It's safe, honest

It is not my intention to draw any fire away from the Wright brothers and their famous flight at Kittyhawk. What they accomplished was nothing short of spectacular. If not mind bendingly dangerous. Think about it, these were bicycle mechanics who had built a hand made airplane, powered by a hand made engine, launching into high winds with not so much as a seat to sit on.

But just look at some of the other guys who made it into the air before them. How about Clément Ader? Who in 1890 made the first powered heavier than air flight. Now there is debate about how much control of the contraption he really had, but none the less, he did fly and it was powered. Let's take a look at some of the stuff he did before he flew his bat winged monster. He devised stereophonic sound, designed the V8 engine and was largely credited for making the telephone actually useful, installing Paris's first phone system in 1880.

OK, so he was smart, and a real engineer. When he turned his energies to flight however, things got weird. He created an airplane called the Eole. It has a 12 metre wingspan, was powered by a steam engine (Lord Jesus) and like the Wright brothers, 13 years to come, controlled (I use the term loosely) the machine by bending and warping the wings.

The genius of Ader was the engine was actually very light weight with the whole machine weighed in at just over 300 kilos. He`s in the history books with the first powered flight on October 6, 1890. The airplane flew about 50 metres. Unlike other airplanes, including the Wright brother`s, his plane was not catapulted or launched from a track into high winds. It took off.

He built other bat planes, claiming that each one flew farther each time and after being spotted by the French military, built a much bigger bat winged beats powered by 2 steam engines that in 1897 flew over 300 metres. Little real evidence exists of any of the other bat planes working, and in any case, the military got bored and walked away. Too bad. It would be neat to see a 4 engine steam powered bat passenger plane.

Not another war.

Anyone who reads the news knows that the HD DVD and BlueRay DVD war is over. In elephant / mouse like fashion Blue Ray has stomped HD. The Falklands of technological battles. Toshiba announced today that it was leaving the war and will stop making HD DVD's. Sony, maker of the BlueRay system must be thinking back to the original "tech war", the VHS vs BETA battle.

In 1974 Sony came up with the Beta video cassette system and planned on marketing it manufacturers starting in 1975. JVC had other ideas. They made the VHS (for Video Home System) cassette. Laser Discs were available too but though far superior in picture quality, they lacked recording capabilities.


Both tape systems could play video but the neat thing was that they could record stuff also. Either with a camera or direct form TV. It started a cultural shift that is still felt today.

Sony had pioneered video cassette technology with the U-Matic video system which came out 5 years earlier and worked with other manufacturers, including JVC, to establish industry standards. The U-matic cassette was the basis for their BETA system.

When JVC entered the fray in 1975 their VHS cassette could record up to 2 hours. BETA could do 1 hour. BETA's picture quality was superior, in part due to shorter run times, but 2 hours was seen as an advantage. As the battle progressed, both Sony and JVC addede record time to their tapes. But that means more tape in the case which means slower record times and that adds up to poorer quality. In the end VHS could just top 10 hours on one tape while BETA could do 5. The consumer could buy 2 of those for every one of JVC's. Seems obvious where this was going to go.

Avast me hearties.

Crews have rebelled against captains, troops against generals for as long as men (and women) have been led or told what to do. I was watching a superd show called Mars Rising, narrated by William Shatner on Discovery Channel last night, when there was a brief snippet about rebellions in space.

As per usual I did some snooping and came up with a few close calls dating back almost 40 years.

Apollo 7 astronauts had an extraordinarily hard time of their mission in 1968. The first new Apollo launch after the Apollo 6 launch pad disaster, the crew felt the pressure to make this one a success. They had pressures from onboard as well: they all had colds. Great, a cold, clammy microscopicaly small capsule with 3 runny nosed men. For 11 long days. Around and around they go, orbit after orbit, testing and re-testing. Getting hundreds of trials completed, scenarios played out in orbit before the first long range charge at the moon. It is said that not all of the requests from mission control were carried out when they wanted them to.

In 1972, the crew of Skylab (remember Skylab?) got fed up with an over ambitious schedule and simply booked a flex day. The day after they worked out a more realistic work load.

