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Dead Media Project
``` [The world is truly weird. We are blessed.]
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From: Bruce Sterling
Thanks for expressing your interest in the Dead Media Project. The Dead Media Mailing List consists of occasional email to that stout little band of souls who have declared some willingness to engage in this recherche field of study. The list-editor is Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) and the list emanates from a mail exploder at fringeware.com.
Traffic on this list is light == we average three messages a week, and never more than one a day. If at any time you want to be removed from this list, send me email and I will liberate you pronto.
Contributions to the Dead Media database should be sent to me as list editor. These contributions should be considered as copyright-free texts abandoned to the howling wastes of cyberspace for the good of the net.community. We are not looking for polished commercial-quality articles, but for raw data that is easily fact-checked and designed for intellectual digestibility by other Dead Media researchers. The citation of sources is especially important. To date, the Dead Media Mailing List has consisted mostly of raw research notes with occasional theoretical venturings and general updates on the progress of the Project.
Dead Media Working Notes generally appear in the following format:
>Subject: Dead Media Working Note 00.7 >Dead medium: the cyrograph >From: drabin@taurus.apple.com (Dan Rabin)
>Mr. Sterling,
>I just attended your talk at Apple, and I thought I'd try >to get this to you before you get home.
>The Dead Medium in question is the CYROGRAPH. It was a >form of authentication for duplicate documents used in >the Middle Ages. The document was written in duplicate >on a piece of vellum (or parchment); the copies were cut >apart and retained by two different parties. Sometimes >the cut was deliberately irregular in order to make >spurious matches unlikely. In addition, lettering would >be placed where the cut was to be made so that both the >shape of the cut and the lettering would have to match >in order to authenticate the copies.
>References (from Library of Congress online catalog): >92-131963: Brown, Michelle. A guide to western historical >scripts : from antiquity to 1600 / London : British >Library, 1990. 138 p. : ill. ; 29cm. > LC CALL NUMBER: Z114 .B87 1990
>92-160830: Brown, Michelle. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts / >Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991. >80 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm. > LC CALL NUMBER: Z8.G72 E53 1991
>Enjoy,
> Dan Rabin (drabin@taurus.apple.com)
Mr Rabin's submission is brief and to the point. It offers intriguing avenues for future research. It describes a weird and deeply obscure technique that 99.995% of the human race has never heard of. If you send me something with these qualities, I can pretty well guarantee you that it will make the Dead Media Mailing List.
Keep in mind that successfully contributing to this list is a deeply prestigious act. Contributors to this list are formally known as "Dead Media Necronauts." Others have the somewhat less stellar title of "Dead Media Lurkers."
On occasion we have been known to tangibly reward Necronauts, with "official" swag such as Dead Media T-shirts, fridge magnets, snow globes, bumper stickers, pennants, monogrammed pencils, and adhesive floppy disk labels. Keep watching this space.
If you are a collector of mechanical antiques, dead software, dead computers, dead playstations, dead recordings, PixelVisions, Teddy Ruxpins, or books on same, then you will want to be on our cousin list, the Dead Media Collectors' List. This list is run by Seth Carmichael (scarmike@well.com). To join the list, send mail to majordomo@lists.tmn.com with the message "subscribe collectorz [your email-address]" in the body. The Collectors' List has been established expressly for the sake of trading, bartering, want-ads, and other forms of netiquette-shattering dead media entrepreneurism. Under no circumstances will commercial announcements be run on the Dead Media Mailing List itself.
Mailing List notes will be posted onto my topic on WELL.COM, the "Mirrorshades Postmodern Archive," and pretty much anywhere else anyone else wants to run them.
Dead Media Working Notes come in "bound volumes" of twenty at a time. I've been known to snailmail the complete works on floppy disk to helpful Necronauts. The notes and associated Dead Media material are also available (at least temporarily) on that highly unstable medium, the World Wide Web.
