Tag: History

Evolution of airplane movie technology

October 26, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Flying to the States on a Continental 777, my favorite jetliner, alternating my attention between my notebook and the video screen in the seat back in front of me. The latter is a new model, fitted to every seat in the cabin. The technology has been evolving ever since I stared flying to America back in the eighties.

At first they introduced real movie screens, one at the front of each cabin, with a projector that would show one single movie at a time. Your viewing pleasure was a matter of luck – a tall passenger in front, or a poor seat location, could wipe it out – but passengers loved it: a movie – in the sky? Wow!

Then came TV screens jutting out under the ceiling, giving better viewing to more passengers; still one movie at a time, chosen by the airline. The passengers had no choice of content or screening time.

More recently we got personal screens, with multiple movies to choose from. Typically we’d have a dozen movies, but they all ran in synch – all started at the same time, and if you switched on in the middle you saw half the movie. Of course on a transatlantic flight there was time enough to take in the missing half in the next cycle. So – each passenger now had the choice of which movie to see but not when.

So this flight, they’ve installed larger, wider screens and with them unbelievable choice. There are hundreds of movies and TV episodes to choose from, and each traveler can start any of them at any time, and even pause, rewind or FF during the movie. Perfect choice.

What will they think of next, then?

The Sweep Hand and the concept of Time

April 17, 2009 / / 1 Comment

I met a guy who had an old Swiss chronometer watch, a self-winding mechanical one. As I looked at it, admiring the fine workmanship, I suddenly noticed a detail that used to be taken for granted: the thing had a seconds hand that was moving around the face of the watch.

Omega mechanical wristwatchSo what, you say?

So, it was moving, not in the swift jerky jumps we’re so used to in today’s superbly accurate Quartz watches. This hand moved at a constant rate, sweeping around the watch, which is why it used to be called a “sweep hand” back then. I remember this from my father’s watch when I was a small child: I would try in vain to discern any movement in the hours and minutes hands, but the sweep hand moved in its slow, stately march, signaling the inexorable continuity of time.

And it occurred to me that the switch from mechanical to electronic analog watches makes the seconds hand mirror the zeitgeist of their respective periods in history. The jumpy quartz-driven hand is such a great fit to the hectic, jerky pace of our modern life, whereas the sweep hand is a better reflection of the more sedate lifestyle of centuries past…

Roman technology rocks!

April 6, 2009 / / 2 Comments

Yesterday I went to the annual conference of the Israeli Society for History and Philosophy of Science, an eclectic event if ever I saw one. Lectures covered such diverse issues as the possible role of quantum effects in neuronal microtubules in creating consciousness (yes, Penrose’s conjecture); blog writing as a therapeutic tool for adolescents with social and emotional problems; the development of the Theremin; and a lot besides. It was so much fun that I joined the society then and there!

A Maltese GalleyBut to the subject of this blog: there was a lecture by Yossi Eliav about The evolution of engineering literacy as seen in Venetian manuscripts about shipbuilding from the 15th century. This mouthful was actually very interesting; but at some point I asked a question about older ships and I was treated to the following insight: these Venetians had large rowing ships (right), galleys, carrying over 100 rowers, which were produced in large numbers and used extensively for centuries; so did the Romans, Carthaginians and Greeks 20 centuries earlier. But the Roman and Greek galleys – triremes, with 3 rows of rowers – were of a completely different, and far superior, construction!

The medieval and early modern ships were built from the inside out: first the keel and ribs were built, and then planks were nailed to this skeleton from the outside. The ancient trireme was built from the outside in: first the shell was built from planks connected to each other with mortise and tenon joints; then the inner skeleton was added as reinforcement. This meant that the trireme had a solid hull that could withstand shearing forces, which the Venetian galleys could not. In addition, the precision of the Greek and Roman work was such that the hull was practically watertight even without caulking!

The picture below shows this amazing technique in detail.
These ancients could sure build!

Trireme hull construction

Photo credits:
Maltese galley: Myriam Thyes, via Wikimedia Commons.
Trireme construction: Eric Gaba, via Wikimedia Commons.

Blast from the Past

February 23, 2009 / / 2 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Computing and Communications museum of the Israel Electric Company. The IEC has been around for almost a century and has kept pace with computing advances since its early days; curator Dlila Shapira did a great job rounding up some lovely vintage pieces from the “big iron” era and later.

