The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  Source: Personal Experience

  Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100

  From Tom Jennings

  The Model T of Computers

  “Watch this,” says Rick Hanson. He stands up, holds his laptop in front of him at shoulder level, and let’s go. It drops and bangs on the floor of his office, a tidy room in his California home crammed with computers, scanners, printers, fax machines, model-car kits, hot rod posters, videos, and a small, orderly electronics workbench. The computer bounces and clatters to a rest. Hanson picks it up and switches it on. It’s ready to go instantly, without warming up.

  “If that was a modern laptop,” he says, “I just lost $5,000.” It is a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, the world’s first laptop, from all the way back in 1983,and it looks like an oversize calculator with a keyboard. It came with 32 kilobytes of RAM—about a 1000th as much as its typical counterpart today—a 40-charcter-by-8-line liquid-crystal display, and no disk drive whatever, hard or floppy. Many hand-held calculators are more powerful nowadays, but Rick Hanson is one of several thousand people who still swear by the little machine—and is the founder and head of their informal organization, Club 100.

  “The Model 100 is simple and rugged. Newspapermen loved it—and some still do. If an elephant steps on it, it still works. It runs on four AA batteries. It’s plain text is compatible with everything, and it has a built-in modem, so you can file from anywhere. It has been on space shuttles, on U2 spy planes, on oil rigs.” Hanson, 49, is a professional website designer, and he actually writes some of the html for his clients on his Model 100 while sitting at the counter of Ann’s Sunshine Cafe, near his home in Pleasant Hill, California.

  “The genius behind this machine,” he says, “was none other than Bill Gates. The software for it was the last code Gates ever personally wrote himself. He was so far ahead of everybody, even then, that he was inventing the laptop when the personal computer was still a crazy idea. He even gave it a port for connecting to barcode scanners, for use in manufacturing. That’s how far ahead of the curve he was.

  “Gates took it to Radio Shack, and they said, ‘Well, we’ll make a thousand of them, and if we can’t sell them, we’ll just find some use for them.’ But at about $1,000 apiece, it was instantly a big hit. I fell in love with it right away.

  “I went to Homebrew, the original computer club, in 1971, after I came out of the service. In 1979, when I was online, I realized that people who are online always go snobbish. You had to be on CompuServe to be part of the Model 100 community, so I started Club 100 as an outfit that gave support by catalog, hone, mail and bulletin board.” In 1986, the Model 100 was replaced by the 102, which was only superficially different, and a couple of years later a Model 200 came out. By 1989 they wee discontinued—ancient history. Today the remaining users of the Model 100 may number in the tens of thousands. Hanson’s Club 100 has a Model 100 website where you can buy and sell the machines (they go for up to $250), order peripherals, and download free software, and it gets about 1,500 visits a day. Its address is [2015 update: http://www.club100.org/ ]

  “Newspapermen are still the core users,” he says. He points to a couple of 100s he has cleaned up and refurbished so they look new.

  “This one here I’m fixing up for a reporter in San Diego. This one’s for a medical student, to take notes in the library. They like it because you just turn it on and start writing. Press one key to save what you’ve written. Press three or four to modem to somewhere. For writing and saving and sending, it cannot be beat.”

  “The numbers of users is dwindling, but recently the Model 100 has found a second life. Brendan Murphy, a New York financial journalist has founded an outfit called Computers for Africa, dedicated to getting reporters to donate the Model 100s in their attics—typically the first computers they owned—to send to journalists in Mali and Senegal who write their dispatches by longhand and send them in by putting them on a bus. How long will the Model 100 hold out in the United States? “The secret is that technology changes, but people haven’t advanced,” Hanson says.

  “This is the Model T of computers. Model T’s last a long time. For me, I can’t ever see getting rid of it.”

  Old Hard Drives

  From Richard Kadrey

  [Richard Kadrey notes: Does dead media has consequences in the real world? Ask yourself this: how much information about you is stored on old, discarded computers being sold off for parts, or simply discarded?]

  MCCARTNEY’S BANK RECORDS FOUND ON DISCARDED COMPUTER

  An obsolete computer, sold by a London bank, contained 108 files containing private information about the movement of money in Paul McCartney’s bank accounts, the London Daily Express reported Tuesday. An expert hired by the newspaper said that it was “embarrassingly easy” to pull the data off the hard drive and that there had been no attempt to delete it. The Express said that similar security breaches have occurred on “millions of computers” that have been discarded without the hard disks being erased.

  pre-digital crowdsourcing

  From Philip Downey

  “The Post Office told rural mailmen to gather the names and addresses of all those farmers along their routes who wanted to sell their produce by mail. Those lists were given to city mailmen, who delivered them along their routes, so interested customers could get in contact with interested farmers directly.

  “Because customers wanted to know what kind of produce each farmer had to sell, local postmasters began including merchandise information on their lists, essentially creating a farm-produce mail-order catalogue.

  “A California merchant named David Lubin proposed a scheme whereby a farmer would pick up colored cards from the post office—white for eggs, pink for chickens, yellow for butter—mark each card with his prices, and mail the cards back. If he had three chickens that week for a dollar each, he would mail three pink cards to the post office.