Dead Media material on the web:
http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html (Canada) http://www.peg.apc.org/~alonsdale/media/dedmedia.html (Australia) http://www.mediahistory.com/dead/archive.html (USA)
I can't promise these websites will last, but they've been handy, and since they are run by volunteers at least the price is right. If you'd like to start your own Dead Media web site, send me email.
Email serves the central purpose of keeping subscribers aware of "dead media." Since this field of study has never been a scholarly discipline and is not logically archived, it shows up mostly in the nooks and crannies of the arcane, the forgotten and the technosocially repressed. The likeliest way to discover examples of dead media is to learn to become sensitized through repeated exposure, then to stumble over examples of it in daily life. One then alerts other Dead Media students by writing a Working Note for us.
Here are the table of contents of the first two volumes:
Dead Media Working Notes, 1-20
00.1. The Incan quipu 00.2. Chaucerian virtual reality 00.3. The Incan quipu 00.4. Kid media: viewmasters, filmstrips, portable projectors, Teddy Ruxpin 00.5. Dead personal computers 00.6. Dead mainframes; early computation devices 00.7. The cyrograph 00.8. The scopitone 00.9. Dead computer languages 01.0 The magic lantern 01.1 The magic lantern 01.2 Clockwork radio 01.3 The magic lantern 01.4 The term "Dead" 01.5 Silent film, the diorama, the panorama 01.6 The magic lantern 01.7 The Comparator; the Rapid Selector 01.8 Bibliography: Magic lanterns, Photography, Optical Toys, Early Cinema 01.9 The Experiential Typewriter 02.0 The magic lantern
Dead Media Necronauts: Trevor Blake, Paul Di Filippo, Stefan Jones, Bradley O'Neill, Dan Rabin, Bruce Sterling Alan Wexelblat
Dead Media Working Notes 02.1-04.0
02.1 Canada's Telidon Network 02.2 Dead Cryptanalytic Devices of World War II 02.3 The Stenograph 02.4 Canada's Telidon Network; Australia's Viatel and Discovery 40 02.5 The Copy Press, the Hektograph, Edison's Electric Pen, Zuccato's Trypograph, Gestetner's Cyclostyle, Dick-Edison Mimeograph, the Gammeter aka Multigraph, the Varityper, the IBM Selectric 02.6 Military Telegraphy, Balloon Semaphore 02.7 Mirror Telegraphy: The Heliograph, the Helioscope, the Heliostat, the Heliotrope 02.8 Schott's Organum Mathematicum 02.9 The Voder, The Vocoder, the Cyclops Camera, the Memex 03.0 C. X. Thomas de Colmar's Arithmometer 03.1 Toy telegraphy; toy telephony 03.2 Phonographic Dolls 03.3 The IBM Letterwriter 03.4 the Zuse Ziffernrechner; the V1, Z1, Z2, Z3 and Z4 program-controlled electromechanical digital computers; the death of Konrad Zuse 03.5 Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon 03.6 Karakuri; the Japanese puppet theater of Chikamatsu 03.7 Dead memory systems 03.8 the Kinetophone; the "Kinetophone Project" 03.9 Clockwork wall animation -- "living pictures" 04.0 Skytale, the Spartan code-stick
Dead Media Necronauts: Nick Montfort, Bradley O'Neill Andrew Pam, Darryl Rehr, Jack Ruttan, Geoffrey Shea Andrew Siegel, Bruce Sterling, Bill Wallace
You can see by this that the Dead Media Project is a loose networking effort by independent scholars to establish a common source of public knowledge. There is no money in this for anybody, except of course for the fabulous CRISP FIFTY DOLLAR BILL that I am offering to the first personage to publish the "Dead Media Handbook," which I imagine to be the eventual upshot of this research effort. If you would like your own emailed copy of the original Dead Media manifesto, let me know. (It originally appeared in BOING BOING magazine as "The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal.")
At the moment, our most pressing theoretical difficulty remains a working definition of "medium." (The term "dead" is also considerably troublesome.)
