The Dead Media Notebook (53 page)

They were also known as aspect cards, optical coincidence cards, and Batten cards (after W. E. Batten, who in 1947 described the use of “interior-punched” index cards to carry out rapid manual searches of chemical patents). The basic principle of Peek-a-Boo card systems is that key-words (subject terms, distinctive properties, taxonomic characters or attributes) had their own index cards. The cards were divided up into a grid, where individual grid locations corresponded to specific documents, species or data records. The grid assignments remained fixed across the entire deck.

To identify the subset of records satisfying multiple search terms, the subject term cards were removed from the card deck, aligned, and held up to a light. Items having all the subject terms (i.e., set- intersection, the Boolean “AND”) would show up as illuminated spots at their respective grid locations. Conventional punched cards and tabulating equipment made individual cases the basic “unit of information storage”. Punched cards like the IBM (Hollerith) cards used coded fields for recording different descriptive terms or numerical data. Each card corresponded to an individual database record.

Peek-a-Boo cards reversed the standard procedures by using conceptual categories rather than documents as the unit of information storage. Logically, this “reversed” system corresponds to an (inverted) index, the basis of book indexes, text retrieval systems, library catalogs, and Internet search engines. Commercial cards were available in capacities ranging from 400 to 40,000 items or grid locations.

For handling databases of greater size, the Omnidex system used cards with 540 locations, 500 for individual data records and the remaining 40 locations reserved for a system of sub- files, to allow multi-level searches of databases of any size. One advantage of Peek-a-Boo index cards is that researchers could readily prepare their own decks using mimeographed sheets or stencils at very little cost, presenting an attractive alternative to “batch processing” in the days before PCs.

A literature search could be performed in minutes, using equipment that could easily fit into a jacket pocket, rather than waiting overnight for a central mainframe to process a deck of IBM cards. At least one manufacturer produced Peek-a-Boo cards made from translucent plastic. This created a ranking of search results from the best, most relevant items (brightest spots) to the least relevant (dim spots).

This system was an optical analog of the Logoscope’s graphical best-matching or set-superposition search method.

One of the earliest applications of the Peek-a-Boo principle seems to have been a system for bird identification, for which a patent was issued in 1915. (Taylor, H., “Selective device”, US Patent 1,165,465.)

In 1916, the French recreational mathematics journal Sphinx-Oedipe published a description of a number guessing game which exploited the optical coincidence principle. (This window system is described in “Mathematical Recreations”, Maurice Kraitchik, Dover Books, 1953, pp. 63-65.)

An optical coincidence card system for identifying mineral specimens was developed by C. J. Gray, and described in the Transactions of the South African Geological Society, 1920.

Also in 1920, a coincidence card system for compiling tabular and statistical data was patented by H. Soper. The system interspersed fully perforated reading columns between the columns of punched data, to allow selection and search without removing cards from the deck.

An automated photo-electric system for searching personnel records was described in a French patent issued to Henri Lieber, 1923. Electro-mechanical systems based on optical index cards and photo-electric read-out, intended for telephony applications, received patents in 1951 and 1954. (I have been unable to determine if index cards were ever actually used in telephone switching systems.)

Colin Burke, in “Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex” (Scarecrow Press, 1994, p. 262) describes techniques developed by Polish cryptanalysts in the 1930s to crack the German Enigma codes.

These Polish cards made use of punched overlay sheets and a light source: “It was much like the system later used by the British and American cryptanalysts and was similar to what postwar information scientists called the Peek-a-Boo system.”

The Polish method substituted “parallel” optical search for the spinning rotors, plugboards, and statistical computations of the British codebreaking computers. (Apparently, American cryptanalysts had been using optical methods to apprehend statistical “coincidences” since the 1920s.)

In 1940 an American mathematician, H. Robinson, published a set of prepared stencils using the Peek-a-Boo principle, as an aid in the solution of equations having the form “x^2 = 2(mod m)”.

The Microcite system, developed at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (1954), was a clever marriage of Peek- a-Boo cards and microform technology. Peek-a-Boo index cards were overlaid on a sheet of microfiche containing document abstracts. Abstracts that matched the query terms could be read directly with a microfiche reader.

The Minimatrex system (from Jonkers Business Machines) used microfilm and a special viewing system to store micro-film strips (“termstrips”), each containing 5 or 10 frames. Each frame was a photographic reduction of the standard 10,000 item Jonkers Termatrex index card. Up to 12 termstrips could be superimposed in a single search.

Peek-a-Boo card indexes were part of the vanished “documentarian” tradition of manual coding and indexing schemes, pushed aside in the rush to computerized databases and information retrieval systems.

High-speed digital computers can now accomplish the same ends using grids of ten million “cells” and hundreds of thousands of “cards”. However, there is still no better way to demonstrate how a search engine works (or how machine pattern recognition or AI expert systems or associative memories work) than by means of this long-forgotten manual indexing technology.

Source:
Wildhack, W. A., J. Stern. The Peek-a-Boo System: Optical Coincidence Subject Cards in Information Searching; in, Punched Cards, Their Applications to Science and Industry, 2
^nd
edition; R. S. Casey et al., Rheinhold, NY, 1958. Bourne, Charles P. “Methods of Information Handling”, Wiley, NY, 1963. Jahoda, Gerald. “Information Storage and Retrieval Systems for Individual Researchers”, Wiley, NY, 1970. Burke, Colin. “Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex”, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen N.J., 1994.

