This post is for INLS 490, aka. Technologies of Friendship, a class I’m taking this semester. For those of you not in the class, the idea is to
Choose a pre-Web 2.0 technology and explore its history and use in relational processes. You should use both academic and popular literature, exploring how the technology was invented (its original purpose), how discourse around its use was framed and re-framed over time, and how the technology was used in interesting ways (how it was hacked or repurposed). In addition, you should explore its legacy impacts (how does this technology continue to live in our use of modern technology) and generative effects of the innovation.
So I decided I would look at magnetic tape. Did you know phone calls were first recorded in 1898? A fellow by the name of Valdemar Poulsen may have run with a hypothesis published in 1888 by an inventor named Oberlin Smith, who suggested weaving steel fibers into cotton thread and using an electromagnet to record on the thread. Poulsen developed several working models with metal wire and secured a broad patent on the concept of magnetic recording. So broad, in fact, that the idea of an answering machine, voicemail, and even hard disk platters predates magnetic tape or even the widespread use of the telephone. Unfortunately recording quality on a wire is pretty poor, and improvements in the phonograph likely dampened interest in magnetic recording research. Proponents of early magnetic recording (1898 to 1920s) had one of several aims: re-use of the recording medium, improved portability, or improved clarity. Note that all of these are incremental improvements on alternative, pre-existing recording technologies. Note also that all of the intended uses were for sound recording. Specific intended audiences and applications included business dictation, military reconnaissance, and (as previously mentioned) recording of telephone messages. But why didn’t these devices take off? Since vacuum tube amplification didn’t exist yet, Poulsen’s inventions did not stand a chance in the market, despite their superior signal-to-noise ratio, since a phonograph could fill a room with sound.
The 1930s saw many, primarily German, advances in magnetic tape. Firstly, several magnetic recording re-inventions from 1900 to the 1920s used metal tape, which was heavy, clumsy (think metal spring), and impractical to edit (Engel 2006, 2). Despite this, some metal systems gained traction for specific applications, eg. the BBC radio studios. Paper- and plastic-based tapes proved much easier to handle. BASF would introduce a plastic “Magnetophone” system at the 1935 Berlin Radio Exhibition (Schoenherr 2005). The Germans were not the first to apply AC-bias, another major advancement in magnetic recording technology, but they were the first to do so in a way that yielded much better audio. Two Americans (Carlson and Carpenter) secured a US patent 1,640,881 in 1921. Their patent was for a wire-based system with AC-bias.
Bias, a technical aside: magnetic recordings have bad low-frequency response. Applying a Direct Current (DC) bias improves things a bit, but adds noise on playback. Applying a high frequency alternating current (AC) bias cleans things up a great deal.
WWII in some ways delayed and in others advanced magnetic tape as a storage medium. The Americans went to war with a wire recorder designed by Camras (Schoenherr 2005), while the Germans (through BASF) continued to develop magnetic tape systems. Their recording systems were so far superior to the American wire ones, in fact, that a Signal Corps technician named Jack Mullin scavenged as many recorders and tape reels as he could and brought them back to the US, where Bing Crosby played a pivotal role in thrusting tape into the American radio business.
You see, recording in the US at that time was done on low-quality records (disks), and editing was done disk-to-disk, which meant that recorded performances sounded tinny (“canned”) and significantly, audibly inferior to live radio broadcast. For that reason, radio stars like Bing Crosby had to do their shows in a live studio, which Bing found stressful enough that he sat out the 1945-6 season entirely (Rushin 2004). Enter Jack Mullin and his scavenged German equipment, which could record at a higher fidelity than the radio broadcast, offering the potential for taped playback over the radio indistinguishable from live broadcast. Mullin gave a demo to Bing and soon found himself hired to edit the entire season of his show.
Let’s pause here and note that the applications we’ve seen so far (business, military, radio broadcast) are all limited to users with a lot of capital and/or specialized tasks. Tape recording as of Bing’s 1947 season was far from mainstream. From 1898 to 1947 significant advances had been made, but magnetic tape was not a product for the masses. It is also worth noting that even though Bing and the radio producers were incredibly impressed with the quality of the taping system, the tape was used only for the initial recording and interim editing steps. The final show was cut to disks that were sent to each station for broadcast. Mullin had only managed to bring back 50 reels of tape, you see.
Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company (3M) had spent much of WWII working on half of a federal contract to produce tape recording systems. 3M worked on the tape half while another company (Brush) produced the recording equipment. By 1947 the 3M product was “too good” for the recording equipment Mullin had scavenged and improved stateside (Rushin 2004, Hammar 2004).
This is probably obvious to most everyone, but just to be clear, tape is not film is not tape. Film cameras had been around for quite some time, and since the earliest days of hollywood there were efforts to record sound on film, but “the technical deficiencies of early magnetic recording technology gave ample room for optical sound recording to become the established method. Even Valdemar Poulsen turned to optical sound recording by the 1920s” (Morton 2004, 124). During that early postwar period there was a push to do video with the audio on magnetic tape. “Movie producers had to wait until about 1948 to get their hands on the first production model [magnetic tape] recorders” (Morton 2004, 125). With that in mind, let’s look at the debut of video tape at the 1956 NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) meeting. This story is just so fantastic that I’m going to quote at length:
Videotape’s big day was April 15, 1956, when the 31st annual convention of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NAB) opened at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. Ampex planned to show its video recorder, the Mark IV (a forerunner of the production model, the VR-1000). 3M had supplied instrumentation tape as the recording medium.
