The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  By the end of WW II, ten Colossi were operating in Bletchley Park, the home of Allied code breaking operations. Each one of them used 2,500 electronic valves and they represented a major technological triumph for British invention. Designed by Dr Tommy Flowers and his team of engineers at the Post Office research labs at Dollis Hill, and manufactured at great speed, they contributed significantly to the war effort by the intelligence that they revealed before and after D Day, 6th June 1944. The Colossi were special purpose, high speed logic calculators of great reliability. They were kept switched on and running 24 hours a day and operated by girls from the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the WRENS.

  The very existence of the Colossi was kept a closely guarded secret and unfortunately all but two of them were totally destroyed at the end of 1945. The reasons for this are still not clear. A blanket of silence descended on everything to do with Bletchley Park and this has, until now, prevented Colossus taking its rightful place as one of the greatest achievements of British technology. It has also allowed the Americans, for far too long, to claim that their ENIAC computer, which first ran in 1946, was the first large electronic valve computer in the world.

  The first revelations about Colossus appeared in 1970 when Jack Good, one of the wartime code breakers, gave a brief description in a journal article. This was followed in 1972 by further revelations by Donald Michie, another of the code breakers, and then by the researches of Prof Brian Randell.

  But even then Colossus was classified as secret and only a few photographs and general details were allowed out.

  In 1993 Tony Sale had just finished working at the Science Museum in London restoring some early computers back to working order. Having studied all the available meagre details about Colossus, he decided that given his early career in valve electronics, his involvement with Ml5 and subsequent long career in computing, it would be possible to rebuild a working Colossus.

  An approach to GCHQ resulted in all the hardware details about Colossus being declassified, and a further set of wartime photographs emerged from GCHQ archives. Some of the original engineers were still alive, including Dr Tommy Flowers, and they were all enthusiastic about such a project.

  Work began in November 1993 to reproduce machine drawings from the photographs. (All the original drawings had been destroyed in 1960).

  All attempts at getting sponsorship for the project failed, and Tony Sale and his wife Margaret decided to put their own money into it in order to make a start since, in view of the age of the original engineers, time was of the essence.

  By July 1994 all the gathering of information had been done and the construction phase of the project was inaugurated by His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent KG in Bletchley Park on the 18th July.

  The Bletchley Park Trust, of which Tony Sale is Museums Director, has kindly made space available and the construction has taken place in the actual room in H Block where Colossus number 9 stood in WW II.

  Two years of hard work helped by an ever growing band of volunteers, including some members of the Computer Conservation Society, and some gratefully received financial donations has resulted in 90% authentic rebuild of Colossus which will now be able to demonstrate its code breaking feats of WW II. His Royal Highness has kindly agreed to switch on Colossus at 10.00 am on Thursday 6th June 1996, an auspicious occasion since it is the anniversary of D Day for which Colossus helped to provide vital intelligence information.

  Source: Tony Sale, FBCS.

  the Bletchley Park Colossus

  From Bruce Sterling

  [Through happy accident I have found an eyewitness account of the newly resurrected Bletchley Park Colossus, as mentioned above. This report is by Brian Randell and was distributed on Dave Farber’s “Interesting People” list]

  The Colossus Rebuild Project by Brian Randell

  Yesterday I attended the ceremony at Bletchley Park for the formal switching on of the recreated Colossus computer. It was a glorious day, attended by about two hundred people, many of whom had worked on code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war.

  The project is essentially due to one person, Tony Sale, who is I’m sure uniquely qualified for such a project. He was for many years with M.I.5 (including a period as technical assistant to Peter Wright, of “Spycatcher” fame/notoriety) and so has a very high security clearance. He is expert on ancient electronics, he was for several years a Senior Curator at the Science Museum, London, (where he led the project which got a Ferranti Pegasus and an early Elliott computer operational again) and he has an unbelievable ability to get things done.

