The Dead Media Notebook (68 page)

“In early 1964, Mr. Ross Cook, Mr. Wilfred Rathbun, Mr. Frank Ware and Mr. Ted Nuestad, got together and formed a new corporation, Zip Tube Systems, Inc. The first stock certificate was issued to Ross Cook, Inc. on March 6, 1964. The new company was located at 6621 Eight Avenue, Los Angeles, California. The company moved once within California, and finally to Denver, Colorado in 1981. By the time Zip Tube Systems, Inc. moved, it had expanded its distributor network to have national coverage. Today, we have now expanded into the international market and have in excess of 30 distributors internationally.

“Through the years, Zip has developed and refined an extensive product line to service the need of a diverse customer base. Zip Tube Systems, Inc. is unique. It is owned by a network of engineers and installers throughout the world. This experience has made us a leader in the pneumatic tube industry.

“During the last several years we have made a significant increase in our product line with the introduction of an automatic and a semi-automatic pneumatic tube system. We have also introduced an extreme duty line of equipment designed for the steel mill, foundry and other harsh industrial environments. These products compliment our already large selection of standard product lines. Zip is especially proud to be one of the only companies that will custom manufacture a pneumatic tube system to an individual customer’s needs.

“We would like to welcome you to Zip’s long history, and we are confident you will find your pneumatic tube system extremely economical, rewarding and easy to maintain.”

Source: Company Profile And History of Zip Tube Systems Inc. [2015 note: Ziptube.com is dead but visible through archive.org]

[Bruce Sterling remarks: this colorful medical tale of the hazards of decaying media has all the qualities of a Jan Harold Brunvand urban legend. Improbable, yes, but what a bar story.]

“Book Fungus Can Get You High” by Ellen Warren, Chicago Tribune “CHICAGO, Getting high on great literature is taking on a whole new meaning. It turns out that, if you spend enough time around old books and decaying manuscripts in dank archives, you can start to hallucinate. Really.

“We’re not talking psychedelia, ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ stuff, here. But maybe only a step or two away from that.

“Experts on the various fungi that feed on the pages and on the covers of books are increasingly convinced that you can get high, or at least a little wacky, by sniffing old books. Fungus on books, they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores.

“The story of The Strangeness in the Stacks first started making its way through the usually staid antiquarian books community late last year with the publication of a paper in the British medical journal, The Lancet.

“There, Dr. R.J. Hay wrote of the possibility that ‘fungal hallucinogens’ in old books could lead to ‘enhancement of enlightenment.’ “’The source of inspiration for many great literary figures may have been nothing more than a quick sniff of the bouquet of mouldy books,’ wrote Hay, one of England’s leading mycologists (fungus experts) and dean of dermatology at Guy’s Hospital in London.

“Well, said an American expert on such matters, it may not be that easy.

“’I agree with his premise, but not his dose. It would take more than a brief sniff,’ aid Monona Rossol, an authority on the health effects of materials used in the arts world.

“For all the parents out there, these revelations would seem ideal for persuading youngsters to spend some quality time in the archives.

“But attention kids: You can’t get high walking through the rare books section of the library.

“Rossol said it would take a fairly concentrated exposure over a considerable period of time for someone to breathe in enough of the spores of hallucinogenic fungus to seriously affect behavior. There are no studies to tell how much or how long before strange behavior takes hold.

“Still, this much seems apparent, if you want to find mold, the only place that may rival a refrigerator is a library.

“Just last week the Las Cruces, N.M., Public Library was closed indefinitely, prompted by health concerns after a fungus outbreak in the reference section. Library director Carol Brey said the fungus promptly spread to old history books and onward to the literature section.

“The town’s Mold Eradication Team, she said, shuttered the library as a precaution. ‘We didn’t want to take any chances,’ she said. A mold removal company will address the problem, which is believed to have originated in the air conditioning system.

“Psychedelic mushrooms, the classic hallucinogenic fungus, derive their mind-altering properties from the psilocybin and psilocin they produce naturally.