From Bruce Sterling

[Bruce Sterling remarks: The US military has discovered that the eighteen-month lifespan of state-of-the-art chips is seriously interfering with their ability to keep war machines armed and ready. One answer, alluded to in this article, is to step outside the process of obsolescence and simulate “legacy electronics” by “cloning” them with “VDELE.” (It is not explained what is supposed to happen when the VDELE “design environment” itself becomes obsolete.) This development is of interest to dead media studies because the rapid obsolescence of electronic components has always been a Mark of Cain for electronic media. The simulation and emulation of dead hardware will increase in importance as the graveyard of dead multimedia becomes more and more crowded with the victims of Moore’s Law.]

“The first F-22 production unit was unveiled last April amid great fanfare. Its first flight, originally slated for late May, was re-scheduled several times as a result of brake malfunctions, flight-software problems, and a fuel leak...

“(Lockheed Martin corporation) recently announced that it had achieved a technical breakthrough that will help the Air Force cope with a problem that is affecting other military aircraft programs, the unavailability of parts. Pentagon officials refer to this conundrum as ‘diminishing manufacturing sources.’ “The parts shortfall stems largely from the short commercial life-span of digital electronic components versus the long service life of weapons systems. A digital component, for example, may have a life of 18 months while the weapon system using that component often lasts for decades. Industry officials believe this ‘parts obsolescence’ problem drives up the coses of a weapons system’s operation and support, which amount to about two- thirds of the entire life cycle investment.

“Lockheed Martin’s innovation involves the ‘first prototype clone replacement for an obsolete airborne printed circuit assembly,’ says a company spokesman. The savings will result, he says, from the use of collaborative tools and electronic specifications.”

“The process used to develop the prototype is based on a VHSIC hardware description language (VHDL) model for an obsolete printed circuit assembly. Once developed, the model is then tested for compliance against the original obsolete printed circuit board in a virtual development, using commercially available software and hardware tools.

“In this simulation environment, says the company spokesman, the design of the obsolete hardware can be re- targeted into modern component technology. Since the design is re-captured in an electronic specification, the cost of re-engineering is ‘greatly reduced.’ “(James A. Houston, a Lockheed Martin engineering project manager) says the benefit of cloning is that the embedded software and support equipment of the re- engineered electronics can be kept intact. Money is saved because there is no need to re-develop software and support equipment.

“The Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a contract for a VHDL design environment for legacy electronics (VDELE). ‘VDELE. overcomes the parts obsolescence problem using current technology,’ says Houston.”

Source National Defense magazine (ISSN 0092-1491) October 1997 Volume LXXXII Number 531 Modelling and Simulation Techniques Aid Air Force Effort to Cut F-22 Costs pages 32-33

From Alan Wexelblat

Sherry Turkle’s most recent book, Life on the Screen contains something of a report on a dead medium which has been mentioned before on this list: the French (Parisian) system of pneumatic tubes for letter delivery. What I find interesting about this is (a) the recency of the report, Turkle lived in Paris in the early 60s; and (b) the specific use for which this medium retained its relevance: “I stayed with a family [in Paris] who avoided the telephone for everything but emergency communications. An intimate communication would go by pneumatique. One brought (or had delivered) a handwritten message to the local post office. There, it was placed in a cannister and sent through a series of underground tubes to another post office. It would then be hand delivered to its destination.

“I was taught that the pneumatique was the favored medium for love letters, significant apologies, or requests for an important meeting. Although mediated by significant amounts of technology, the handwritten pneumatique bore the trace of the physical body of the person who sent it; it was physically taken from that person’s hand and put into the hand of the person to whom it was sent. The pneumatique’s insistence on physical presence may have ill-prepared me for the lessons of postmodernism, but it has made e-mail seem oddly natural.” As we delve into the reasons for a medium’s death or disappearance, it would be wise to keep in mind those media which deliver this sense of physical presence and see if that (or something like it) is a factor in media Darwinism.

Source: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle Touchstone Books 1997 ISBN 0684833484

From David Morton

[David Morton remarks: The following article describes one of the several different technologies that RCA considered or actually marketed under the name “SelectaVision.” Other technologies included the SelectaVision capacitive videodisk and the SelectaVision VHS videotape system. The film-based system described below, which never went into production, coincided with but was significantly different than the film-based “Electronic Video Recording” technology developed at the same time by CBS, which was also a commercial failure.]

“A laboratory model of a low-cost television color tape player built around lasers and holography and destined for home use in the early 1970s was exhibited recently by RCA. In commercial form, the SelectaVision player, which will be designed to attach to any standard color television set, will play full-color programs recorded on tapes made of the same clear, inexpensive plastic materials used in super-markets to wrap meats.

“These tapes will be scratch proof, rustproof, and bb virtually indestructible under normal use. The conversion process is described as follows: a color program originating from a color television camera or color videotape player is recorded on conventional film by means of an electron beam recorder. This film, known as the color encoded master, is then developed and convened by a laser to a series of holograms recorded on a plastic tape recorded with photoresist, a material that hardens to varying degrees depending upon the intensity of the light striking it.

“Next, the tape is developed in a chemical solution that eats away the portions of the photoresist not hardened by the laser beam. The result is a relief map of photoresist whose hills and valleys, and the spacing between, represent the original color television program in coded form. This is called the hologram master.

“The hologram master is plated with a thick coating of nickel and stripped away, leaving a nickel tape with the holograms impressed on it like a series of engravings. This is the nickel master.

“Finally, by feeding the nickel master through a set of pressure rollers along with a transparent vinyl tape of similar dimensions, the holographic engravings on the master are impressed on the smooth surface of the vinyl as holographic reliefs. The result is a SelectaVision program tape ready for home use.

“Playback of such a tape requires only that the beam from a very-low-power laser pass through it into a simple, low-cost television camera that sees the images reconstructed by the laser directly, and their colors as coded variations in those images. The playback mechanism, the laser, and the television camera are all housed in the SelectaVision player, which is attached to the antenna terminals of a standard color television set for actual viewing.”