No less interesting than the equipment on display were the speeches of some veteran managers of the computing division. One gentleman told us how when he first arrived on board as a programmer his first task was to glue shut holes that had been punched in error onto punched cards; a bottle of the liquid used was on display, and here it is.

Punched Cards and correction fluid

Also on display were storage devices of yesteryear. In the photo below you see a removable hard disk pack from a Prime computer system of the 1980’s; the dozen 12-inch platters together hold 300MB. For comparison, you see on the glass case another removabe storage unit, namely a 2.0 GB – 2000MB – Disk-on-key from today. We’ve come a long way…

300MB Disk Pack from the 80's

The opposite of Human Engineering

January 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The key idea of Human Engineering is to design the product to fit the humans using it. Makes sense? Sure does, but there are also cases of the opposite approach; Select the human to fit the task or the product!

Obvious examples abound in sports, as with the physical attributes of the horse racing jockey and the basketball player (and while we can’t change the horse’s reaction to a heavier load, we could actually lower the basket if we were designing it to fit the average human…)

A technological example would be the Soviet solution to giving battle tanks a low silhouette: make the tank low, and recruit soldiers of short stature to Cray Wiringcrew them.

But an example I really like has to do with the construction of the Cray 1 supercomputer in the 1970s. This elegant computer was built in a round form with the electronics modules on the outside and a central cavity surrounded by the wiring connecting them (the same idea, more or less, is used in the human brain). The wires – huge numbers of them – had to be soldered correctly in the narrow central space, a nightmare task. So how did they manage it?

I once met a veteran of Cray Research at the Computer History museum and he explained it to me. Cray hired women for this task – ones selected for their patience and precision – and they put two of them on each machine: a tall girl to solder at the top of the structure and a short one to work the bottom. Unbelievable? Look at these photos!

Cray Wiring

Cray Wiring

The infamous Caps Lock key

October 24, 2008 / / 5 Comments

Caps lock key on a modern PC keyboardEveryone knows that the QWERTY keyboard layout sucks, because it carries a legacy from the early typewriter days; still, we’re all locked into its use and live in oblivion of what we’re missing. But we have another legacy from mechanical typewriters that is hard to forget because it bites us daily. i REFER TO THE cAPS lOCK KEY.

It is interesting to trace the history of this design infamy. Originally, it made a lot of sense: in a mechanical typewriter the Shift keys did just that: they shifted the type mechanism vertically so the type bars would hit the paper with the uppercase letters; and the Shift Lock key would keep the keys locked in this position. This key had to sit right above the Shift key, because it physically latched it in a depressed position; hitting Shift again would release the lock. It was very easy to see (and feel) whether Shift was locked or not, because both keys would be depressed when the lock was engaged. The photos below are from an antiquated Royal typewriter; you can see how the Lock key holds down the Shift key on the right (and note the quaint caption on the latter key – Shift / Freedom, in allusion to releasing the Lock).

Shift Lock in an old typewriter

Early computer keyboards carried this idea forward, with a Shift Lock or Caps Lock key that had two physical positions: depressed for Lock, and flush with the other keys when released. You could therefore tell when you were in Caps mode, and would notice immediately if you hit the lock accidentally while touch typing. The delightful Commodore 64 had this feature, among others; the photos show a keyboard that came with the collection of homebrew boards described here, from the late 70s.

Two-position Caps Lock in a 1970s keyboard

Later, as keyboard makers sacrificed quality for cheap manufacturing, the more complex and different two-state key was replaced with a momentary key like all the others, with electronics to implement toggle action. Gone was the tactile feedback. Now a simple brush of the finger could accidentally lock you in Caps mode. Worse still, the position of the Lock key next to the left Shift key, which made sense a century ago, was retained – placing this relatively little used key right in harm’s way.

I don’t see manufacturers giving us back the 2-position key (it would cost them a few cents, after all), but the least they could do is move this stupid key to the top row, next to the Scroll Lock, where it will remain unused, unnoticed, and harmless.

So, what can we do about this? Well, one thing we can do is disable the offending key. No need to tear it out – I used KeyTweak, a free key remapping utility, to disable it on my Windows XP system. Good riddance!