Consider for instance the Babylonian cuneiform tablet. A dried (fired?) clay brick covered with wedge-shaped pictographs. Dead graphic instrument (stylus). Dead recording device (clay tablet). Dead language (Babylonian). Dead alphabet (combination syllabary/pictography). Is it a dead "medium"? And if it is,then is a papyrus scroll also a dead medium? How about a Latin incunabula work on medieval theology? How about a plastic-bound manual for the Osborne computer? I hope you grasp the difficulty in drawing hard and fast lines here -- and that perhaps you can help draw a few that make sense.
Here is the current (highly fragmentary) master-list of extinct forms of media:
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THE MASTER-LIST OF DEAD MEDIA
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DEAD PRELITERATE MEDIA
Prehistoric etched-bone mnemonic devices and lunar calendars.
Preliterate clay tokens of Fertile Crescent area.
The Luba Lukasa mnemonic bead-tablet. The Inuit Inuksuit. Inuit carved maps.
String and yarn-based mnemonic knot systems: Incan quipu, Tlascaltec nepohualtzitzin, Okinawan warazan, Bolivian chimpu, Samoan, Egyptian, Hawaiian, Tibetan, Bengali, Formosan; American wampum, Zulu beadwork.
DEAD SOUND-TRANSFER NETWORKS
Drumming, stentor shouting networks, alpenhorns, whistling networks, town criers, mechanical telephones.
SMOKE DISPLAYS AND NETWORKS
Signal fires, smoke signals (still in use by Vatican), fire beacons. Skywriting.
DEAD PHYSICAL TRANSFER NETWORKS
Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Mongol, Roman and Chinese imperial horse posts. Extinct mail and postal systems: Thurn and Taxis (1550 AD), Renaissance Italian banking networks, early espionage networks, German butcher's-post, Chinese hongs, Incan runners, US Pony Express, etc etc.
Balloon post (France 1870-1871) American guided missile mail (1959), Styrian, Tongan, German, Dutch, American, Indian, Australian, Cuban and Mexican rocket mail. Russian rocket mail (1992). Tongan floating tin-can mail.
Pneumatic transfer tubes: Josiah Latimer Clark stock exchange pneumatic system London (1853); Berlin stock exchange pneumatic system (1865); R.S. Culler/R. Sabine radial pneumatic telegraph/mail system London (1859); Paris pneumatic mail system (1868); pneumatic mail transfer in Hamburg, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Naples, Milan, Paris and Marseilles.
Mechanical cash carriers.
Norwegian mountainside transport wires.
Pigeon post: Egyptian Caliphate 1100s, Mameluke Empire 1250's, military sieges of: Acre (11--?), Candia 1204, Haarlem 1572, Leyden 1575, Antwerp 1832, Paris 1870-1871; Reuter's pigeon stock-price network 1849, military pigeoneers of World War 1.
Chinese kite messages, 1232 AD
DEAD OPTICAL NETWORKS
Roman light telegraph; Polybius's torch telegraph ca 150 BC Moundbuilder Indian signal mounds Babylonian fire beacons Fire signals on the Great Wall of China
Amontons' windmill signals (1690)
OPTICAL TELEGRAPHY: Johannes Trithemius's Steganographia (ca 1500?) Dupuis-Fortin optical telegraph (France 1788) Chappe's "Synchronized System" and "Panel Telegraph" (France 1793) Claude Chappe's French Optical Telegraph (France 1793) The Vigigraph (France 1794) Edelcrantz's Swedish Optical Telegraph (1795) British Admiralty Optical Telegraph (1795) Bergstrasser's German Optical Telegraph (1786) Chudy's Czech Optical Telegraph (the Fernschreibmaschine) (1796) Van Woensel's Dutch system (1798) Fisker's Danish Optical Telegraph (1801) Grout's American Optical Telegraph (1801) Olsen's Norwegian Optical Telegraph (1808) Abraham Chappe's Mobile Optical Telegraph (1812) Parker's American Optical Telegraph (ca 1820) Curacao Optical Telegraph (1825-1917) Watson's British Optical Telegraph (1827) Australian Optical Telegraph (Watson system) (1827) Lipken's Dutch system (1831) O'Etzel's German Optical Telegraph (1835) Schmidt's German Optical Telegraph (1837) Ferrier's optical telegraph (1831) Russian Optical Telegraph (1839, Chappe system) Spanish Optical Telegraph (ca 1846) San Francisco Optical Telegraph (1849) Ramstedt's Finnish Optical Telegraph (1854)
Heliography: The Mance Heliograph (Britain 1860s) The heliostat, the heliotrope, the helioscope. The Babbage Occulting Telegraph (never built) American World War II pilot-rescue signal mirrors.