  The recreated Colossus is remarkably authentic, though not yet finished. (It was in fact complete enough to read encrypted messages from the 5000 character per second paper tape, do some basic processing using an electronic version of the Lorenz (Tunny) rotors, and output counts onto an electromechanical typewriter, all very impressive.

  There are also a whole series of rooms in which the various aspects of the wartime work, from radio interception, through to processing and indexing the results of the codebreaking, are portrayed and explained.

  When I succeeded in getting the Colossus partly declassified, and some photographs of it released, I never dreamt that, over twenty years later, I would actually see a real, albeit recreated, one!

  Source: Brian Randell

  The Aluminum Transcription Disk

  From Paul Tough

  Hey there, Bruce. I received this press release (with a cassette tape) in the mail yesterday, and thought immediately of the list. The dead medium is the 16” aluminum Transcription Disk, but as you’ll see, the story is a much about a dead cultural medium as a dead technological one.

  ON THE AIR: YIDDISH RADIO 1925-1955

  A decade ago, ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik (credited with sparking the Klezmer music revival in the United states) tripped over a pile of 16” aluminum disks in a musty storage room in New York City. On the worn-away labels he could make out some writing: WEVD. WBNX. “Yiddish Melodies in Swing”.. “Stuhmer’s Pumpernickel Program”. “Bei Tate Memes Tish” (“Round the Family Table”).”Life is Funny with Harry Hirschfield, Sponsored by Edelstein’s Tuxedo Brand Cheese”.

  In all, more than 100 discs. He paid $30 for the collection. The seller was thrilled. Sapoznik tracked down an old Transcription Disc turntable and sat down to listen to his find.

  He put on the first disc. A clear, strong voice announced: “From atop the Loews State Theater Building, the B. Manischewitz Company, worlds largest matzo bakers, happily present Yiddish Melodies in Swing.” Fanfare. Drum rolls. Clarinets begin to swing. Two announcers continued: “They do it to Eli Melekh!” “They do it to Reb Dovidl!” “They even do it to Yidl Mitn Fidl!” “Who does what to which?” “Yiddish Swing takes old Yiddish folk songs and finds the groove for them in merry modern rhythms.. The B. Manischewitz Company proudly presents Sam Medoff with the Yiddish Swing Orchestra. Hit it, maestro.”

  And the band launched into a raucous, swinging rendition of Dayenu. “It was simply unbelievable. Unlike anything I’d ever heard,” remembers Sapoznik.

  “I felt like I was being transported back in time to this real living moment in history, it was unreal. I was transfixed.” He was also hooked. Sapoznik has spent the past eight years searching for transcription discs of Yiddish radio shows [a transcription disc is the single ‘air check’ of a program used for archival purposes before the era of tape]. He’s combed attics, flea markets, even dumpsters, in an attempt to rescue and preserve these remnants of Yiddish radio.

  “You have to remember, these are one-of-a-kind recordings,” explains Sapoznik. “So much was so close to being lost forever. What choice did I have?”

  Over the years, Sapoznik has amassed the largest (and only) collection of Yiddish radio in the world, more than 500 hours of material. Rich, wonderful and irreplaceable material from this critical and tumultuous era in American Jewish history. In its heyday in the 1930s, Yiddish radio flou
rished across America. Thirty stations in New York alone aired Jewish programming: advice shows, variety shows, man-on- the-street-interviews, news programs, music and game shows in both Yiddish and English. The programs in this collection afford us a snap-shot of American Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s, the collision of Yiddish and American cultures, the dawning reality of the genocide occurring across the ocean, the day-to-day lives of immigrants struggling to make it in a new land. The radio rescued in the Sapoznik collection exists by pure chance; aluminum disks that survived WWII scrap metal drives and the grinding gauntlet of time.