The day before the show was to open, one of the Ampex staffers decided to try out the new tape. With horror, he discovered that it just wasn’t up to the high-frequency demands of the Mark IV and placed a phone call to Dr. Wetzel in St. Paul. Ampex had been cagey about what kind of machine the tape was to be used on, no doubt fearing that 3M might jump into the video recorder business on its own.
Because Wetzel had been doing his own research on video tape, he had a pretty good idea what Ampex was up to. Nonetheless, the Ampex engineer, out of desperation, was forced to outline in detail exactly what the new tape was supposed to do. Could 3M do it — and in time for the debut the following day? Wetzel thought so, and put a team of technicians on the job. They worked through the night, coming with sample after sample.
Finally, by 6:00 a.m., they’d produced a sample that worked and coated two five-minute reels worth of it. But Wetzel had already left for the airport. Vic Mohrlant, a technical services engineer grabbed the samples and dashed to the airport hoping against hope that Wetzel’s flight had been delayed. For once, it had not. It was out on the runway waiting to take off.
Mohrlant dashed out onto the tarmac, found a member of the ground crew who had a pole long enough to reach the cockpit, and persuaded the pilot to stop. Fastening the package onto the end of the pole, he shouted that it was an emergency package for Dr. Wetzel aboard the flight. The pilot, not doubt concerned about a medical emergency, pulled the pouch off the pole and passed it back to his passenger.
The demonstration on April 15 caused the same kind of sensation that Mullin’s IRE session had ten years earlier. Hard-headed engineers and front office men were on their feet cheering as the first reels rolled on the Mark IV. Many rushed to the stage to get a closer look. And orders for both tape and recorders piled up (Rushin 2004).
Again, we’re talking about magnetic tape as a tool of the rich and powerful… or perhaps a struggling recording artist. In 1956 your neighbor was not likely to own a tape recorder. Les Paul had already pioneered multi-track recording with wax disks in the 1940s, but the ease of use of tape systems was making multi-track recording feasible for many more artists. Tapes influences on the wider American culture up to the mid 1950s, then, were via broadcasting and music. As magnetic tape and other recording technologies increased the reach and power of broadcasters and record labels, social phenomena like song sheets and fake books were upsetting the music publishing applecart. The social effects had admittedly very little to do with tape up the 1950s, but “The postwar plundering [of German technology, including the magnetophone] was if nothing else genuinely effective in diffusing tape recording worldwide” (Morton 2004, 127).
In the next post we’ll look at magnetic tape as a mass “consumer” product. Stay tuned!
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Hi there,
I don’t know if this is the right discussion to get mixed in, since I am an absolute newbie in unix. Still I wanted to report my story. I purchased this Acer laptop about two years ago I think, could be three, I don’t recall exactly. I had Vista home basic installed or something similar. I could not upgrade it to Windows Vista Ultimate. I bought it on eBay as refurbished, and the seller had upgraded it from 1 GB base memory to 4 GB. I called Microsoft and they referred me to memtest as well. Then the memory gave problems too. It turned out that the 32-bit vista could only use 3 GB maximum memory, so during the upgrade, this gave problems, since it found 4 GB and it could use only 3 GB. Now the Acer machine itself could handle 4 GB. It has two equal 2 GB max memory slots. My two chips are identical. I am now running a gparted session, since my kernel won’t boot from 2.6.27-2, despite that 2.6.27-1 behaved remarkably stable and would reboot without a problem. I tried to remove cups and it’s ancestors, by running ’sudo apt-get remove cups*’. Unfortunately this removed a huge amount of core utilities, such as gnome-terminal, network-manager and such. I tried to repair it from a previous kernel by sudo apt-get install cups*, but this works only partially, I don’t know which packages are all missing and I don’t know how to detour all of the build dependency problems. So now I am making another partition to install alfa three and upgrade it, to a point where I can make a full APTon image. Then I can try to rescue my system, but the repartitioning goes real slow. Sorry for that intermezzo, I just wanted to say that I cannot remove any memory right now, since my machine is running. Anyway, what I wanted to say is, when I go into BIOS on start up, I am not able to change the memory manually, it is fixed to 3 GB max. I think I recall that I used both chips separately a couple of years ago, and found that they were both intact. I will check on this once my repartitioning is done. I also recall that once I downgraded to 2GB, that the correct memory was displayed again. It was now displayed in black, like the rest of the BIOS settings, and not in blue and unable to select, as previously, when fixed to 3 GB. Now I have this 3 GB setting again in BIOS, although only having one single ubuntu 8.10 partition with Vista Ultimate and OSX Tiger in VirtualBox 1.6.4. So clearly the OS2 BIOS setting was somehow not overwritten. Now this is funny since I upgraded to Intrepid from hardy, so I don’t thing this is an intrepid issue. Also since ubuntu should work on 4 GB instead of 3 GB for the 32-bit CPU’s, I really doubt that Intrepid would recognise the wrong amount of memory by itself. When I now run memtest with 4 GB installed, also 3 GB memory is found plus error codes, for no good reason. First all memory comes out clean, the remainder is all corrupted, just as it was two years ago with vista. Anyway, I just wanted to ask to you people, how many are running dual boots, or have wiped out a previous Microsoft partition? It could be that Microsoft changes something to OS2 BIOS, which cannot be overwritten by ubuntu (8.10 and possibly previous versions). Cheers, Thomas.