Semaphore and flag signals: Byzantine naval code (Byzantium AD 900), Admiralty Black Book code (England 1337), de la Bourdonnais code (France 1738), de Bigot code (France 1763), Howe code (Britain 1790), Popham code aka Trafalgar Code (Britain 1803, 1813) US Army Myer Code semaphore (USA 1860). Military balloon semaphore (France 1790s).
Early 20th Century electric searchlight spectacles.
DEAD ELECTRICAL TRANSFER NETWORKS
ELECTRICAL CURRENT TRANSFER George Louis Lesage / Charles Morrison electric telegraph (1774) Francisco Salva's Madrid-Aranjuez electric telegraph (1796) Soemmering's electrolytic bubble-letter telegraph (1812) Henry's electromagnetic telegraph (1831) Baron Schilling's Russian magnetized needle telegraph (1832) Gauss/Weber mirror galvanometer telegraph (1833)
CODED ELECTRICAL TRANSFER
Samuel Morse telegraph (patented 1837) Karl August Steinhill paper ribbon telegraph (1837) Charles Wheatstone / William Fothergill Cooke Five-Needle Telegraph (1837) The Alphabetical Telegraph Foy-Breguet Chappe-code Electrical Telegraph The Bain Chemical Telegraph (1848) Alexander Bain automatic perforated-tape transmitters (1864).
Specialized telegraphic fire alarms, burglar alarms, railroad-signalling systems, hotel annunciators, etc.
Telex.
CODED ELECTRICAL TRANSFER OF IMAGES
Elisha Gray's telautograph (1886); the telescriber.
The Vail telegraphic printer (1837), the House telegraphic printer (1846), the Hughes telegraphic printer (1856), the Phelps telegraphic printer (1859) Frederick Bakewell's Fac Simile telegraph (1848) Giovanni Caselli's fascimile pantelegraph (Paris-Lyon 1865-1870); Arthur Korn's telephotography (1907), Edouard Belin's Belinograph (1913), Alexander Muirhead's 1947 fax.
ELECTRICAL TRANSFER OF SOUND
Unorthodox telephony networks and devices: The Bliss toy telephone (1886), Telefon Hirmondo, Cahill's Telharmonium (1895), Bell's photophone, the Telephone Herald of Newark, Electrophone Ltd. wire broadcast
Telephonic Jukeboxes: The Shyvers Multiphone, the Phonette Melody Lane, the AMI Automatic Hostess, the Rock-Ola Mystic Music System
ELECTRICAL TRANSFER OF SOUND AND IMAGE
(Dead Telephony) The AT&T Nipkow disk picturephone (1927), Gunter Krawinkel's video telephone booth (Germany 1929), Reichspost picturephone (Germany 1936), AT&T Picturephone, AT&T Videophone 2500, etc
(Dead Mechanical Television) Baird Television; Baird Noctovision; Baird Telelogoscopy; The General Electric Octagon; the Daven Tri-Standard Scanning Disc; the Jenkins W1IM Radiovisor Kit, the Jenkins Model 202 Radiovisor, Jenkins Radio Movies; the Baird Televisor Plessey Model, the Baird Televisor Kit; the Western Television Corporation Visionette
(Dead Color Television Formats): Baird Telechrome, HDTV, PALplus letterbox format, etc.