  “There they would be put in a pigeonhole with all the other pink cards. Customers could come by and comparison shop, pick out the cards they liked, write their address on these cards, and have the postal clerk mail them back to the farmer. It was a pre-digital eBay. The scheme was adopted in and around Sacramento, and Congress appropriated ten thousand dollars to try a similar version of it on a large scale.

  “At about the same time, an assistant Postmaster General, James Blakslee, had the bright idea of putting together a fleet of parcel-post trucks, which would pick up farm produce from designated spots along the main roads and ship it directly to town. Blakslee laid out four thousand miles of produce routes around the country, to be covered by fifteen hundred parcel-post trucks.

  “In 1918, in the system’s inaugural run, four thousand day-old chicks, two hundred pounds of honey, five hundred pounds of smoked sausage, five hundred pounds of butter, and eighteen thousand eggs were carried from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to New York City, all for $31.60 in postage. New York’s Secretary of State called it ‘an epoch in the history and the world.’

  “Only it wasn’t. The Post Office had devised a wonderful way of communicating between farmer and customer. But there is more to a revolution than communication, and with a few years the farm-to-table movement, which started out with such high hopes, was dead.

  ‘The problem was that Blakslee’s trucks began to break down, which meant that the food onboard spoiled. Eggs proved hard to package, and so they often arrived damaged. Butter went rancid. In the winter of 1919-20, Blakslee collected a huge number of orders for potatoes, but, as Wayne Fuller writes in his wonderful history of the era, ‘RFD: The Changing Face of Rural America,’ the potatoes that year ‘were scarce, and good ones even scarcer, and when Blakslee’s men were able to buy them and attempted delivery, nothing but trouble followed.

  ‘Some of the potatoes were spoiled to begin with; some froze in transit; prices varied, deliveries went astray, and customers complained loudly enough for Congress to hear. One harried official wrote Blakslee that he could “F
ill the mails with complaints from people who have ordered potatoes from October to December.”.Some people had been waiting over four months, either to have the potatoes delivered or their money refunded.’”

  Source: The New Yorker, Dec 6, 1999. pg. 115. “Clicks and Mortar” by Malcolm Gladwell.

  Carmontelle’s Transparency

  From George ‘Jake’ Tringali

  “Carmontelle’s Transparency In 1996, the Museum aquired a monumental transparency created by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle. This work, Figures Walking in a Parkland, will be displayed at the Museum for the first time in a new exhibition, Carmontelle’s Transparency: An 18th-Century Motion Picture. Among the forerunners of the modern motion picture, the transparency was a pictorial narrative that suggested animation when rolled through the aperture of a hand-cranked optical viewing box. Illuminated with jewel-like watercolors, the Getty’s 12-foot transparency shows people strolling at leisure through a park rich in monuments, temples, and amusements. A viewing box like those used by Carmontelle also will be shown, as well as other drawings of the period.”

  Source: This information is from the J. Paul Getty Museum monthly flyer, 2000

  the Echo Cannonade of 1825

  From Candi Strecker

  A cannon-fire relay communicates and celebrates the opening of the Erie Canal.

  “In 1825, the first boat bound for New York City left Lake Erie and entered the newly completed Erie Canal. Observers at the point where the canal met the lake saw the boat and fired a cannon.

  “Some miles to the east, people heard the shot and fired a cannon there; when sound of that shot reached a cannon farther east, someone fired that one; and so on, in a sequence of hundreds of cannon placed at intervals along the canal route, down the Mohawk River, and down the Hudson River all the way to New York City.

  “At the final shot, an hour and twenty minutes after the first, the sequence was reversed, from the city all the way back to the lake. The Echo Cannonade (as people called it) announced the opening of the canal and began a big celebration in the city.”

  Source: Ian Frazier’s “Family,” 1994

  Undead Media - The Edison Stock Ticker

  From Bill Burns

  The Stock Ticker Company is reproducing the 1870s era Universal Stock Ticker, with an Internet connection to print current stock quotes. From their introduction: “The Heartbeat of Wall Street Returns Old meets new in one of the most ingenious ideas to celebrate our financial and innovative heritage—a handcrafted, working, museum-quality reproduction of the original Universal Stock Ticker. The Universal connects to the Internet to print your live stock quotes, and personal messages.”

  Source: stocktickercompany.com

  The Toy Artist drawing automaton

  From Dan Howland

  [Dan Howland remarks: In a nutshell, this toy was capable of storing simple line drawings as replacable dual cams. The engraving shows a seated doll in a clown suit, with his right arm holding a pencil lead to an easel. Behind him, on the base, is a crank.]

  The Artist still exists, along with the Scribe and the Musician. These are three mechanical figures built by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, around 1772. They’re in the Neuchatel Historical Museum in Switzerland, and they still work. They’re operated once a month.

  I’ve seen the Artist and the Musician working there; the Scribe was dismantled for maintenance. All are cam-driven. The Scribe has the most sophisticated mechanism, because it is programmable to write different texts.

