From the RAT FILES Circa 2004: The Dead Are Among Us! The Dead Are All Around Us!

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The following was originally composed as radio copy for air in May of 2004 in a feature entitled THE RANDOM ACCESS FILE over THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO, North America's premier amateur radio audio news service. Please click on the following http://www.twiar.org/ for additional details.
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The dead are among us. The dead are all around us. The dead reside in our attics. The dead lie buried within our basements. The dead are parked in our living rooms, lodged in our bedrooms and concealed in darkened back corners in our places of work.
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The dead are among us. The dead are all around us. There are corpses to be found everywhere. But they did not decompose. Nor did they rot. Nor did they go rancid. Or grow fetid with age. As you might expect. More than likely, they may have rusted badly or they may have simply become dusty or dirty or possibly moldy or grimy or gunky at the very worst. But the dead among us. They never lived to begin with. But they may have provided a valuable service or perhaps a pleasant mood.
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Case in point: In the attic space above me in this very house, even as I now write, several multi hued plastic milk crates are stuffed chockful of paper cardboard sleeves, festooned with colorfully creative and in some cases, outrageous psychedelic artwork. And inside those sleeves, large twelve inch diameter black and shiny and often slightly warped but otherwise nominally flat, grooved plastic vinyl discs with a little hole in the center, specifically designed to rotate on a motorized platter precisely at 33 and a third revolutions per minute and to make a sound which would come out of two speakers in such a way that the effect was to be called "stereo".
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And in those same multi hued plastic milk crates, many smaller though quite similar seven-inch diameter plastic discs with a much larger hole in the center, made to spin a little faster at a speed of 45 RPM. Why, there are even a few additional discs made of some kind of heavy Shellac or Acetate. Their nominal speed of rotation was set to 78 RPM, although this was really supposed to 78.26 revolutions per minute, so I am told.
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All dead. Things that don't play anymore. Dead media. Early analog software with now very hard-to-find hardware to play them on. More than likely your own Victrola, your own record player doesn't work anymore and the cost to replace that hardware with what few record players that are still being manufactured is beyond belief. And thanks to current technology and the widespread cheap availability of digital compact discs and MP3 players, the lowly, low quality audio cassette is now on death row, doomed to extinction as is the equally lowly and equally low quality video cassette. The message is clear for videotape since you can go to WalMart and buy VCRs for under $49 and formatically transitional hybrid VCR-DVD players for maybe twice that amount. The once and future LP and EP is now the now and soon to once CD and DVD.
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And where are you hiding your laserdiscs and attendant laserdisc players? Did you get any bids on eBAY? Did anyone give you five bucks for them at your local garage sale? You and I both know they are corroding away in spiderweb enshrouded damp and moldy cardboard boxes in your cellar. It's just our dirty little secret. No one else need know.
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And what of the office secretary's most valuable friend and formidable ally? That gallant and valiant prince of print, the ultimate analog communications medium, the typewriter, terminated without pay! The IBM...retired! The Olivetti...expired! The Smith Corona...recycled and melted down into molten slag! Collateral damage includes carbon paper, the very bane of those very same secretaries and those equally messy mechanical marvels, the Mimeograph and the smudgy purple Ditto machine.
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In fact, the secretaries themselves have become a dead medium. Alas, not only analog but also expensive to run, almost all of these lovely ladies laid off and replaced with a onetime investment in a little black box which answers the office telephone with its cloying and annoying digital voice that says: PRESS 1 for residential services. PRESS 2 for business services. Or stay on the line for the next available representative. Estimated serve time: 61 minutes and 19 seconds - Please hold!"
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Other communications media were tried and died. Stop to think: The town crier...fired! Smoke signals...faded! Only the Vatican still uses smoke signals. Two colors: white and black for new Pope and dead Pope related information. The passenger pigeon,finished and extinct! Back in 1849, the Reuters News Service actually had a functional pigeon-delivered stock-price reporting network but now? Grounded! The Morse telegraph, a big deal in 1837, a dead deal in 2004. Although thousands of amateur radio operators still employ the Morse code as a means of communication, virtually every business, government and military agency has forsaken those sinusoidal continuous waves. Why, do you realize that the American Radio Relay League Radiogram is indeed a dead medium? The Internet and e-mail has effectively blown away that method of information transfer.
