The Dead Media Notebook (55 page)

“The RAM expansion modules, data recorder, and thermal printer never made it past the drawing board, and the music synthesizer had but one software title to take advantage of its capabilities. While the 2600 adapter greatly expanded the library of available games, much of the steam this generated had already been stolen by Coleco’s own expansion module.

1984 would spell the end of the original Intellivision as the world knew it. T.E. Valeski, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Mattel Electronics, along with a group of investors, purchased the assets, trademarks, patents, and right to the Intellivision in January of 1984 for $16.5 million dollars. The purchase was backed by financing from Tangible Industries, a division of Revco Drug Stores. The newly formed company was originally called Intellivision, Inc., and later renamed INTV, Inc., after Valeski negotiated all rights from Revco in November of 1984. During the next two years, the new company would lie dormant while plans were being made for a re-emergence.

“In the fall of 1985, the INTV System III (also called the Super Pro System) appeared at Toys ‘R Us, Kiddie City, and in a mail order catalog sent to owners of the original Intellivision direct from INTV. The new console was of the same general design as the original master component, except it sported a fresh black plastic shell with brushed aluminum trim. Several new games accompanied the release of the new system, and 1985 would register over $6 million dollars in sales worldwide, indicating that INTV Corp. had indeed revived the Intellivision. INTV continued to market games and repair services through the mail with great success. Between 1985 and 1990 over 35 new games were released, bringing the Intellivision’s game library to a total of 125 titles.

“Many more changes were to come during the final six years of Intellivision’s useful life. In 1987, an improved master component called the INTV System IV was shown at the January CES, which sported detachable controllers and a timing device. Unfortunately, this never saw the light either. In the fall of 1988, INTV re- introduced the computer keyboard adapter through their mail order catalog on a limited quantity basis.

“In 1990, INTV discontinued retail sales of their games and equipment and sold them only through the mail channels. The change in marketing was due to agreements with Nintendo and Sega to become a software vendor for the NES, Game Boy and Genesis. In 1991, INTV sold out its stock of Intellivision games and consoles, and the company, along with the Intellivision, gradually faded into black.”

Source: Mattel Intellivision Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) by Larry Anderson Version 3.0, June 27
^th
, 1995 “Copyright © 1995 Larry Anderson

From Morbus

[Bruce Sterling remarks: Steve Baldwin has an interesting hobby. He not only hunts down dead websites (as the following indicates) but he has entertaining and highly caustic things to say about them in his own website.]

[Morbus remarks: “Ghost Sites is a zine that guides you to the rotting corpses on the Internet. All those sites that haven’t been updated in years, or proclaim movies long dead, forgotten to the sands of time.”]

[The following text is by Steve Baldwin.] “Layoffs at Hotwired. A bloodbath rumored at CNet. Cool Site of the Day on the rocks. A cruel, winnowing ice storm is blowing through the Net, and many of yesterday’s once unassailable Web sites are fighting for their lives.

“Many say that the age of experimentalism is over, that it’s time for the Web to grow up and start earning a living, that the world won’t shed a tear for the legions of half-baked and half-cocked sites now lying in ruins.

“At Ghost Sites, we try to avoid long-winded discussions of how we got ourselves into this awful mess. We’re not here to speechify, we’re here to wield a shovel and play Taps for dead web sites. Someday, perhaps when the Web becomes civilized enough to bury its own dead, we’ll move on to happier pursuits.

“But not now. There’s too much digging to do.

“If you’re interested in this Ghost Sites thing, it is a project that I began in the summer of 1996 while I was working for Time-Warner’s Pathfinder. Late in the evening of July 4
^th
, while piloting a small craft across Long Island Sound, I had what only can be described as an epiphany.

“From out of the depths came a cruel vision of the World Wide Web. It wasn’t a friendly place, an innocent place of community, commerce and chat. It was a great and utterly pitiless electronic ocean that swallowed up sites, careers, and venture capital like a ravenous killer whale. Great sites, sites like Mecklerweb and iGuide, were going down with all hands. Great fortunes were collapsing and proud content sites lay wrecked on the bottom. No one seemed to care. The future was a vast abyss, who would record these days of New Media folly, disaster and despair? “Back on shore, but still haunted by this vision, I launched Ghost Sites as a modest attempt to document the great disappearing fleet of web sites sinking beneath the waves. This project briefly made me spectacularly famous, and then I was quickly, and completely forgotten.