  What’s been rescued is random. There are more than five hours of DER YIDISHER FILOSOF (“THE JEWISH PHILOSOPHER”) from the tiny Brooklyn station WFAB, and only 2 minutes of WEVD’s THE FORWARD HOUR, the most important and popular Yiddish radio program ever. But what serendipity has preserved is magical, one-of-a-kind documentary evidence of the explosive and fertile collision of Yiddish and American culture in the 1930s - the sparks of which, in books movies and music, continue to rain down upon us to this day.

  Source: David Isay, Sound Portraits Productions, Inc.

  Indecks Information Retrieval System

  From Candi Strecker

  Database programs on personal computers have proven extremely efficient at organizing and manipulating certain kinds of everyday information. How did people store and sort this kind of data back in the dark ages before desktop computers, say, 25 years ago?

  One method was to use the special sortable paper cards marketed as the “Indecks Information Retrieval System.”

  Each Indecks card was approximately the size and shape of the old computer “punch card.” Like punch cards, Indecks cards had a diagonally-cut corner, so they could quickly be aligned before sorting. Each card face had two parts: a rectangular central area (where one would note down information), surrounded by an outer margin with about 80 numbered, punched holes. Each number could be assigned a subject appropriate to one’s project. A “notcher” tool was used to chop a notch in a card from any subject hole to the card’s edge. When a stack of cards was aligned and the Sorting Rod (sort of a knitting needle) was run through a particular subject hole, the appropriate cards, those notched at that subject’s hole, would drop down out of the deck into one’s lap. At least one competing product existed in this category, referred to below as “McBee cards.”

  From the Last Whole Earth Catalog’s review of Indecks, by Stewart Brand:

  “What do you have a lot of? Students, subscribers, notes, books, records, clients, projects? Once you’re past 50 or 100 of whatever, it’s tough to keep track, time to externalize your store and retrieve system. One handy method this side of a high-rent computer is Indecks. It’s funky and functional: cards with a lot of holes in the edges, a long blunt needle, and a notcher. Run the needle through a hole in a bunch of cards, lift, and the cards notched in that hole don’t rise; they fall out. So you don’t have to keep the cards in order. You can sort them by feature, number, alphabetically or whatever; just poke, fan, lift and catch. [.]

  “We’ve used the McBee cards to manipulate (edit) and keep track of the 3000 or so items in this CATALOG. They’ve meant the difference between partial and complete insanity.” The subsequent (1980) issue of the Whole Earth Catalog is full-to-bursting with information about personal computers, but contains no mention of the Indecks system. Sometime between 1971 and 1980, this medium seems to have died...

  Source: The Last Whole Earth Catalog

  Pneumatic Typewriters

  From Charles Stross

  While bumming around my local remainders shop I came across a fascinating book: “Century of the Typewriter”, by Wilfred A. Beeching (Director, British Typewriter Museum). It’s an edited re-release of an earlier edition (1972) which was considered one of the definitive texts on typewriters. Is the typewriter a dead medium? Arguably, yes. They’re still around, but they no longer occupy a central role in the office, or even in society at large, and the humble manual portable has all but been killed by cheap dot-matrix print heads. And some varieties of typewriter are definitely dead:

  PNEUMATIC TYPEWRITERS

  “Various attempts were made from 1891 onwards when Marshall A. Wier in London, produced a typewriter with a pneumatic action. The object of such a machine was to eliminate the hard work involved in typing and to reduce the noise and increase the speed. It was also thought to be a substitute for such power as electricity.

  “One of the disadvantages of pneumatic machines has always been typebars that did not return fast enough, and although this problem could most likely have been overcome the fact is, it just seemed to present insurmountable difficulties.

  “It would appear that the last real attempt to manufacture a pneumatic machine was made in 1914, by a man called Juan Gualberto Holguin in Mexico. This machine was known as the ‘Burbra’, and used compressed air cylinders as a source of power. In spite of much time and money spent on the production of compressed air typewriters, very little result of any importance has ever been achieved.