MIR wasn't so lucky. A workhorse both in kilometers traveled and hours logged by its crews, it was also the first true space outpost. A place astronauts went and moved in and stayed. In 1995 2 Russian astronauts simply refused to don their space suits and head outside. Ground engineers couldn't do a whole heck of a lot so they said OK, fine, have it your way. Back on earth there was some crap flying. The MIR commander of the time had simply had enough and wanted to wait until fresh replacements arrived.

MIR had suffered an enormous fire that year, that if it had not been put out, could have done in the place. Later on in June a supply ship crashed into MIR, cutting its power in half and generally making a hash of the place.

Gone fishing.

Today, as you may have read in countless online news sites, marks the 25th anniversary of the computer virus. What a thing to celebrate! Thank heavens we mark such events. I really get into tech stories, and although few of us who have ever battled a computer with a virus don't think damn much of them it got me going off to see if this really was the first.

The AP story running now states that somewhere around 1978 a 15 year old created a program that once launched keeps creating copies of itself. The creator made copies and gave them to his friends (for now). When they plugged the floppy in to their computer the virus would burrow its way onto the machines memory. AND, if you put a clean disc in it would copy inself onto that so that when it was passed around it would continue the infection. Such a method of moving digital data around is quite innocently called the "sneakernet". Users literally carried the stuff around on discs to other computers.

Now the Internet had been running of a sorts back then. Mainly still in the realm of universities and the government, the late 70's boasted less than 200 hosts. So its unlikely a 15 year old had access. But by the end of the 80's things had heated up so to speak. ARPANET, the first Internet was reaching the end of its useful life and would soon be split up and expanded in to bigger networks.

Check out the picture above for what it looked like in 1985. Even you non techies can begin to grasp the scope of what was to come based on the sketch by Martin Lyons. Anyways, you need the Internet to have a for true virus like attack. Along came the "Worm" in 1988 and the online experience has never been the same since. A worm is slightly different from a computer virus in that it uses the computers along the way to power itself, in effect using the resources as a kind of digital slingshot.

On or about 6pm on November 2, 1988 odd things began to happen to the burgeoning Internet. The amount of stuff moving through the Internet starts to rise fast. By 9pm most systems have surpassed the number of processes they can handle and are crashing or being shut down by very nervous sytem admins. What is perhaps the first e-mail sent warning of an Internet Virus states that "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS. It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." And shortly thereafter this inciteful gem: "There may be a virus loose on the internet."

I didn't take this either.

Not being keen on writing exams about numbers you can't even see, I gave calculus a pass in high school. Some folk, however, think its peachy. And, always on the hunt for a good "I told you so" even if I can't understand it, check out this gem.

From an article in today's CBC's Technology and Science page comes news that calculus and its basic concepts was not devised by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz but rather comes from medieval India.

Members of the Kerala school, a group of heavy weight thinkers, came up with the concept of infinite series around 1350, years before Newton even toyed with the notion. Founded by Madhava of Sangamagrama, he and his fellow scholars worked in astronomy as well and developed methods to calculate the positon of the moon as it moved across the sky and to track the planets.

As is often the case, colonialism and a general European superiority either ignored or supressed the work and discoveries going on outside of their sandbox. But it is possible that through trade with Asia these mathematical discoveries filtered their way to Newton's England.

Here's the link to that CBC article. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/14/calculus070814.html

Tommorow I'm back at African themed stuff again. I gotta have a stab at those nasty Belgians before I move on.

Blade Runner

Storing information on transparent discs is not that new a technology. The idea was conceived in the late 50's by David Paul Gregg and patented in 1961. MCA bought out Gregg in the late 60's and combined with pioneering efforts by Phillips developed the Laserdisc by 1978. The idea was that MCA would pump out the discs and Phillips the players. MCA called the product Disco-Vision (oh my) and came out competing head to head with the big kid on the block, VHS tapes. MCA's first release on this format was Jaws in 1978.

Oddly enough, the format was pushed in the Japanese market with players and discs being sold at near VHS like prices. The result was a large customer base with lots of players in homes and a good selection of discs. Major releases continued until 2001.

Laser discs were typically 30cm in diameter (12 inches) and were 2 sided like LP's. The video portion of the show was analog, while the audio was often digital. This was a weird combo because the video took so much space in analog format that the whole movie had to be on both sides of the disc, and yes, you had to flip it, unless you had one of the fancy machines with a head that would migrate to the other side. Either way there was a pause while you changed sides. Later versions doubled the capacity of the disc so most movies fit.