“By March of 1997, Ghost Sites had succumbed to the same deadly entropy that had settled over the Internet, and became a crewless wreck itself. For six cruel months, it drifted like a despised garbage barge, broke its keel in a summer squall, and finally washed up on Geocities.

“On an icy November morning, Morbus boarded the wreck, inspected the damage, and offered the captain a safe harbor. The bilge pump was started, and the squealing, rusty hull lifted off the sands again. It soon arrived here, in the dark, unquiet waters of Disobey.Com.

“If you want to see the article that made me briefly famous, check out ‘Ghosts in the Machine.’ I became so famous because of this article that there were women lining up to see me, I felt like Elvis! But then. the fall from grace.

Source: www.disobey.com/ghostsites/ [2015 note: Still alive, ish]

From Roberto de Sousa Causo

[Bruce Sterling remarks: One might feel a bit of skepticism for these nationalist claims of pre-eminence in radio, but I have to give this Brazilian journalist a lot of credit for his assertive title.]

“Marconi my Ass! Brazilian Radio Inventor Arrived Ahead” by Geraldo Nunes

“Brazilian Catholic priest Landell de Moura tested positively a radio device in Sao Paulo, in 1893, two years ahead of Marconi.

“This is a story of individual vision and collective shortsightness. Back in 19
^th
century Brazil, the only way you could become a scientist was by first becoming a member of the Catholic Church. That was what Landell de Moura (born in January 21, 1861, dead July 30 1928) did in 1879, in order to be accepted at the Gregorian University in Italy. There he met Guglielmo Marconi, who was then studying the telegraph, while Moura went to researching radio transmission.

“Back in Brazil he was met with indifference by local Church officials. After insisting on his projects for some time and suffering a lot of transferral from one town to another, he ended up in Sao Paulo, capital of a State with the same name, a city in which he found means to build his ‘emissor de ondas’ or wave emitter.

“In 1893, in the Paulista Avenue, he tested his emissor de ondas, contacting a receiver installed at Alto de Santana, a place 8 kilometers from the emitter site. This was two years ahead of Marconi, and while Marconi’s device could work only with morse code, Moura’s emissor de ondas could really transmit the human voice.

“Moura proceeded to get a patent registered in Sao Paulo, and other three in the US, among them were a hertzian wave transmitter, a wireless telephone and telegraph.

“Yet his discoveries and inventions were badly received by the Church intelligentsia in Brazil, which claimed talking from place to place without a wire could only be a ‘Devil’s deed.’ When looking for government support Landell de Moura was treated as a crazy dumb idiot, and in 1904 his patents expired.

“Eventually, in the 20s, the radio was introduced in Brazil and become a major cultural feature, and everybody of course honored Marconi for that.”

Source: Marconi uma Ova!, an article by Geraldo Nunes in the weekly magazine of the newspaper Diario Popular Number 48, October 5, 1997. The article was based in Reynaldo C. Tavare’s book, Historias que o Radio Nao Contou.

From Tom Jennings

Nixie indicators (aka “Nixie tubes”) were an all- electronic display device developed by Burroughs Corp in 1954 from a design by the Haydu brothers a year earlier. Nixies were a novel use of tried-and-true technologies, vacuum tube packaging of gaseous-discharge lamps (“neon lamps”) shaped into alphanumeric symbols. Until the late ‘60’s when supplanted by LEDs (then LCDs), Nixies were the premier display technology for low-bandwidth information. A Nixie contained up to 12 symbols; most commonly digits 0 through 9, others with sign (+, -), decimal point or even alphas. Characters were cursive, discrete, fully formed, and a bright orange color.

Nixies were nicely synergistic, bridging the pre- computer world with the post. For the first time, instrumentation could display numbers as people drew them, nicely formed digits in a linear left-to-right string, with leading sign and decimal point.

