1970s moment captured when advances in the pneumatic tube machine made it able to be fit on a desktop.
Yesterday my son asked about the old days -- 10 years ago -- before there was Google. (That is, not my grandson, which I don't have, and not about 50 years ago).
Does this mean that "technology is accelerating?" Well, no, not exactly. In fact -- not at all. And in fact, it may not even mean that the human condition is advancing, either. The geeks are the first to tell you that "the future isn't evenly distributed" -- although it may be more about them being more evenly distributed in the future than the rest of us *cough* -- or it may be a confusion about the concept of "change" with concepts of "acceleration" and "betterment".
Somehow, my son was surprised because someone told him this on WoW who was a bit older -- that there was a time before Google. He didn't remember such a time. But how did you search for things?! he asked. Google was born in 1998, when he was six years old, and not yet sitting up to the computer to do much, preferring either to play the sort of PlayStation or X box games that kids play, or even still pushing little cars around on the floor or dressing up like a Power Ranger (remember them?) or even Peter Pan (the film of Mary Martin's staged production, not the Disney version, was played probably 5,357 times in our house, and it took some doing find just the right sort of Peter Pan type shoes to complete the outfit). He remembers those things from the age of six; he doesn't remember the birth of Google.
But by the time my son could play Runescape when its monthly subscriptions, which began in 2002, when he was then 10 years old, Google was on the way to being established. I don't know why I think of Google as not really being ubiquitous until about 2003-2004, maybe due to the addition of local search or news or something. In any event, if you were six when Google was born, and 10 when Google became widely used, you would think it "had always been there". I explained about Alta Vista, and how in the earlier days, we even used to spend a lot of time making aggregate pages. Someone in a country or state or city would take it upon themselves to make the portal page for that country's listings and you would find the URL to that page by getting it in email. We also used to hilariously make use of the random URL generator to find odd things like crab cake shacks in Louisiana.
At some point in describing these "old days" I mentioned that we didn't use to have a mouse -- something my son found absolutely incomprehensible. We typed in DOS commands. When I think of those earliest Hayes Smart Com file sharing exercises, or sending the email with that program, I remember typing many lines of commands learned by wrote. There were gophers that you sent to fetch files that you knew were there to be fetched because someone told you on the phone or email. Email seemed like such a wonder and yet so ephemeral that I had one even very scientific boss order us to print it all out and store it in big black binders lol.
But then I pushed back to the days even before that, in the 1970s, working at Xerox and Citibank and IBM at secretarial jobs, in the days when they still called them secretaries and when "administrative assistants" were just coming into fashion.
Interoffice mail was handled manually because of course there was no Internet, and no wide use of faxes yet. Each morning, we would race to get some correspondence done for the first pass through by an elderly black man pushing a metal cart like a shopping cart filled with manilla envelopes. We would type up correspondence using carbon paper (hence the term "cc" or "carbon copy" still surviving as a vestige today on e-mail) and often curse as we had to fix mistakes using a bottle of white-out to paint over the typo and try again -- or, if we were lucky and already had one of the IBM Selectrics that had memory at least for a line or page, could press some buttons to make it go back and erase the mistakes using a little disk of sticky white correction tape put into the machine along with the font ball.
Each piece of correspondence would be careful to have the signature of the boss, and below, our own initials to signify that we were the ones who had typed it, and in some cases signed it with an /s/ indication typed to show it wasn't an authentic signature. Then we would carefully create the cc: list -- and the even more important bcc: list that we had to be especially attentive not to goof up and put someone in the wrong place.
Then, after carefully gathering up either the onion-skin copies made with carbon paper, or, using the big Xerox machine (Xerox was promiscuous about using its own machines; other companies were not as yet), there would be the struggle with the large manilla envelopes -- making sure to get each piece of correspondence singularly into an envelope, cross off the name of the person who had sent some correspondence before using that interoffice envelope, carefully write the name of the person to get the next piece of correspondence, and then, for some reason, wind the long red string around the circular disk to keep the big envelop closed -- tucking in the flap was not acceptable for some reason.