(Dead Interactive Television) Zenith Phonevision, the first pay-per-view TV service (1951). Cableshop
AT&T wirephoto (1925)
DEAD DIGITAL NETWORKS
Teletext, Viewtron, Viewdata, Prestel, The Source, Qube, Alex (Quebec), Telidon (Canada), Viatel and Discovery 40 (Australia), the ICL One-Per-Desk, etc.
Dead bulletin board system networks: RIME, ILink, FrEdMail, OneNet, SmartNet, InfoLink, WWIVnet, NorthAmeriNet, FirstClass, etc.
TRANSFERS BY ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION
(Dead Television) Nipkow disk (1884), Zworykin iconoscope (1923), Farnsworth Dissector. Hugo Gernsback's Nipkow television broadcasts (1928)
(Microwaves) Microwave relay drone aircraft (Canada 1990s)
(Radio) RCA radiophoto (1926)
(Electrical induction)
Smith's railway induction telegraph (1881), the Edison induction telegraph (1888)
DEAD INK-BASED MEDIA
(dead text production devices and systems)
Typewriters: Henry Mill's device (1714) Pingeron's machine for the blind (1780), Burt's Family Letter Press (1829), Xavier Progin's "Machine Kryptographique" (1833), Guiseppe Ravizza's "Cembalo-Scrivano" (1837), Charles Thurber's "Chirographer" (1843), Sir Charles Wheatstone's telegraphic printers (1850s), J B. Fairbanks' "Phonetic Writer and Calico Printer," Giuseppe Devincenzi's electric writing machine (1855), the Beach Typewriter for the Blind (1856), Edison electric typewriter (1872), Bartholomew's Stenograph (1879) Schulz Auto-typist punch-paper copier typewriter (1927) Weir's pneumatic typewriter (1891), the Blickensderfer rotary wheel typewriter (1892), the Elliott & Hatch Book Typewriter (1895?) Juan Gualberto Holguin's 'Burbra' pneumatic typewriter (1914), the IBM Selectric, etc.
Dead copying devices: James Watt's ink copier (1780) The aniline dye copy press The hektograph Edison's Electric Pen stencil (1876), the Edison pneumatic pen stencil, the Edison foot-powered pen stencil, the Music Ruling pen stencil, the Reed pen stencil Zuccato's Trypograph (1877) Gestetner's Cyclostyle (1881) The Edison Mimeograph (1887) The Gammeter, aka Multigraph (circa 1900) The Vari-Typer
Chinese imperial court printed newspaper (circa 618 AD); Beijing city printed newspaper (748 AD) Bi Sheng's clay movable type (1041 AD)
DEAD SOUND-CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES
Extinct forms of dictation machine. Poulsen's telegraphon wire recorder (1893) The Wilcox-Gay Coin Recordio (1950?)
DEAD SOUND ARCHIVAL TECHNIQUES
Extinct phonographic formats: Leon Scott de Martinville phono-autograph (1857), Edison tinfoil cylinder (1877), Edison wax cylinder, the Bettini Micro-Phonograph, the telegraphone, Bell's graphophone (1886), The Columbia Graphophone Grand, the Edison Concert Grand Phonograph, the Pathe' Salon cylinder, the Edison Blue Amberol cylinder, the Edison vertical-groove disc phonograph, the Michaelis Neophone, wire recorders, 78s, 8-track tape, 2-track Playtape, the Elcaset, Soviet "bone music," aluminum transcription disks, etc.
DEAD SOUND REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES: The AT&T Voder (1939) The Bell Labs Vocoder Talking dolls and cassette dolls (von Kempelen's "talking" doll (1778), Robertson's talking waxwork (1815), Faber's Euphonia (1853), Teddy Ruxpin, dolls linked to television programs, realistic sound-producing squeeze toys, etc).