  There’s a big stack of cams, with one stack level for each character, arranged to slide like an idler shaft in a gearbox. A wheel with slots for character plug-in blocks controls the shifting. The Scribe is thus programmed by putting in the right character blocks for the desired message.

  They’re beautiful bits of clockwork. The works actually fit inside the doll figures, which are about 2’ high.

  Source: Mark Rosheim’s “Robot Evolution”, ISBN 0-471-02622-0

  Mechanical Memories (rotating disk, movable pins)

  From John Nagle

  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.” Mechanisms like that date back much further than post-WWII. They were a common storage mechanism in jukeboxes back to the 1920s. T

  he oldest one I know of is a destination-sign controller in the London Transport Museum, London. This device consists of a 4-bit rotary encoder, a 4 bit x 10 shift register, and a 1 out of 16 decoder. But it’s all 19th century technology. The shift register is a drum with pins, and it’s huge; the thing looks like a drive system for a tower clock, standing about three feet high and powered by a weight, cable, and crank, just like a big clock. As of 1985, it was still working.

  Source: Personal observation

  The ephemeral nature of magnetic domains on rotating platters

  From John Spragens

  The cold, cold ground may preserve historical data more effectively than computers, according to a BBC report. The Beeb cites a University of York study that looked at records of scores of archeological digs between 1991 and 1996 -- stored in computer databases.

  It will come as no surprise to necronauts that the data had deteriorated much faster than the archeological artifacts had while they were underground. The list of problems ranged from corrupted floppies to obsolete physical media formats and database files that can’t be read by current programs.

  “Kept on standalone computers or on disks in a shoe box, data from sites will be of less use to tomorrow’s archaeologists than if the site had not been excavated in the first place,” the BBC says.

  For some reason, the reporter has greater faith in the Net: “Servers can go down or will need upgrading, but in theory, information on the internet will last forever.” Well, in theory...

  Pre-cinema moving pictures (electrotachyscope)

  From Didier Volckaert

  The Elektrischer Schnellseher (also called Electrotachyscope) was build by Ottomar Anschtz (Germany) in 1887.

  The machine powered (by electricity) a circle containing 24 photograps printed on glass. The images were made using the Muybridge technique. This is important because therefor the 24 images were truly a photographic mathematical fragmentation of a reality in motion. (Most pictures used by other devices at that time were just actors posing before the camera and ‘faking’ motion. A ‘filmcamera’ - a device that could take at least 16 images a second - did not excist till 1892 (Le Prince).

  The unique matter of this device is that the image was not projected onto a screen but instead the viewer looked to the glass pictures itself. These were lit from behind for a fraction of a second by a Gleisser-bulb every time one of the glass plates passed the lamp. Using this technique Anschltz avoided the main problem of all other devices, the fact that the pictures were always moving and therefor could not provide a sharp image.

  The Nazi Volksempfanger Radio

  From Bruce Sterling

  “The industrial rationalization that took place under the Third Reich embraced everyday objects, as well as architecture, art and armaments.

  “The National Socialist regime used form in a very precise way and applied its aesthetic ideas to all areas of production, using them as instruments of political and cultural propaganda. The radio receiver, like other products, was closely studied to see how it could best fulfil its role at the heart of totalitarian government: namely to infiltrate every house in the Reich.

  “Walter Maria Kersting was one of the pioneers of German industrial design. In The Living Form, published in 1932, he described how the task of the designer was to create ‘simple and cheap objects, which must not appear to be more than they are. and which can be bought anywhere.’ Their mechanisms must be obvious so that they can be understood by peo
ple ‘who do not have a technical mind,’ and should be designed such that they are ‘foolproof in the event of mistreatment.’

  “Kersting didn’t realize how pertinent his comments were: in 1928 he designed a radio receiver several hundred thousand of which had been manufactured within five years. His original design only underwent one modification before mass production started: the addition of the swastika on the front.

  “The radio was designed according to Kersting’s functionalist principles, which led to what was at the time an innovatory fusing of concept, form and materials. An ancestor of today’s ‘black box’ hi-fi designs, its cubic cabinet, moulded from plastic, incorporated the radio’s components. The buttons had been so well thought out in the initial design that the same configuration was adapted for the manufactured version.

  The set was ‘foolproof’ to use and Hitler was careful to ensure that its range was limited to Nazi frequencies, fearing that English, French, and Bolshevik transmissions would be picked up and interfere with his political broadcasts.”

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: This is the Volksempfanger’s “dead media” aspect: the Volksempfanger was a medium specifically designed to be “all-Nazi, all the time.”]

  “What was, during 15 years of Nazi rule, a formidable Nazi propaganda device, was transformed, at the end of the war, into a terrible trap for the Germans, who were unaware of the advance of allied troops through their already devastated territory.

  “After the Second World War, Walter Maria Kersing denied that he had designed his radio receiver for political ends, despite the fact that this standard and very cheap product (it was subsidized by the government) had been of enormous service to the Nazi regime for propaganda purposes.