The man would take your thick bunch of manilla envelopes into his cart, and give you a set of your own addressed to your own boss -- and then you were off to the races again, opening up all the correspondence, getting it around to all the proper desks of the bosses in your department, then getting back their inked or pencilled comments on the actual page, or, taking their handwritten or dictated correspondence to be typed up again -- in readiness for the afternoon's cart, pushed by a middle-aged woman in a shapeless shift with Coke-bottle glasses who often used the occasion of her cart-pushing to unofficially bring you a snack, that you'd pay her a little extra for, like one of those packs of Ritz peanut-butter crackers. Once again, the winding of the big red string around the manilla envelopes, and hoping you didn't put any of those bcc people into the cc: people's envelopes by mistake -- there'd often be multiple letters with multiple statuses.
Occasionally you might privately wonder to yourself, wrestling with typos and copies and manilla envelopes if the Xerox machine, by making it very easy to make copies and make whited out mistakes look good, was inducing a need in bosses to send more needless copies to other bosses, who then upped the ante. Before these days, they might have...picked up the phone. Or gone out to lunch together. More and more, they were sitting inside now with a brown paper bag, going through huge inboxes laden with cc'd memos and reports...
Sometimes, if a communication was to go "upstairs" to some really important boss, it would skip over the stage of the slow-moving folks with the metal pushcarts, and be a candidate for the pneumatic tubes. To be honest, I was always a little afraid of that assignment. It's not that opening the big door to the pneumatic chamber, I thought I might be sucked in -- although one might be forgiven for a fleeting thought of that nature. It's that again, it required dialing certain things correctly -- I seem to remember it worked like this: you had to turn a dial on the canister itself and set it -- "F8" or "H22" or something -- then set it into the machine that would suck it up and crank something there, too, to make sure it went to the right place.
At Citibank, there was a mad rush at the end of the day to prepare all the reconciled accounts for bundling and trucking to other cities. Someone sat with a large ledger of accounts and an adding machine and a pencil. Somebody else, to be sure, had a computer they were still testing -- it filled a room, and took up lots of punch cards, and occasionally, these punch cards were bundled up for the trucking -- but the main attraction -- balances of accounts -- was still contained in large ledgers and paper pages. Someone else might be busy at an adding machine or office machine that would create something like "a print out" that was in a long spool of paper to be rolled up. There were more manilla envelopes with their red string wound around a ridiculous amount of times. All of this would go into big burlap bags to be loaded on to a truck. This was "banking" in 1975 when we were just starting to suffer from "inflation".
Fax machines were available, but nobody was going to send thousands of pages on them, especially of wide pages of spreadsheets with numerous small numbers pencilled on them. I remember my first encounter with what was called "the telecopier" at Xerox in 1975. Interaction with this device almost always seemed to be bound with a live voicemail call. So you wouldn't be loading it up and just sending it asynchronously. Instead, you would first call the person to tell them to be on hand to receive your "telecopy". Upon reaching them and discussing the document, you would then press send while you had them on the line and they would watch it come out on their end. I'm trying to remember if that initial voice contact was necessary, or a vestige in those days -- I seem to recall that it was necessary because the person had to switch their line from phone mode to telecopier mode and the noisy sound of the fax to get it to work -- then come back on the line to you to say that they got it OK.
I don't know whether it was because of that need for initial voice contact and synchronizing -- and it often took several tries because it didn't work right in the early days -- or because telecopiers were not yet on every desk (we only had one in our department of a dozen people) -- but they weren't used very much. Perhaps the issue was the phone bill. So the exercise of typing correspondence, fixing mistakes by whiting them out and Xeroxing the paper to make it appear clean and trying again, making Xerox copies or carbon copies (yes we still used them, even at Xerox), fitting them into the manilla envelopes -- all of that took up a good part of the day. And of course, there was still the outside mail to prepare for the mailroom to send, or, depending on the office, to send yourself if you were given the job of weighing the envelopes in the mailroom and working the postage meter.
