Topic: How pictures were sent by wire (1930)

[Francois]

Just found this and it made me smile
https://youtu.be/cLUD_NGE370?si=k_KobhU3h8l6cqyB

Now, that's what I call speed! I never thought it could rival modern days computers in a sense...

[EarlJam]

A 2013 PetaPixel article bubbled up on a social media site recently that details how photos were transmitted in the mid-1920s. It's fascinating how far technology had developed in a decade, even before the vast amount of technical research that occurred during the WW2 years.

(Apologies if this article was linked when it first appeared)

https://petapixel.com/2013/07/01/how-they-sent-photos-across-the-ocean-back-in-1926/

[Bryan]

We just use smaller dots now.  I wonder what a side by side comparison would look like to see how much the image is degraded. 

[Francois]

I know Man Ray did some photos that were meant to be wired to New York. In them you can clearly see the scanning.

It's funny when you think of it: we're 100 years after this invention and we essentially still do the same thing... and my Epson is probably just as slow as this early scanner.

[EarlJam]

Paper punch tape has fascinated me for years. It's a late 18th/early 19th century technology originally developed for loom control. Fast forward 200-ish years to 1979 and it's what drove the first "multimedia" slide projector sequencer I used at one of my early AV jobs. A decade later and the major video editing houses in Los Angeles were still asking for edit decision lists on punch tape. The online guys didn't trust EDLs on 8" floppies which they had the drives to read but weren't comfortable using. I did my last big video project in 1988 and don't recall when the last of the paper tape readers disappeared from use.

[AJShepherd]

In the late 70s after leaving school I got sent on a 'work experience' course of six months in the pathology laboratories of my local hospital. The Biochemistry lab was just having a computer installed, a Data General the size of a phone box with an enormous disk that stored a few megabytes, and they booted it up by running a roll of punched paper tape through the Teletype unit attached to it.
Suspect these days a Raspberry Pi Pico that costs a few quid could emulate that!

[Francois]

I always find it fun to see how tech has evolved.
Back in the 60's, my mom worked at a bank where they had a state of the art Burrows that she used to balance the books. The thing was the size of a kitchen counter... And it probably could be run from an Arduino nowadays.
On YouTube there's a guy who just did a comparison between the Cray 1 and an iPhone. Guess which one is the most powerful?

[EarlJam]

I always find it fun to see how tech has evolved.
Back in the 60's, my mom worked at a bank where they had a state of the art Burrows that she used to balance the books. The thing was the size of a kitchen counter... And it probably could be run from an Arduino nowadays.
On YouTube there's a guy who just did a comparison between the Cray 1 and an iPhone. Guess which one is the most powerful?

Fall 1970, senior year of HS: my math teacher rolls an AV cart into the room with a typewriter-size device hidden under a sheet. "Kids, I'm going to show you the future" as he removes the sheet to unveil a four-function plus square root calculator with 8 nixie tubes and a paper tape printer. "And it's only $1500!" ($12k in current dollars). By the time I graduated in June '71, TI, National Semiconductor, Bowmar and others had handheld calculators with segmented LED displays selling in the $100-ish range if memory serves.

Fast forward to 1976 and I'm working in the camera department of a local membership retailer. In June, we had a competitive handheld calc with decent functionality selling for about $50. By Christmas, there was a stack of unsellable stock on a table priced at $4.99. Absolutely wild times.

[Francois]

Definitely.
Just to think that Colossus, the supercomputer at Bletchley Park that allowed Alan Turing to break the code of the Enigma machine contained 2500 vacuum tubes and that my old VIC-20 and it's 6502 processor had over 4500 transistors...