They were a monolithic electronic device rather than a mechanical assembly or array of lamps. Texas Instruments and others made TTL integrated-circuit interfaces for them, the 7440 and 7441.

Nixies are related to another dead computing/display technology, decimal counting tubes, inherently- computational devices tried in the crazy days of early computing, (about 1935-1955).

Decimal tubes performed functions otherwise requiring a chassis full of tubes and discrete components. A decimal tube “effectively replac[es] 18 transistors (10 high voltage ones) and forty diodes”, a Good Thing in 1954.

The design life of decimal counting tubes was fairly long, late 40’s through early 60’s. Gaseous decimal counting tubes were also a medium unto themselves. They directly displayed their internal state via visibly-glowing electrodes, which commercial equipment used to advantage, mainly in counters and scalers.

From Gary Gach

“The Horse Relay Station (Pabal) “Horse relay stations were a communication system established to deliver emergency military secret documents promptly from the central government to the border.

“Relaying information about an enemy’s position using beacon or smoke was limited when it was cloudy or foggy. Thus the horse relay station system supplemented the beacon and fire system. It originated as a military secret service, established by the Sung dynasty in order to attack the Jurchen dynasty.

“There were three types of delivery. The poch’e and kopgakch’e were a type of communication in which a man delivers a message by running, and mach’e was a type of communication in which a horse was used. This system was further developed during Yuan and Ming dynasties of China.

“During the Japanese Invasion, the Ming China’s military dispatched messages to the Choson dynasty using the relay station. Kim Ung-nam, a consular representative, and Han Chun-gyom, the royal secretary, suggested in adopting a similar system. It was then adopted and 194 stations were established. Three main sectors, West, North, and South were established. They were further subdivided into regions. There was a stop station every twenty or thirty ri for jockeys.

“Important aspects of operating horse relay stations were security of horses and soldiers. Soldiers were organized by paljang and palgun. The palgun was composed of cavalry and infantry which was composed of militia. Their main duty was the transmission of official secret documents. Those who delayed transmission, damaged documents or stole them were strictly punished. There were case in which secrets were leaked.

“Methods of beacon and fire were further developed after the seventeenth to eighteenth century with the horse relay station system as part of the Choson military communications system, but the horse relay stations were abolished with the advent of telephone and telegraph in 1894.”

Source: ENCYCLOPEDIA KOREANA, to be published 1998 by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Seoul, Korea (Warning: Korean financial difficulties may make the publication date problematic)

From Bill Burns

Thursday, January 1 12:43 PM EST “SOS distress signal era ends “LONDON, Jan. 1 (UPI), The Morse code distress signal SOS is now officially history, but not before a 13,000 ton Bahamas-registered ship used it to call for help 790 miles west of Ireland.

“The SOS signal and official use of Morse Code was formally scrapped worldwide at midnight.

“The ship MV Oak was headed from Canada to Liverpool with a crew of 26 when its cargo of wood shifted in storm- force winds and it lost all engine power Wednesday.

“The ship tapped out Morse code’s final SOS and the signals were picked up in Britain and passed to the Falmouth coastguard. The Coast Guard initially considered the message a joke signaling the end of an era.

“Guard spokesman Gerry Wood said, ‘We haven’t had a Morse distress message for years. It was almost too perfect.’ “But he said they reacted knowing ‘someone was in distress. as nobody ever sends an SOS signal as an exercise.’ “Ship signals are now dispatched by modern satellite voice and computer communication.

“The Morse code system dates back to 1908 when British and German radio operators agreed to use the SOS message.

“The letters were chosen because they are simple to tap out in Morse code: dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot- dot.

“Wednesday’s message from the Oak said only ‘SOS. SOS. This is Oak. Position 53 16 N, 24 59 W. Stop engine. We need assistance.’ “British Coast Guard officials report the ship has been abandoned and the nearest ship is some 400 miles away. But the Oak’s crew and captain are reportedly aboard lifeboats.”

Source United Press International 1/1/1998; the telegraph collectors list