Also, if you use MS Word, you may be unaware that depressing Shift+F3 repeatedly will change any selected text to lowercase, uppercase, and sentence case; a very useful feature after YOU’VE ACCIDENTALLY HIT sHIFT lOCK AND CONTINUED TYPING.

Babylonian memory technology

August 25, 2008 / / 0 Comments

A gem I saw in a museum recently: this is a large cuneiform-inscribed cylinder, maybe 3-4 inches thick, which describes the building activities of king Nebuchadnezzar (better known in the bible for his opposite exploit when he destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC).

Babylonian Cuneiform Cylinder

Anyway, in one of those moments of associative memory, it struck me how similar this looked to the contact-studded drum memory devices of the ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Computer, one of the earliest electronic computers (1941), pictured below at the left. One is also reminded of the magnetic drums that served computers for memory in the 1950s, like the one to its right.

Computer Memory Drums

The idea of using a drum for computer storage makes good sense in terms of allowing it to be scanned easily by rotating it; but the Babylonians probably used this form because it allows you to cram much text (and many construction exploits, if you’re a busy king like Nebuchadnezzar, he of the hanging gardens of Babylon) into a relatively compact object.

Also worth noting: The king’s memory cylinder is still readable after more than 26 centuries; so, can you read your 5-1/4 inch floppies any longer?

Pillboxes and Clay balls: inside and outside

July 10, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I recently bought this box of vitamins, and noticed it had a life size outline of the pills’ actual size. This makes sense, since the box is “safety sealed for your protection”, so people can’t see what’s inside before they buy.

Vitamins box

This reminded me (wonders of associative memory!) of something rather different, yet following the same idea, from the History of Computing (one of my favorite hobbies). I read about it long ago, but recently was delighted to run across the real thing in a small showcase in the Pergamon museum in Berlin. Back in ancient Mesopotamia, around 9,000 years ago, people had this neat idea of recording commercial transactions with clay tokens. Different shaped tokens might represent a sheep, a jug of beer, or a sack of grain… and so you could represent a loan or tax payment by a collection of tokens (SAP was far in the future then, as was Excel; in fact they had yet to invent writing, so they couldn’t use that for their records). Here is a sample of these tokens:

Mesopotamian Clay Tokens

Then, around 3,500BC in ancient Sumer, the idea occurred that it’s better to keep all the tokens in an “envelope”, a hollow ball of clay that could be signed with the parties’ seals, then fired to harden it. These balls of clay are like an authenticated, signed record; their content can’t be altered without breaking the ball. The museum had some of these balls cracked open, with the tokens still in them:

Mesopotamian Clay Balls with Tokens

Mesopotamian Clay Ball with imprinted tokens

And since the clay is not transparent, they would sometimes press the tokens on the outside of the ball before sealing them inside – so you’d know what each ball was about. And now we have an accessible copy of the record on the outside, and a sealed version on the inside… just as with the vitamins box!

The next step is obvious in retrospect: who needs the tokens on the inside? So around 3,300BC they dispensed with the tokens, flattened the ball into a clay tablet and made do with the indentations on this, as in the next photo.

Mesopotamian Clay Tablets

And lastly… surely you can see where this is going? Once they could Early Writing on a Mesopotamian tabletrepresent stuff in the real world by abstract marks on a tablet, they were on the path to real writing, starting with pictographs and ending with true cuneiform. Here is another exhibit from the Pergamon, which seems to be halfway through the transition. Wayda go!

More of the science behind this fascinating history can be found on the web site of Prof. Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the university of Texas, a leading researcher of the origins of writing and counting .

The left-handed staircases of the Kerrs

July 4, 2008 / / 1 Comment

When we toured Scotland we visited an ancient building with a curious design feature: it had a staircase that ran in a counterclockwise spiral, opposite to the standard design.

We were told that there are a number of such buildings in Scotland, all built by the same family. Apparently the Kerr family tended to have many left-handed sons, and they built a number of their castles and buildings (notably Ferniehirst Castle, in the 15th century) with counterclockwise spiral staircases, the idea being that a left handed person could defend them more easily (and perhaps also confuse the more common right handed enemies? although it seems that the latter would have some advantage on the attack).

Such a degree of custom design, geared to a genetic trait of one family, is interesting. It is also told that once they committed the architecture this way, they handled the fact that not all their fighting men were lefties by training those who weren’t to fight with the sword in their left hand anyway. Customize the building to the family, then customize the retainers to the building…

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