There were also in-person messengers, of course, and bike messengers, and in 1979, if you wanted to send a press release to 20 news outlets, you sent someone like me around physically with the manilla envelop with the duplicate of the press release. That press release might be made on a Gestetner, or mimeograph, not a Xerox machine, which were expensive even to lease and not ubiquitous. Our college newspaper was made on a Gestetner. (And in fact in Girl Scout camp, we used a homemade hectograph made from a tray with Knox gelatin and purple ink and stencil pages to make copies of our artwork and our little newsletters.) Making a Gestetner copy involved taking a long legal-sized stiff piece of blue waxed paper and typing, and apparently the typing would displace the wax to enable ink to be forced through. When these offices advanced in the 1970s and 1980s, they would get Savin liquid toner copying machines, not yet Xeroxes -- they were too expensive (and often required a lot of troubleshooting and repair; I remember taking a course in basic Xerox machine repair, before they had the "for dummies" sort of easy tabs and instructions they have now, in order to constantly troubleshoot these machines).
One of my more festive summer jobs was to test the workings of a big new fancy Xerox machine, whose number I've forgotten, that took up half a room. My job was to load it up with paper, as much as it could hold, 250 or 500 sheets or whatever. Then, I would set to testing it with patterned pages, marking on a clipboard at certain times how good the copy was looking, and at what point it would simply stop showing up. I would keep loading and loading this machine and checking its quality and numbers all day, reading a novel in 7-minute installments as it grinded away on its copying mission. The machine constantly stopped, jammed, spat up, etc. and had to be adjusted and the black toner would get everywhere.
I distinctly remember, in about 1982 or so, perhaps it was a year or too later, I remember an officious secretary bringing a technician into the back office where I worked to install what she proudly and pompously called "the dedicated line". That is, before then, we had used the phone line, tying up one of the voice lines for a time to send files back and forth on Hayes Smartcom between cities, and figuring out, as many did, that instead of just using the little spaces at the top merely to type file names, we could type "Hi, how r u" and "how's the weather in DC?" or "so-and-so is making a surprise trip" etc. -- I suppose these were the first tweets or sorts.
Eventually they made longer forms of email of course. And the "dedicated line" took up only the digital communications of those first computers on the local area network, or the intercity connections over phone which of course was still not the Internet. These clunky terminals required literally a grinding sound as each new page was formed and "turned over," roughly like pulling a page out of typewriter and inserting a new one. There was a whole host of DOS commands to memorize in using "Wordperfect" the program you could use to create documents on these machines. We were assigned to type and edit a book on this machine soon after it was put in, and we kept marvelling at what a pain it was to use -- it was ostensibly supposed to be easier than typing and duplicating, and corrections were supposed to be easier than on the IBM Selectrics (which by that time could "remember" whole pages and even several pages of documents), but of course the new computer didn't work perfectly as advertised. It was often "down".
"Down" is a word that people live with every single day, and almost never thing deeply about. In fact, you might say we live in a "System of a Down" like the funny Russian rock group name. I go to the bank, and nothing can get solved about a double debit because "the system is down". Calling about the double debit, I'm told by an automatic message that "our system is experiencing higer than usual calls now" -- something it says every day, in fact and that I might have a 27 minute wait, or a 2 minute wait that actually culminates in me being cut off automatically and having to start over.
My own printer is "down" because when I ordered the toner by mail with the precise number that it showed on the box, what was sent didn't fit the printer so it didn't work. At Kinko's -- even at Kinko's -- quite a few of the comptuters and printers were "down".
Attempts to revisit some of these issues later in an office turned up the same thing -- the system was "down" today and the geek on vacation. It wasn't clear when it would be "up".