“One historic example of this phenomenon, scientists now believe, is the madness that prevailed in the late 1600s in Salem, Mass., where ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus, infected the rye crops that went into rye bread. Ergot contains lysergic acid, a key compound of the hallucinogenic drug LSD. This tiny fungus and its wild effects on the rye-bread-eating women may have led to the Salem witch trials.

“Rossol, a New York chemist and consultant to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History who publishes the newsletter Acts Facts, the journal of Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety, said that there have not been scientific studies on the hallucinogenic effects of old books.

“But, relying on accounts from newsletter readers who report their own strange symptoms, ranging from dizziness to violent nausea, she says there is no doubt that moldy old volumes harbor hallucinogens.”

Source: Ellen Warren in Chicago Tribune (no date given); reprinted in Arizona Republic, October 6, 1996, Houston Chronicle October 6, 1996, and in Rare Books Newsletter of the National Library of Scotland pages 59-62 (Autumn 1996) see also: Sick Library Syndrome by Dr. R. J. Hay in The Lancet 346, December 16, 1995, pages 1573-1574.

From Mike Kelley

Back in the late 1950’s and early 60’s I worked first in the U.S. Senate, then in the White House, operating an automatic typewriter that made a final product, a letter, which the recipient thought was hand-typed. The salutation was personalized, as was the address, but the body of the letter was typed automatically.

I could operate three of these machines at once, turning out 85-90 “hand typed” letters an hour. I moved sequentially from one to the next, typing in the address and Dear ____ on one, while the previous machine was still typing the body of the letter.

The machines were called Robotypers and they are indeed a dead medium today. They operated like player pianos, each with its own air pump, a coded roll representing the “hand typed letter,” and an IBM model B or C typewriter (another dead medium).

There was a platform in front of the box that held the roll, with little hooks for each of the typewriter’s key levers. One hook would go over each key lever, beneath the keyboard, and these would pull down the keys as the roll, with its coded air holes, was pulled over a bar.

Mechanics had a hard time disengaging the typewriter from the Robo machine when repairs were needed.

At the U.S. Senate, the place I worked was called the “Robo Room”, a terrible name for a room with a terrible sound.

In the White House, we had the machines in a separate room near the Correspondence Section. At the White House, the only type of IBM machine used for letters was the Proportional Spacing model, also a dead medium. These models used different widths for various letters, much like (but not nearly as complex) as cold type.

Most typed characters took up 3 space units. The “i” was two units wide, small “m” and “w” were 4, and the capital “m” and “w” were 5 units. This made the spacing movement uneven. In making the Robo Rolls at the White House, I had to add room on the roll to compensate for proportional spacing, a work something like typesetting.

Without this extra work on the rolls, the old IBM’s keys would overstrike typed characters on the page, or sometimes keys would even smash into each other. I don’t see the Robotyper on your Master List of Dead Media, but it surely is one very dead medium today.

At its peak, however, it gave a lot of folks the feeling that their mail to politicians got a hand typed reply.

A newer and competing auto-typer, developed in the 1950s a bit later than the original ROBOTYPER, was the FLEXOWRITER, yet another dead medium. This machine, eventually manufactured by Singer, was an all-in-one typewriter and tape reader-writer.

The Flexowriter featured a reader/writer unit attached to the side of the typewriter. It had a little sprocketed drum, which pulled an oiled pink paper tape across a slot that contained 6 or 7 teeth.

These teeth would move up and down in mechanical synchrony with each move of the sprocket-drum. There was a large blank tape reel stored on the back of the machine. When composing a new letter, the end of this master tape would be fed through the sprocket, and the teeth would literally punch out holes in the tape, in patterns corresponding to each keystroke.

Patterns were easily readable by those of us who learned them, so we could find a typo on the tape. We would fix it by hitting the “delete” key, which punched holes across the entire tape. When a letter was completed, the operator added a “Stop” code, a number of “Deletes”, and then cut the tape from the master roll. The front and back of the tape would then be glued together, lining up the delete holes at each end.

