The Dead Media Notebook Read Online Free Page A

Toronto Press, 1991. 80 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm. LC CALL NUMBER: Z8.G72 E53 1991
     

the Scopitone
    From Dan Rabin
    The Scopitone was a precursor of the rock video, a visual jukebox introduced in France in 1963. It was a coin-operated large-screen device intended for the bar and nightclub market, showing brief 16mm color films of such period popstars as Lesley Gore, Dion, the Tijuana Brass and Nancy Sinatra.
    These devices were essentially extinct by 1968 -- “victims of slot-machine racketeers and censorial prudes,” according to Request magazine writer James Sullivan. San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema has run three Scopitone festivals in recent years.
    Sam Wasserman is a Scopitone collector, owning six Scopitone players and “thousands” of their films. He has been transferring his Scopitone reels to VHS cassettes and will send a catalog of his prizes for a self-addressed stamped envelope. His address is P. O. Box F, Daly City CA 94017.
    Source: Request Magazine October 1995 p 10; James Sullivan, reporter; Sam Wasserman, Scopitone collector
     

dead computer languages
    From Dan Rabin
    Dead computer languages covered in ‘History of Programming Languages’…
    Fortran I, II and III
    ALGOL 58 and 60
    Lisp 1 and 1.5
    COBOL (the dead-ness of this language may be debatable)
    APT
    JOVIAL
    SIMULA I and 67
    JOSS
    PL/1
    SNOBOL
    APL (ditto)
    Source Wexelblat, Richard (ed.) History Of Programming Languages Academic Press (HBJ), ISBN 0-12-745040-8
     

artoc: The US Army’s portable pneumatic-tube powered multi-media system. in tents.
    From Tom Jennings
    “One hundred million bits of random access storage are provided by two magnetic disk files, each housed in a 2-1/2 ton utility truck.”
    ARTOC, a late-1950’s hare-brained Army tactical field communications coordination system, is a breathtaking mixture of Rube Goldberg technologies whose purpose was to coordinate information from many different and incompatible sources (messengers on foot; radio; centrally-gathered intelligence, etc) and to present it in a coordinated manner to Army personel who needed to make decisions based upon the information, once coordinated.
    ARTOC is at once beautiful and horrifying; it used brute force, Army logic, blind faith and the latest in computer technology to put together what can only be called a multi-media system.
    It was very, very ambitious, to say the least. Apparently this thing actually existed, at least in prototype form.
    ARTOC is a portable, field-operated system. One tent full of people accepted the sundry inputs, and input them to computer(s), both graphical and textual.
    It is nearly impossible today to imagine how far-fetched storing graphical data in a computer was, in 1959. It just wasn’t done. These were vector, not raster, days, and the details of implementation are not elaborated upon in this article.
    You should read the article for details; but essentially, there was one tent where input was entered into the system, and a number of other tents, somewhat physically remote from the input area, that contained a number of display stations.
    Data was input to a computer, which was used to produce photographic-type slides, in color, by using a non-real-time cathode-ray tube with RGB filters to make each “separation”. The slide-producing machine spit out a developed and mounted slide in under 10 seconds (please don’t stand in its way).
    Each slide had a machine-readable indext attached. These were delivered by pneumatic tube to the remote display stations. Each display station consisted of a small (20”) rear-projection viewer and a large (7 foot) front projection viewer.
    There was some way to select which slide(s) to view; but essentially the slides were overlays for maps, and text could be overlaid in some manner on the screens too.
    “A very simple, reliable pneumatic distribution and transport system automaticall delivers the slides from a central slide generator to the many display units in a user area.