I thought about a campaign we did this week on certain issues, requiring emailing and faxing and also making appointments with certain officials. Here the following things happened:
o I sent so many emails out I was afraid of spamming some people twice, and yet one of them got forgotten because I thought they were on a list given to an intern and visa versa, somehow they were left out
o 99 percent of the people never answered
o Knowing of this coefficient, where emails are lost, deleted, never read, etc. we also doubled up with some faxes, perhaps 50 of them, let's say. These were to create a sort of "paper fact" in an office where, sometimes, an operator of the mail room seeing the fax come in to an important enough person addressed individually will actually move that paper on to that person's desk, especially if it is a one-page fact-filled memo with Internet links to PDF files -- that way "somebody has to take action" moving that paper along
o Perhaps 3 or 4 out of the faxed list responded
o We made phone calls, and asked for meetings for some of the people -- perhaps 10.
o Knowing that coefficient, naturally we attempted to set up face-to-face appointments. Here, perhaps two out of the six contacted engaged, said they might "do something" and then needed a hard copy -- here, it was no good to say "it's in your email," a page had to be put in their hand at that moment they were prepared to focus. In a few cases "a FEDEX with a hard copy" had to be sent, even though within that office's system were already multiple emails and faxes. I often find that you have "closed the deal" so to speak when you reach this almost silly and redundant phase of following up an unread email with a phone call that is left on an answering machine...that MIGHT lead to having a f2f meeting that then leads to a pushing of physical paper when the follow up consists of...FEDEXing a hard copy lol
o more and more, you might say "well, it's on your blackberry," and the person might start vainly pushing and pulling and looking for your message among the zillion, but here, your hard copy and your f2f meeting are absolutely vital for gaining attention.
o even though PDF files are widely touted by Web 1.0 geeks (less so by Web 2.0 geeks) as just being the ne plus ultra across platforms, people HATE THEM with a PASSION. Sending many people a PDF link elicits actual hostility. That's because they may not have Adobe downloaded to open up the file. Or they might not have the *right version* of Adobe to open up the file. Or they can open it up, but it might freeze their screen. Or they can open it up, but it's set at a giant 133 percent for some reason on their system. Or they can open it up, but they have to arduously page through 80 pages of PDF, scrolling arduously, and not having the pages be visible most of the time as they scroll as they would if they scanned an HTML file or even an attached Word document in an email. PDF is HATED, but try telling that to your IT department who insists on pushing them
I go into this deep historical and current detail to make a number of salient points about the Singularity Hoax. Because it's based upon a number of fallacies and outright lies about technology that any one can see are not true, using their five senses and common sense, and taking just a little bit of documented historical perspective. These truths work something like this:
o Technological advancement does not accelerate in linear, perfect fashion, but moves in fits and starts, sometimes forcing offices to go backwards, not forward, sometimes forcing people to waste more time and money, not save it -- for uncalculated time periods. Some technology might be "invented" or "started" in a certain year, but not become really used until another year, that could be 2-10-50 years into the future.
o Technological advancement does not evenly distribute. It doesn't even evenly distribute in places where you think it really "should". Why would people who invented the Xerox machine and had loads of cheap and easily-available Xerox machines all over their offices, like Xerox, still use carbon paper or pneumatic tubes? Why would people who had telecopies waste time and money and staff positions on moving paper around when the added cost might be matched or saved if just looked at over time?
o Cost of technology is one factor -- some technology is just too expensive to use or make wide use of, and the people who invent it and the affluent early adapters are tone-deaf -- or toner-deaf -- to that reality
o Even when this more costly latest technology begins to come into effect, it doesn't instantly replace the old technology in any kind of predictable, logical, or fast way. There are still people who use carbon paper and old fashioned typewriters to print forms to this day in one office I go to because trying to put flimsy forms with carbon copies (yes, housing and medical forms in particular are guilty of arriving in this fashion quite often) into printers where they might crumple and jam, and where they can't hit the boxes correctly using a word processing program -- is more trouble than its worth. So some offices keep old typewriters around just for that purpose of form-filling. Pneumatic tubes are still used in banks and hospitals to this day, with modern versions of the system to move actual objects like currency or blood vials along with messages.
o All along the way, constantly, endlessly, ubiquitously, *technology breaks down*. It is this most salient factor of technology we as users and ordinary people all know about what is supposed to be so "advanced" and so "futuristic". Yet technology's inventors and early adapters, and their merchandisers, of course, never, ever, ever admit or factor into their lovely futuristic equations.