DEAD STILL-IMAGE CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES
Extinct photographic techniques: Niepce's asphalt photograph (1826), daguerrotype (1839), calotype (1841), talbotype, collodion process (1851), fluorotype, cyanotype, Pellet process, ferro-gallic and ferro-tannic papers, albumen process, argenotype, kalliotype, palladiotype, platinotype (1873), uranium printing, powder processes, pigment printing, Artigue process, oil printing, chromotype, Herschel's breath printing, diazotype, pinatype, wothlytype, etc.
DEAD STILL-IMAGE TO TACTILE IMAGE TECHNOLOGY
Naumburg's printing visagraph and automatic visagraph.
DEAD STILL-IMAGE DISPLAY TECHNOLOGIES
The stereopticon, the Protean View, the Zogroscope, the Polyorama Panoptique, Frith's Cosmoscope, Knight's Cosmorama, Ponti's Megalethoscope (1862), Rousell's Graphoscope (1864), Wheatstone's stereoscope (1832), dead Viewmaster knockoffs.
Medieval and renaissance magic-glass conjuring. Alhazen's camera obscura (1000 AD), Wollaston's camera lucida (1807). Magic lantern, dissolving views
Phantasmagoria: Robertson's Fantasmagorie, Seraphin's Ombres Chinoises, Guyot's smoke apparitions, Philipstal's phantasmagoria, Lonsdale's Spectrographia, Meeson's phantasmagoria, the optical eidothaumata, the Capnophoric Phantoms, Moritz's phantasmagoria, Jack Bologna's Phantoscopia, Schirmer and Scholl's Ergascopia, De Berar's Optikali Illusio, Brewster's catadioptrical phantasmagoria, Pepper's Ghost, Messter's Kinoplastikon.
Biddall's Phantospectraghostodrama and similar "fairground bogeys."
Riviere's Theatre d'Ombres.
DEAD STILL-IMAGE "3-D" WITH SOUND
The Talking View-Master.
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION TECHNOLOGIES
Joseph Plateau's phenakistiscope (1832), Emile Reynaud's praxinoscope, Ayrton's thaumatrope or "magic disks" (1825), Stampfer's stroboscope, William George Horner's zoetrope or "wheel-of-life" (1834), L. S. Beale's choreutoscope (1866), the viviscope, Short's Filoscope, Herman Casler's mutoscope and the "picture parlor" (1895), the Lumiere Kinora viewer and Kinora camera, the fantascope, etc.
Dead cinematic devices, including but not limited to: Muybridge's zoogyroscope, E J Marey's chronophotographe and fusil photographique, George Demeny's Phonoscope, Edison kinetoscope (1893), Anschutz's Electro-Tachyscope, Armat's vitascope, Rudge's biophantascope, Skladanowsky's Bioscope, Acre's kineopticon, the counterfivoscope, the klondikoscope, Paul's theatrograph, Reynaud's Theatre Optique, Reynaud's Musee Grevin Cabinet Fantastique, Lumiere cinematographe, Kobelkoff's Giant Cinematographe, Lumiere Cinematographe Geant (1900), the vitagraph, Paul's animatograph, the vitamotograph, the Kinesetograph, Proszynski's Oko, the Urbanora, the Prague Laterna Magika.
The Sony Videomat coin-op video recorder booth (1966)
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE, PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION, SOUND TECHNOLOGIES
the Photo-Cinema-Theatre sound film system (1900), Gaumont's Chronophone (1910), Messter's Biophon (1904), The Mendel-Walturdaw cinematophone (1911), The Jeapes- Barker Cinephone (1908), Hepworth's Vivaphone (1911), Edison kinetophone (1913), Ruhmer's Photographon optical sound recorder (1901), the synchronoscope, the cameraphone, phonofilm, the graphophonoscope, the chronophotographoscope, the biophonograph, DeForest Phonofilm (1923), Warner Bros/ Western Electric Vitaphone (1926), Fox Movietone (1927), Vocafilm, Firnatone, Bristolphone, Titanifrone, Disney's Cinephone, Hoxie / RCA Photophone (1928), General Electric Kinegraphone (1925), Cinerama (1951), CinemaScope (1952), Natural Vision (1952), etc.
