The Dead Media Notebook (85 page)

From David Forbes

Back in the late 1950s, the jukebox manufacturer Seeburg produced a background music system for offices and retail establishments to provide some competition for Muzak.

They invented a new vinyl record format and player to allow 40 hours of music to be played endlessly over the office PA system with no attention from the staff. The systems were installed by jukebox operators all over the country (and presumably the civilized world).

A new set of records came out every 3 months, so that the hapless listeners wouldn’t have to murder anyone from hearing the same cheery song too many times.

The records were owned by Seeburg and presumably destroyed after being returned to the factory (subject to a $1 fee per disk), so they are not exactly easy to find.

The initial player made by Seeburg looks like a microwave oven, complete with window. Instead of the food rotating slowly on the turntable, however, is a stack of twenty-five 9-inch microgroove records revolving at a leisurely 16.66 RPM. The player plays both sides of each record in the stack with a double-sided tonearm, then lifts the stack of records and starts over.

The later version that I have, the BMC-1, is in a boring sheet-metal box with no window. Naturally, Seeburg had to provide a source of records as well as the player. They created a company called Seeburg Music Library Inc., whose purpose was to provide recordings of the sort that would inspire workers to work harder and happier.

Vocals are not present, but Top 40 hits and old standards are. Even the mellowest of mellow hits was re-recorded to a state of syrupy sweetness. I have tried to locate the Seeburg company.

They seem to have been bought by Williams, the pinball and video game maker. No trace remains. The system is mentioned in Joesph Lanza’s wonderful book Elevator Music.

Source: Personal Experience

From Trevor Blake

[Trevor Blake notes: Recently I have been diagnosed with ‘tachycardia’ - for no particular reason, my heart begins to beat very fast... A surgical remedy is available and I hope to have it within the next few months — wish me luck. But for now, please allow me to share the high point of my experience: wearing the Del Mar CardioCorder, Model 459. Part of my diagnosis included wearing a heart monitoring device that is an honest to goodness dead media. This description of the Del Mar CardioCorder is based on personal observations, Web research and conversations with the fellow who put it on me]

The Del Mar CardioCorder Model 459 is the size of a larger, first-generation Walkman. It is a tape recorder, using normal c60 tapes, but on a single side recorded all my heartbeats for 24 hours - so the thing runs slowly! There was a port like the kind computer network cables use that ran to the sticker pads that were patched on me. There was an ‘EVENT’ button and a ‘TEST SOCKET’ (small audio plug size) but I don’t know what they do. It had three channels, but I don’t know what that means either. And LCD display was likewise not instructive to me. I did, however, understand the 9 volt battery that powered it. The manufacturer was “Del Mar Avionics / 1601 Alton Ave. / Irvine CA 92714-4878.” There was no date on this model but the plus-four postal code is a hint. The hospital I was tested at is replacing these cassette-based recorders with digital ones, and even Del Mar isn’t manufacturing this model any more. A dead media may have saved my life!

Source: Personal Experience

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 1000
^th
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.”

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.

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 “Fill 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.

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 18
^th
-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

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

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.”