Of course, it goes without saying that scores of kids without the kits drew on the television screen itself, ruining many a family’s first television sets.

  “Winky-Dink and You originally ran Saturday mornings at 10:00 am, from October 10, 1953 until April 27, 1957 on the CBS network. Along with host Jack Barry was Dayton Allen as Mr. Bungle, his assistant that never gets anything right. You may recognize the name ‘Mr. Bungle’ as the name of a very popular alternative band of the early nineties.

  “In 1956, Jack Barry began hosting a wildly popular prime-time game show he also produced called Twenty-One, and Winky-Dink was canceled the next year. Barry said at the time, ‘It strictly didn’t rate that well. It was on for almost four and a half years, but it never got the kind of audience the straight cartoon shows started pulling.’ Twenty-One, on the other hand, was riding the crest of popularity that game shows were enjoying on the Fifties prime-time schedule.

  “In the fall of 1958, Twenty-One (and almost every other game show) was driven off the air when it was revealed that $129,000 winner Charles Van Doren was given some of the answers in advance. (The story was told in the movie ‘Quiz Show’.) Jack Barry, as host and producer of the show that broke the industry wide practice of prompting some contestants, took the brunt of the bad publicity. Because of the immense scandal that e
nsued, it was another ten years before Jack Barry worked on television again.

  “In 1969, Winky-Dink was revived by Barry, this time as a five minute cartoon feature, complete with a new Winky-Dink kit for kids to send off for. Consumer groups argued that kids shouldn’t be playing with their eyes so close to the TV set, and the character was quickly retired.

  “Modern audiences will remember Jack Barry as the host of the long running CBS game show ‘The Joker’s Wild’, a show he hosted from 1972 until his death in 1984. Barry also hosted a children’s version of the ‘The Joker’s Wild’ called ‘Joker, Joker, Joker’ from 1979 until 1981, bringing his career full circle.”

  [Julian Dibbell remarks:] Thus ends a remarkable entry in the annals of dead- media history, with only a couple of important questions left dangling. To wit:

  1. Why has Jack Barry not been canonized as the patron saint of interactive television? All other experiments in interactive TV to date have been just that: experiments, and mostly unsuccessful ones at that. Mr. Barry, on the other hand, put ITV on a major network for four years running, and though he downplayed the commercial success of the venture, it’s clear he had his sights set on bigger things than children’s programming anyway. Personally I suspect Winky Dink was more of a hit than he let on. Speaking as one who was old enough to catch the 1969 version of the show in my kindergarten years, I can attest that its appeal to at least one child was nothing short of ravishing. I did not have access to the Winky Dink Kit, sadly, and I can still remember clearly the gnawing existential hunger with which I yearned to cross the barrier of the TV screen and join with Winky Dink in his adventures. Certainly nothing in the subsequent history of interactive television, be it the ill-fated Qube or the insinuating WebTV, has inspired anything like that desire in me. It has been noted in an earlier Working Note that some media die into an afterlife as children’s toys, and perhaps that is to be interactive television’s fate. Perhaps it’s time the John Malones and Bill Gateses of the world came to accept the humbling but hardly dishonorable fact that they are merely following in the great Jack Barry’s footsteps.

  2. Why has Winky Dink itself not ascended into the canon of iconographic Americana, right up there with Marilyn Monroe, the Apollo 11 moonwalk, and disco shoes? In the reader-response area of the TV Party site, one boomer nostalgist recalls coming to Winky Dink’s aid with a stick of his mother’s lipstick, scribbling directly on the screen without benefit of the official plastic screenguard; another remembers that one day the secret word kids were asked to spell out was the surprisingly arcane SABOTAGE. How is it that such ripe ingredients have escaped the eye of a DeLillo or a Pynchon? How is it that nowhere in postwar fiction do we find a scene in which, sometime in the same year the Rosenbergs were executed, or the same year Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts came to a head, a mother comes home to find fragments of the word SABOTAGE scrawled in blood-red lettering across the face of her TV set, itself a strange new addition to the cultural landscape? Granted, the nod given by Bay Area thrash-funk weirdos Mr. Bungle does go a good way toward securing Winky Dink its rightful place in the field of pop-cultural reference. Likewise, the starring role of a certain “Mr. Bungle” in one of the founding myths of latter-day cyberculture, the so-called “virtual rape” case at LambdaMOO, dug up and hyped by this reporter and others back in late ‘93, brings the new-media resonances of Winky Dink full circle in a particularly pungent way. But I dare say the rich motherlode that is Winky Dink and You has only begun to be tapped.

  Source The TV Party Website (www.tvparty.com)
Winky-Dink and You (Or, Interactive Television, Take One) by Julian Dibbell

  the Cat Piano

  From Richard Dorsett

  From the chapter “Persecution”: “To Brussels is due the unenviable distinction of having produced the first cat organ, in 1549. This triumph of ingenuity was designed to lend merriment to the street pageant in honor of Philip the Second, and is described by Juan Cristoval, a Spaniard in attendance upon the King.