This “endless loop” would then be put into the machine, and would type out the correspondence. The advantage of the Flexowriter was that the same machine could write AND read the tapes. It was a self contained unit, needed no noisy air pump, and the little tape loops for each type of correspondence could be stored in far less space than the Robo rolls (which were similar in size to a player piano roll. The products of both of these now Dead Media would be sent for a “genuine, hand made signature” to yet another machine called the auto-pen.

As far as I know, the auto- pen is still alive and well in offices today.

Source: personal experience The Robotyper and the Flexowriter

From Stefan Jones

Dan Bunten / Danielle Bunten Berry 1949-1998 [Stefan Jones remarks: One of the things that primed me to become a delver in Dead Media studies was Bruce Sterling’s description, in his speech to the Computer Game Developer’s Conference, of the fate of his Atari 800. I owned (own) of of those machines, and spent many hundreds of hours playing games on it before consigning it to a box in the corner of the basement. Although many of its games were far more entertaining than those available for my PC, the trouble of getting it going and loading software from decrepit disk drives took its toll.

[I just learned that one of the maestros of the Atari platform, Dani Bunten, recently passed away. Bunten’s masterpieces, “M.U.L.E.” and “Seven Cities of Gold,” were utterly at home on the Atari platform. Ports to other platforms were of limited success; indeed, it can be argued that “M.U.L.E.” is best played not just on any Atari machine, but one a particular model, the Atari 800. It was this particular computer, and no other, that had the extra joystick ports that allowed four players to participate.]

On her web page, Bunten expresses regrets on the fate of M.U.L.E: “My only disappointment with the game is that it only exists on long defunct hardware and it looks awful (since those machines only offered 48K of memory and I used it mostly for program rather than graphics). I almost got a Sega Genesis version through EA in ‘93, but at the Alpha phase they insisted on adding guns and bombs (or something similar) to ‘bring it up to date.’ I was unable to comply.” From Greg Costikyan’s obituary: “Dani Bunten Berry was a giant.

“I don’t mean that she stood six-foot-two, although she did. I mean that she was one of the great artists of our age, one of the creators of the form that will dominate the 21
^st
century, as film has dominated the 20
^th
and the novel the 19
^th
: the art of game design.

“I mean that she displayed a complete mastery of her craft, always pushing the edges of the possible, always producing highly polished work of gem-like consistency and internal integrity.”. “This year, at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference, she was awarded the CGDA Lifetime Achievement Award. These things, alas, tend to be awarded to the dying. But certainly no one in the field deserved it more.”

Dani Bunten Berry’s design credits (mostly designed as “Dan Bunten,”
before her sex change): WHEELER DEALER, Speakeasy Software, 1978 COMPUTER QUARTERBACK, SSI, 1979 CARTELS AND CUTTHROATS, SSI, 1981 CYTRON MASTERS, SSI, 1982 M.U.L.E., Electronic Arts, 1983 SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD, Electronic Arts, 1984 HEART OF AFRICA, Electronic Arts, 1985 ROBOT RASCALS, Electronic Arts, 1986 MODEM WARS, Electronic Arts, 1988 COMMAND HQ, Microprose, 1990 GLOBAL CONQUEST, Microprose, 1992

[Bruce Sterling remarks: Dan Bunten was a guru of his/her field when occupying either gender. Among her numerous aphorisms, this one seems particularly prescient and memorable: “No one on their deathbed ever says ‘I wish I’d spent more time alone with my computer.’”]

Source:
Obituary by Greg Costikyan, Dani Bunten Berry memorial website

From John Aboud

This Old Technology Hasn’t Gone Down the Tubes

By Marcia Biederman” [John Aboud remarks: there is a photo captioned, “At Columbia-Presbyterian, Marina Conliffe receives blood samples.” “Marina” is opening a barrel-shaped canister, which opens like a clam. It doesn’t operate like the traditional bank tubes common at drive up windows. The pneumatic station has a digital readout and touchpad. This is likely the computer enhancement mentioned in the article.]

“Long before E-mail and faxes, pneumatic tubes were widely used in New York to whisk small capsules containing memos or other things from one office to another. Science fiction may have inflated hopes for the tubes, but they are still being used, in old and new ways.