The Scopitone.
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE, PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION, IMMERSIVE
Raoul Grimoin-Sanson's Ballon-Cineorama ten-projector circular screen (1900)
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE, PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION, SOUND, SMELL Odorama, Smell-O-Vision (1960), Aromarama (1959) etc.
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE, PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION, SOUND, SMELL, IMMERSIVE Morton Heilig's Sensorama.
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE, PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION, "3-D"
Devignes's stereoscopic zoetrope (1860) Stereoscopic phenakistoscopes: Seller's Kinematoscope (1861), Shaw's stereoscopic phenakistiscope (1860) Bonelli and Cook's microphotograph stereo-phenakistiscope (1863), Wheatstone's stereoscopic viewer (c. 1870)
3-D projection systems: d'Almeida's projected 3-D magic lantern slides (1856), Heyl's Phasmatrope (1870), Grivolas's stereoscopic moving pictures (1897), the Fairall anaglyph process (1922), Kelly's Plasticon (1922), Ives and Leventhall's Plastigram, aka Pathe Stereoscopiks, aka Audioscopiks, aka Metroscopix (1923,1925, 1935, 1953), Teleview (New York 1922), polarized light stereoscopic movies (1936), Ivanov's parallax stereogram projector (Moscow 1941), Savoy's Cyclostereoscope (Paris 1949), the Telekinema (London 1951), Space Vision (Chicago 1966).
VisiDep 3-D Television
DEAD MULTIPLE-IMAGE, PERSISTENCE-OF-VISION, SOUND, ARCHIVAL
Dead video: Baird Phonovisor wax videodisk (1927), Ives/Bell Labs Half-Tone Television (1930s) Eidophor video projector (1945), PixelVision, Polavision, Philips Laservision videodisk, Panasonic HDTV (1974), McDonnell Douglas Laserfilm Videodisc (1984), analog HDTV (1989), RCA SelectaVision CED videodisk, Telefunken Teldec Decca TeD videodisk, TEAC system videodisk, Philips JVC VHD/AHD videodisk
Dead videotapes: Ampex Signature I (1963), Sony CV B/W (1965), Akai 1/4 inch B/W & Colour (1969), Cartivision/Sears (1972) Sony U-Matic (197?), Sony-Matic 1/2" B/W (197?) EIAJ-1 1/2" (197?), RCA Selectavision Magtape (1973) Akai VT-100 1/4 inch portable (1974), Panasonic Omnivision I (1975), Philips "VCR" (197?), Sanyo V-Cord, V-Cord II (197?) Akai VT-120 (1976), Matsushita/Quasar VX (1976) Philips & Grundig Video 2000 (1979), Funai/Technicolor CVC (1984) Sony Betamax
DEAD VIRTUALITIES
Physical display environments (non-immersive): Dioramas (no sound), de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon (sound and lighting) (1781), the Stereorama, the Cosmoramic Stereoscope.
Mechanical drama: Japanese karakuri puppet theatre Heron's Nauplius. Dead thrill rides.
Immersive physical display environments Panoramas, Poole's Myriorama, the Octorama, the Diaphorama, Cycloramas, the Paris Mareorama (1900).
Defunct digital VR systems.