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Some dead media continue to claw for life in highly specialized environments. Like the rare sea-faring Marine Iguana, found only on the remote shoals of the Galapagos Islands, the pneumatic transfer tube is a now-archaic technology that curiously can be found only within the concrete shade of the savings bank teller drive-through window but nowhere else.
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Meanwhile, there may still be a few DATs, not bats but DATs, that is, Digital Audio Tape machines that may still be flourishing in the back rooms of some sound studios and post-production houses but DAT never got a toe hold in households. Some future media came into this world stillborn and never got off the ground. Witness the the promise of the Bell System PicturePhone unveiled at the 1964 New York World's Fair: DOA man! Dead on arrival.
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Some species of dead media simply refuse to die. Go to any Chinese laundry in New York City and find an abacus in prominent daily use. The abacus has been traced back to ancient Egypt as far back as 500 BC and is still here. Meanwhile,many old people live on in quiet desperation in their rent stabilized apartments with their out of date Bakelite rotary dial telephones which can be of no use when the digital voice on the other end of the line intones:"PRESS 1 for residential services."PRESS 2 for business services. Or stay on the line for the next available representative. Estimated serve time: 2 days, 14 hours, 5 minutes and 42.3 seconds. Please hold!"
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While I was a resident in the little town of Sand Lake in upstate New York, my local barber shunned both ancient mechanical and futuristic computerized cash registers in favor of the ultimate dead medium for handling currency, counting the cash and coin using his hands and counting it correctly and storing it all in a cardboard shoebox! Like money, the deceased can be tallied in legion numbers, an endless list that includes such things as slide rules. Electronic calculators did Murder One on that device.
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Little cheap chip-sets have made obsolete all those plastic Chatty Cathies, Teddy Ruxpins and other talking dolls that relied solely on a string pulled plastic disc for playback. Another casualty, a low tech toy that I still own, 2XL, a wisecracking little plastic robot with a Brooklyn accent and a flair for being educational to children could not match the Speak And Spell master chip with his own custom made eight track tapes.
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And how about those Eight track tapes. Those four track tapes. Those two track PlayTapes. Those BetaMax Video tapes. Those UMatic professional 3/4 inch videocassettes. Those weird boxy little video broadcast cartridges. Those weird boxy little Fidelipac audio broadcast cartridges. Those monster 2 inch Quad reel to reel video tapes. Those Quadraphonic four channel sounds, both discrete and matrix. All outmoded, deep sixed in dumpsters, entombed in landfills. Or up for bid on eBAY! Even the stereo optical ViewMaster, a child's gem of the 1960s is invalid.
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In the unreal, surreal and sometimes, all too real, universe of motion pictures, the lumbering Vitaphone record player gave way to the clanky 35 millimeter magnetic film machine or the smoothly spinning magnetic tape machine that came in various tape widths and inch per second speeds, all of which were surpassed by hard drive or optical drive workstations where the mere idea of working with magnetic media is seen as being akin to playing with little strips of plastic littered with rust. And whatever happened to Cinerama and Cinemascope anyway? And whatever happened to those Bell and Howell eight millimeter home movies? And whatever happened to those Bell and Howell Super eight millimeter home movies? Gone! And forgotten! So much dead media! Things that don't play anymore. So many impossible to find devices! The list never ends.

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Some final considerations: Whistling networks where guys actually hooted really loud in an effort to span vast mountains and valleys with their mouth noises. And how about those humongous Alpenhorns like you see in those old Riccolo TV commercials? The Pony Express, the U.S. Army's Myer Code Semaphore system, a circa 1860 technology and other things like the A.T.&T. wire photo, big in 1925 and the RCA Radio Photo equally big in 1926. Wire recorders, my Uncle Fred had one of these. It was big! It was bulky! It smelled funky! But it was cool! Toss in those 16-inch diameter aluminum transcription disks, some Magic Lanterns, a few Elcassettes and a couple of Atari 400s. Oh, don't forget DOS and Windows 3.1, 95 and 98. All dead! dead! dead! The dead...are among us. The dead...are all around us. The dead are still here. And now, this monologue is dead too. This is Bill Baran N2FNH for This Week in Amateur Radio.
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