The story of technology in the last 25 years that was supposed to save us time and money is really a story of machines that wasted money and time in prodigious quantities, lost time, lost jobs, caused problems -- that perhaps we won't get back or fix so quickly. 25 years ago, I would not be spending $5000 or more like $10000 to put laptops and Internet connections into a small office -- it would not be money I needed to raise. Today it is. 25 years ago, I wouldn't lose a day of work or even two days of work while those machines were "down"; today I do.
While it might seem that the money spent and the time spent adapting or waiting for "Down" to be over are trivial compared to the amount of time gained in advanced communications, and surely some tekkie would snappily pull out the spreadsheets to prove this. But let's look at "the human factor".
o the jobs held previously by the unskilled elderly black man and the middleaged woman with poor eyesight are gone, and probably they are retired, laid off, put on welfare.
o the semi-skilled jobs held by hordes of college students in the summer working as office workers, secretaries, word-processers, testers, mailroom clerks etc are gone -- and that kind of job as semi-skilled labor full-time through all seasons are also gone -- because any boss now essentially has to type at least his email and Blackberry, even if he might still, if rich and important and high-ranking enough, have someone to take his dictation. People who are bad at typing or find it too slow can pick up their mobile phones.
o the costs for technology for small organizations without economies of scale are still pretty great, and perhaps don't balance out -- but the cost of "down" is incalculable because no one every studies it honestly and systematically. I always marvel that in all studies of "technology" and "the future" nobody ever thinks to make a simple field-data-driven test, sampled across times, sectors, geographical areas, etc. of just how much the technology "we all depend on" really works -- and how much in fact we "really depend on it" given that it is "down" a good chunk of time, forcing us into workarounds (telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, waiting in lines).
o all these communications advances, the role of the face-to-face meeting, the persuasive in-person argument, the cogitation that has to take place with a harder copy in hand -- these are also all incalcuable and not honestly reported.
And what are all these forms of communication worth, if they do not lead to attention and action?
What was the most interesting communication I received all week? What was the most interesting communication you receievd all week? Was it really on Twitter?
Oddly enough, for me, it was quite an extraordinary hand-written paper document. I got a piece of snail mail from my mother's old college room mate. Inside, she had in turn put a letter written to her by my mother, dated July 5, 1956 -- that is, more than 53 years ago.
On flowery 1950s-type stationery, in ball-point ink, it's a letter about my birth and baptism one month before. It also mentions in passing my father studying hard to pass a physics exam at the college of engineering, where he was enrolled on the G.I. Bill. It gives a sense of what it was like for a young woman of 24 who was the first woman in her family to be educated in college, to learn a language, and study abroad, to then marry -- and suddenly be faced with the challenge of a crying little newborn who won't let you sleep at night ("a devil!") but who had naturally curly hair : )
Quite amazing!
My brother e-mailed me not long ago he's expecting another son...I hope I saved that e-mail...I hope the system wasn't down...His wife is likely to make a picture on her Blackberry before she'd ever sit down and write the kind of letter that I just got from my mother, 53 years later. What will be preserved, and what will be communicated?
nothing lasts forever.
Teeth last the longest. So if you want it preserved for the longest time then chisel the message into a tooth.