DEAD DATA-RETRIEVAL DEVICES AND SYSTEMS
accountant tally sticks Card catalogs: The Indecks Information Retrieval System, Diebold Cardineer rotary files, etc. Vannevar Bush's Comparator and Rapid Selector Scott's Electronium music composition system
DEAD COMPUTATIONAL TECHNOLOGY (ANALOG)
Extinct computational platforms: abacus (circa 500BC Egypt, still in wide use) saun-pan computing tray (200 AD China) soroban computing tray (200 AD Japan) Napier's bones (1617 Scotland), William Oughtred's slide rule (1622 England) and other slide rules, Wilhelm Schickard's calculator (1623 ?) Blaise Pascal's calculating machine (1642 France) Schott's Organum Mathematicum (1666) Gottfried Liebniz's calculating machine (1673) Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (built 1990s) (1822 England) Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (never built) (1833 England) Scheutz mechanical calculator (1855 Sweden) The Thomas Arithmometer Hollerith tabulating machine (1890) Vannevar Bush differential analyzer (1925 USA)
DEAD COMPUTATIONAL TECHNOLOGY (DIGITAL)
The Cauzin Strip Reader (archival)
Extinct game platforms: Actionmax Video System, Adam Computer System, Aquarius Computer System, Atari: 2600/5200/7800, Colecovision, GCE Vectrex Arcade System, Intellivision I/II/III, Odyssey, Commodore, APF, Bally Astrocade, Emerson Arcadia, Fairchild "Channel F," Microvision, RCA Studio II, Spectravision, Tomy Tutor, etc.
DEAD BINARY DIGITAL COMPUTERS
Konrad Zuse's Z1 computer (1931 Germany) Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1939 USA) Turing's Colossus Mark 1 (1941 England) Zuse's Z3 computer (1941 Germany) Colossus Mark II (1944 England) IBM ASCC Mark I (1944 USA) BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer) (1946-1949 USA) ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) (1946 USA)
Dead mainframes.
Dead personal computers:
Altair 8800, Amiga 500, Amiga 1000, Amstrad Apple I, II, II+, IIc, IIe, IIGS, III Apple Lisa, Apple Lisa MacXL, Apricot Atari 400 and 800 XL, XE, ST, Atari 800XL, Atari 1200XL, Atari XE Basis 190, BBC Micro, Bondwell 2, Cambridge Z-88 Canon Cat, Columbia Portable Commodore C64, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore Plus 4 Commodore Pet, Commodore 128 CompuPro "Big 16," Cromemco Z-2D, Cromemco Dazzler, Cromemco System 3, DOT Portable, Eagle II Dragon System Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 Epson QX-10, Epson HX-20, Epson PX-8 Geneva Exidy Sorcerer, Franklin Ace 500, Franklin Ace 1200 Fujitsu Bubcom 80, Gavilan, Grid Compass, Heath/Zenith, Hitachi Peach Hyperion, IBM PC 640K, IBM XT, IBM Portable IBM PCjr, IMSAI 8080, Intelligent Systems Compucolor and Intecolor, Intertek Superbrain II Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1, Kaypro 2x Linus WriteTop, Mac 128, 512, 512KE Mattel Aquarius, Micro-Professor MPF-II Morrow MicroDecision 3, Morrow Portable NEC PC-8081, NEC Starlet 8401-LS, NEC 8201A Portable, NEC 8401A, NorthStar Advantage, NorthStar Horizon Ohio Scientific, Oric, Osborne 1, Osborne Executive Panasonic, Sanyo 1255, Sanyo PC 1250 Sinclair ZX-80, Sinclair ZX-81, Sinclair Spectrum Sol Model 20, Sony SMC-70, Spectravideo SV-328 Tandy 1000, Tandy 1000SL, Tandy Coco 1, Tandy Coco 2 Tandy Coco 3, TRS-80 models I, II, III, IV, 100, Tano Dragon, TI 99/4, Timex/Sinclair 1000 Timex/Sinclair color computer, TRW/Fujitsu 3450, Vector 4 Victor 9000, Workslate Xerox 820 II, Xerox Alto, Xerox Dorado, Xerox 1108 Yamaha CX5M etc. etc. etc.
Dead computer languages. Fortran I, II and III, ALGOL 58 and 60, Lisp 1 and 1.5 APT, JOVIAL, SIMULA I and 67 JOSS, PL/1, SNOBOL, APL
Dead operating systems. CP/M, CP/M-86 DEC RSTS/E Fujitsu E-35
Dead Internet techniques.
We are actively hunting data in all these categories and also hunting for new categorization schemes.
Bruce Sterling October 11, 1997 ```
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