  “’The organ,’ says Cristoval, ‘was carried on a car, with a great bear for the musician. In place of pipes, it had twenty cats separately confined to narrow cases, from which they could not stir. Their tails were tied to cords attached to the keyboard of the organ. When the bear pounded the keys, the cords were jerked, and this pulled the tails of the cats, and made them mew in bass or treble notes, according to the nature of the airs.’

  “Such an invention could have afforded, at best, but doubtful entertainment; yet the cat organ was so widely appreciated that German humourists undertook to alter and improve it; and after a time a choice variety of instruments were constructed, in all of which cats were induced by some well applied torture to furnish forth the necessary music.”

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: see also Cat Piano and Tiger Organ, in which cats were alleged to have been whacked by needle-sharp piano keys, rather than having their tails yanked. There was no mention of a cat-piano- playing bear in the other account, and the bear, somehow, seems even less plausible than the cats. One wonders what this bear was supposed to do with his keyboard skills during the off season.]

  Source: The Fireside Sphinx by Agnes Repplier, 3rd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1939.

  the Cat Piano, The Donkey Chorus, the Pig Piano

  From Dave Walsh

  “In keeping with Darnton’s methodology and subject matter we might want to look at the cat piano. Athanasius Kircher first wrote about it in his great Musurgia universalis of 1650, and it has reappeared occasionally since. In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.

  “The cat piano confirms Darnton’s discovery that most early modern Europeans found the torture of cats funny. It also illustrates Kircher’s fascination with the relationship between the art of music and the natural production of animal sounds. But for us it is an instrument that has mercifully been forgotten.”. “1. According to Louis-Bertrand Castel and ‘Dr. Z.’ (see below), Athanasius Kircher described the cat piano is his Masurgia universalis, 2 vols. (Rome: Francisci Corbelletti, 1650), facsimile ed. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), but we have not been able to find it there. His pupil, Gaspar Schott, described it in his Magia universalis naturae et artis, sive recondita naturalium et artificialium rerum scientia, 4 vols. (Wurzburg, 1657- 1659), vol. 2, chap.

  “The cat piano was not unique. Schott proposed a donkey chorus, and Pierre Bayle tells us that the abbe de Beigne built a pig piano at the order of Louis XI. In every case the animal instrument was created to entertain a noble patron. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical, 5 vols. (London, 1736), facsimile ed. (New York: Garland, 1984), 3:803; and Isaac Nathan, Musurgia vocalis, 2d ed. (London: Fentum, 1836), p. 160.

  “The cat piano occasioned a recent debate in Experimental Musical Instruments 5, no. 5 (1989-1990): 6; and—in 6 (1990-1991)--no. 1, p. 4, no. 2, p. 3, and no. 5, p. 2.”

  Source: Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1995, pages 73, 246-7;Magia universalis naturae et artis, sive recondita naturalium et artificialium rerum scientia, 4 vols. (Wurzburg, 1657-1659), vol. 2, chap. “Felium musicam exhibere,” pages 372-373; La Nature 2 (1883) pages 519-520; Michael Bernhard Valenti, Museum museorum; oder, Vollstandige schau-buhne aller materialien und specereyen, nebst deren naturlichen beschreibung, election, nutzen und gebrauch. 2d ed., 3 vols. in 2 [Frankfurt am Main: J.D. Zummer und J.A. Jungen, 1714], page 73 and table 31; Gunnar Jungmarket, “Kattklaver och voterings-instrument Verklighet och fantasi,” Artes, no. 5 [1982]: pages 116-125; Pier
re Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical, 5 vols. (London, 1736), facsimile ed. (New York: Garland, 1984), 3:803; Isaac Nathan, Musurgia vocalis, 2d ed. (London: Fentum, 1836), page 160; Experimental Musical Instruments 5, no. 5 (1989-1990): 6; and in 6 (1990-1991) no. 1, p. 4, no. 2, p. 3, and no. 5, p. 2. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1995, pages 73, 246-7.

  Train Token Signals System

  From Dan Howland

  [Dan Howland remarks: Train token signals were a system for preventing collisions on single sections of railroad track. As the text mentions, the baton and paper version was all but dead when the book was published in the early 1940’s.] “Token Signals System “The essential principle of the token system is that the engineer has in his possession a form of token that is visible evidence that the signalman has given him permission to travel over a specific length of track.

  “In the earliest forms of this system, the token was a staff that resembled a policeman’s baton, marked with the names of the stations at each end of the section.

  “When two or more trains ran on a single line, the line was divided into sections, a staff being provided for each section. The staff for a particular section would be handed to the engineer at one signal box, and he would hand it in at the next box. From here it would be taken back to the first box by the engineer of the next train in the opposite direction, so that the staff was continually travelling between boxes.

  “No engineer could enter the section unless he was in possession of the appropriate staff, and if this was not available, obviously there was a train already in the section whose engineer was carrying the staff.” [Or the staff is sitting at the other station, and even though the track may very well be clear, you can’t proceed. See below.] “This train staff system had a serious drawback, for where there were two successive trains in the same direction, with no intermediate train in the opposite direction, the staff could not be brought back to enable the second train to proceed.