As for the audio, no one had CD's yet, so this was the only source for digital music. The soundtracks outshined what was heard on VHS. Some versions of discs had analog and digital audio tracks and supported surround sound. Star wars Episode 1 released on Laser Disc in Japan in 1999 was the first in 6.1 Dolby surround sound.

Laser discs remain collectable with many videophiles preferring the quality, selection and features to those on DVD.

London calling.

Time to take a break from ranting on about low level brain activity and powerful people. I was combing the WWW looking for possible topics when an old movie revue caught my eye. It was for Sabrina, a 50's classic in which, among other things, Humphrey Bogart talks on a mobile phone. Though it is no doubt not a real cell phone, mobile phones were in use in many cities.

So here's what I could find out. The idea of mobile radio is not a new one. Radio receivers have been "portable" for over a 100 years. Combination transmitter/receiver since the 1920s. I am stretching the word portable to mean that the radio was not fixed to base station. In the 1920s, these portables were in either trucks or trains. They were very large, bulky walkie talkies (built into a desk often) and worked like you expected- press to talk then stop and listen.

Although true mobile communication, they had some drawbacks, not the least of which was their size and power consumption, they did not operate in a cell like manner. That is to say they transmitted a signal from one device to be received by another. Cell phones are radio devices that transmit to small repeater transmitters that pass the signal down the line from "cell" to "cell" of repeater transmitters. This cuts down the size, the power requirments and liberated users from being within transmission range of just one transmitter.

These old brutes were finicky and required training to run, again limiting their use to large organizations like railroads and the military. The Second World War saw technology move to more phone like convenience with mobile radios becoming phone handset shaped, though kinda big still, and able to handle full duplex communication: no more press to talk.

Just after the war Bell labs conceived the cell communication concept in an internal memo by D.H.Ring. Although they didn't call it cell phone technology, they essentially described the roots of what the service is.

The challenge for the technology then was how to stay in contact. After all, mobile phones were mobile. And moving around transmitters made it tough to keep a long conversation together. Mobile phones of that time, ( probably the phone that Bogey used), were two way radio hand sets transmittinmg to the local telephone company, AT&T, who patched the call into their hard wired phone service. This service was available in many North American cities then and continued into the 90s in many countries. I have used this service on the West Coast of Canada many times.

Taxis and police services used dedicated radio systems, that were mobile but did not work with the telephone system. In fact early police radios were simply base station transmitters that broadcast over regular radio. When there was something up they sent out a "calling all cars" and the police would stop and use a phone to call in to see whats up.

The FCC throughout this time had no use for giving out radio licenses for mobile phone use. They saw TV as needing as much bandwidth as possible. Finally in the 1960s they relented and Bell, AT&T and Motorola went back to their labs and started cooking. Across the ocean, Ericsson had a fully operational mobile phone sytem in place in Sweden by 1956. Large and bulky, the phones still had to be used within one transmitters range, the technology to "hand off" a call to the next transmitter hadn't been perfected yet.

On April 3, 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper placed the first cell phone call. The rest is history.

Money troubles.

I'm starting a new section called "Back to Front" where I dig up and examine stuff that we seem to feel are part of our time and history, when, in fact, they came from a while ago.

So here's a quick look at the Secret Service. I must admit I got onto this upon seeing a picture in Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples of President Abraham Lincoln with a Secret Service agent, Allan Pinkerton. The caption states that the year is 1862, when many other sources say Lincoln established the USSS in 1865. Doesn't matter. Pinkerton looks dogged and observant.

Initially the Seccert Service was charged with eliminating the vast amount of countefeit money that was circulating in the US. This was compounded by the states issuing their own currencies through many different banks. There were hundreds of kinds of ways to pay for things and this just made it so much easier for the bogus bills to proliferate. In 1865 some estimates show one third of the money in circulation was fake.

As history is rife with irony, the USSS was not charged with the protection of the president. In fact Lincoln was assassinated the night of the very day he formed the service. Two more presidents were assassinated (Garfield and McKinley) before the duty was assigned to them in 1901.