Imagine what an archeologist 50 million years from now might try to deduce from these arcane glyphs we use to communicate. When, after all, humans always had telepathic capabilities. They just refused to acknowledge it and instead assumed it was an invisible deity talking to them.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | July 05, 2009 at 05:36 PM
I don't envy archaeologists of the future. Imagine what Egyptology would be like if every single hieroglyph document required as much effort as was devoted to the decipherment of hieroglyphs, and cracking one provided little to no help with the next.
That's what they'll have to look forward to for documents to which DRM is applied.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | July 05, 2009 at 07:13 PM
Some days I think I have more obsolete technological knowledge than most people have technological knowledge in total.
Double-sized, magnified sprites. Programming a piece of music to play with CALL SOUND. The significance of "PR#6". Punching a notch into the other side of 5-1/4" disks so they could be "flipped" for double the storage (and disks were expensive in those days). Apollo Domain OS, which was a lot like Unix, except that it was different. TecMar cartridges. The original Turbo Pascal. Programming serial communications under MS-DOS in assembly language (which I did one afternoon while backups were running, based on a magazine article in PC Techniques). Using "smart exports" in 16-bit Windows programming to keep from having to use MakeProcInstance. The intricacies of writing code under OS/2 2.0. And a ton of other things that mean nothing to anyone now.
What'll it be like ten years from now? The mind boggles.
Posted by: Erbo Evans | July 05, 2009 at 09:37 PM
PR#6!! Oh geez, it's been a long long time :-)
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | July 05, 2009 at 11:27 PM
Erbo - CALL SOUND makes me think of the PLAY command in QBasic, which I used to compose intricate melodies with.
This post makes me feel young, although I love Erbo mentioning Turbo Pascal, and I also remember having 5.25" floppies. Even with Win3.11 being avilable I stayed in DOS most of the time and only started up windows as needed.
Unlike a lot of people, I was lucky to grow up with a father and older brother who were both computing fanatics, which as you can obviously see washed off onto me. I'm not joking when I make the claim that I began programming at 6.
I still remember the first time I switched from P-System to Turbo Pascal, and then from there to every young script kiddie's dream - Visual Basic. "Wow! I can code stuff for windows and not just DOS"
My deep hatred of microsoft began to kick in around the time I switched from win 3.11 to win95. Around this time I was suffering from the insane bloat that win95 brought along and was introduced to this crazy thing called "linux" by my elder brother. "What? it's a whole operating system for free and it has all the source code?" I said to him, and then I discovered it was based on this other thing called "unix" - although my father didn't believe that bit. "I used unix before you were born, no way it's based on that".
Then of course there's the games - going from the super nintendo to the playstation 1 (the original, with the parallel port at the back, not the new lame slim models) to the playstation 2 and going from the original gameboy to the gameboy advance and then the sony PSP (the latter of which I purchased myself as an adult).
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | July 06, 2009 at 04:55 AM
It is true what you are saying..you cannot beat something handwritten to convey feelings. I suppose everything now has to be 'real time' and happen before your eyes, but what will remain in the future for people to find.
Ritz Crackers with peanut butter snacks..so not fair, that sounds delicious. UK never caught up with USA for peanut buttery snack foods.
Someone tell me what PR#6 means..i cut my teeth on BBC Micro computers followed by Commodore Amiga..i am way curious. now.
/me goes into Guru Meditation....
Posted by: Micha Sass | July 06, 2009 at 11:42 AM
"#" is the moral equivalent of the FORTRAN unit number, it determines which device, or rather, path number, the PR (short for PRINT, I expect) output goes to.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | July 06, 2009 at 11:56 AM
PR#6 was the command you issued to the Apple ][ to reboot its disk drive, the controller was in slot 6.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | July 06, 2009 at 12:07 PM
Advancement in communication is probably the fastest and most advanced of all other technological advancements. There are always new things, such as twitter and techie phones coming out.
-Jack
Posted by: avaya phone system | July 07, 2009 at 04:10 PM
Fax machine and copy machine are easily available in all over their offices.
Posted by: Fax Machine Repair | July 07, 2009 at 05:13 PM