Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

Unicode 5.0.0 is almost out

Unicode 5 CoverUnicode 5.0.0 is about to be released by the Unicode Consortium.

For those of you who don’t know about Unicode, it “provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no mater what the language.” (My emphasis) In other words it replaces ASCII as the standard for character encoding to support multilingual computing across platforms.

For more information see What is Unicode? or Useful Resources.

I also note that the Unicode site has a Chronology Of Unicode Version 1.0 along with information about contributors/members over time. Xerox, for example, seems to have been a major player in the early years, but is no longer a member. I also note that there are two governments that are institutional members, India and Pakistan (they joined a year apart) and one university, Berkeley. What a strange trio of institutional members.

Digital Art Museum

The “Digital Art Museum has an ambitious aim – to be the source for history on the digital arts. They have an interesting set of essay links and information about the early history of digital arts.

Digital Art Museum aims to become the world’s leading online resource for the history and practice of digital fine art.

It exhibits the work of leading Artists in this field since 1956. [DAM] is an on-line museum with a comprehensive exhibition of Digital Art supported by a wide range of background information including biographies, articles, a bibliography and interviews.

Bemer and the History of Computing

The History of Computing Project is another collection of timelines and biographies sponsored by computer museums in Holland, Poland and elsewhere. There are some gaps, like the empty biography of Bill Atkinson and a history of Apple that is “withdrawn for revision”. It is, however, cleanly designed, and covers a lot.

Some of the information is useful like the biography of Bob Bemer who contributed the ESCape key and worked on ASCII, among other things, at IBM. (See CNN – 1963: The debut of ASCII – July 6, 1999 or the archive of Bob Bemer‘s personal site – he has passed away
.) Thanks to Matt for this.

RAMAC and Interactivity: Pictorial History of Media Technology

IBM 305 RAMACPictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production. What’s so important about the RAMAC?

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on An Excerpt from Mechanisms, Professor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.

Pictorial History of Media Technology

Pictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: An Excerpt from MechanismsProfessor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.

Keven Steele: Photo.menu

Steele Photo of TorontoKevin Steele’s Photo Menu page has a large collection of small photo essays by Steele. He has a nice clean touch – small numbers of images arranged on a white background using repetitions of different elements.

Steele is a designer who cofounded Mackerel an innovative early Toronto multimedia company that Cory Doctorow says,

“Together, they built the first iteration of a project that would go on to virtually create the market for multimedia in Canada. They laughed. They smoked. They blew a bunch of doobs.”

Previously I blogged his new site for Smackerel where he and David Goff have some great essays on early multimedia – see Mackarel Smackarel.

Turntablism: Radical Phonograph Effects

Katz, in chapter 6 of Capturing Sound writes about “The Turntable as Weapon” and how DJs battle each other making music by scratching older records. The art has been called Turntablism and it is a radical example of how a “phonograph effect” where a recording technology like the phonograph has effects on that which is records. In the case of turntablism, the phonograph has the radical effect of becoming an instrument for new music to be performed. See also BBC: History of Vinyl.

Ironically on the djbattles.com site they have a PDF on how to transcribe turntable moves – a system for scoring and annotating what is supposed to be a live and combative art.

Western Union Telegram

Western Union, who have a long history providing telegraph services have discontinued the telegram as of January 27th.

Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.

The Globe and Mail carried a story today about this that I can’t find on their site. They changed their name to “Western Union” when they connected the Western (US) lines with the Eastern lines.
It can be argued that the conjunction of the telegraph and the daily newspaper had a more dramatic effect on global information than any other technology, including the internet. With these two readers, for the first time, would know more about world news than about their neighbors.