  “There are reports of various designs of pneumatic typewriters having been produced by large organizations, both in American and in Germany in recent years. Most of these consisted of an electrically propelled plunger which compressed oil in a tube, fired the typebar forward in a sharp thrust, had the advantage of being very quiet and also eliminating most of the moving parts of the conventional machine. The idea seems to have been abandoned due to the high cost and probably to lack of interest.

  While Wilf Beeching is an admirable old gent, his book is not considered “definitive” by typewriter collectors. It has a lot of good stuff such as serial number lists, and a multitude of photos (many from the massive collection at the Milwaukee Public Museum), but it is frought with inaccuracies. Much more “definitive” is “The Writing Machine,” by Michael Adler, written in 1973. Adler is about to release a revised edition. My own book on typewriters (“Antique Typewriters and Office Collectibles”) should be on the street next spring. It will feature 100% color photos (many from the Milwaukee Public Museum collection). Is the typewriter dead? Hmmm, I suppose so. But as you compose your next computer message, be aware that the QWERTY keyboard under your fingertips was there at the birth of the typewriter industry. QWERTY has been with us since 1872

  Source: Century of the Typewriter by Wilfred A Beeching, ISBN 0 9516790 0 7

  Dead Personal Computers

  From Stefan Jones

  For many years, Stan Veit edited the original incarnation of The Computer Shopper, a newsprint computer hobbyist want-ad monthly that was the last place die-hard Atari, Commodore, Osborne and Apple II users could find sources of hardware and software. The classified ad section of this tome was worth the cover price alone, but it also had articles for the major dying computer standards, and Veit’s own history column.

  While The Computer Shopper is now a professionally managed, hernia-inducing monthly dedicated to the PC market, Veit’s columns are now available in book form. The chapters of Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer show their origin as magazine columns. The same incidents (e.g., the first months of Stan’s Computer Mart store in midtown Manhattan) are described again and again, albeit from slightly different perspectives. This isn’t a problem if you read the chapters one at a time and don’t expect a consistent narrative.

  Each chapter covers Veit’s dealings with a particular company: Altair (the folks who arguably started it all), Sphere, IMSAI, and so on. Most of the systems and companies that Veit surveys are long dead; victims of the Apple II with its reliable disk drives and built-in video, or of IBM and its CP/M-squishing Personal Computer. Some of the firms passed on gracefully; others were frauds and cheats. The most entertaining chapter is the tale of the early days of Apple.

  Veit rubbed elbows with the two Steves when they were still ragged, long haired hackers; he relates how his mother-in-law made Steve Jobs take off his jeans at a crucial early trade show so she coul
d sew up the rents and tears. Veit also mentions the time that Jobs offered him a chance to buy a significant chunk of the nascent computer giant for $10,000. Had he not had the money tied up in his store, Veit probably would have taken him up on the deal and today would be worth billions...

  Another highlight: The time that a computer graphics display - the Cromemco “Dazzler” - placed in the store window caused a late-night traffic jam on 5th Avenue. Drivers were so amazed that they stopped and stared . . . and stared. until police rousted Veit’s landlord from bed to turn off the monitor.

  Veit doesn’t neglect the experiences of his customers. The feats of soldering and switch-flipping the early computer hobbyists had to perform to get a working computer are explained in exquisite detail, making one damn appreciative for BIOS chips and floppy drives.

  The tales of vaporware BASIC, dirty tricks, memory boards that periodically blanked and some systems that just plain didn’t work are almost enough to make one grateful for IBM and Microsoft.

  The computerists of the mid seventies were a different breed, and true pioneers.

  Source: Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer: From Altair to IBM, A History of the PC Revolution by Stan Veit Published by WorldComm, 65 Macedonia Road, Alexander, NC 28701 ISBN 1-56664-023-7 $19.95

  Early Mechanical Television Systems

  According to Business Week in 1931, television broadcasters admitted “that interest in their efforts is confined almost entirely to the experimenter, the young man of mechanical bent whose principal (sic) interest is in how television works rather than in the quality of images received.” William Boddy, 1991