What an incredible collection. Once again, the IA is one of the most important bits to come out of the internet. Long after Facebook and Twitter are forgotten (does anybody remember the name of the town crier in Alexandria?) the Archive will hopefully continue to exist and will continue to amaze.
I learned how to type when I was 15 on one of those clunky old Scheidegger machines with anonymized key caps. 40 years later I still use that skill every day, so this article probably resonated with me for that reason alone.
But to see the physical part of the Archive really warms my heart, at least one group has their eye firmly on the ball and is able to say 'we'll take all of it' in cases like these.
I sure hope the IA gets funded enough some day to get the kind of metrology gear [1] it would take to scan in the physical artifacts like these typewriters.
We don't have nanoscale metrology yet, but it would be nice to start at least with this level of scanned-in measurements when the original manufacturing descriptions and specs are long gone. Maybe then, one day our descendants will thank us for the foresight to capture these relics in sufficient detail to make their VR games' retro artifacts authentic.
The Chicago Field Museum uses medical CT scanners for similar physical artifact scanning. I imagine there are medical imaging facilities near the Internet Archive in SF/South SF that might offer a reasonable price for such scans during low demand periods.
It's incredibly frustrating that a resource that holds so much unique content and history decided that the hill it was going to die on was content that is readily available elsewhere.
People were either locked at home, the libraries were closed, or else disease-ridden.
Archive.org was providing knowledge in a time of emergency when people had no other means of access to knowledge, and people who may have been out of work due to a pandemic, and thus unable to afford to buy the stuff if it even was available via mail.
I'm just not convinced that what they provided couldn'tve been provided just as well by proper pirate sites, or that they are more discoverable than pirate sites.
From my understanding, in reaction to libraries being closed everywhere due to the 'rona, they started to "give away" ebooks, which the copyright holders were Not Happy with.
i think they mean a normal archive of physical materials. archivist have been working with collections like these long before the internet archive existed.
according to the archivists i know, they are cowboys who don't listen to the advice or follow the historic practices of archivists. For example, you should ask permission before you archive something. You have the right to be forgotten, and archive.org scoffs at that premise by ingesting and serving the whole historic web without permission from the owners.
> He (Martin Tytell) spent much of his time assigned to the Army’s Morale Services Division, at 165 Broadway, which dealt in information and propaganda. There he received his hardest job of the war—a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. Many of the languages he had never heard of before…. Morale Services found native speakers and scholars to help with the languages. Martin obtained the type and did the soldering and the keyboards. The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor’s Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin’s original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.
A friend is reaching out to Ian Frazer, who authored a piece called "typewriter man" that references this claim, to obtain the provenance of it. I will return to provide an update (and update Wikipedia), if something of substance results.
If I don't return before the reply window closes for this thread, check Wikipedia for those who encounter this thread in the future.
I didn’t say they were lying. I thought it’d be enjoyable to keep pulling the historical thread to see where it leads and codify it in a knowledge repository of some permanence (stick the docs into an IA item, cite it in Wikipedia). Scratching my digital historian itch, doing the future a favor, that’s all.
Regardless, thanks for the post, I really enjoyed a peak into Pearl and Martin’s work, and yours.
I have a reaction when we've got years (and years and years) of this and someone says "well, they're fighting about it on Wikipedia" like that means a single darn thing.
Glad you like the stuff; always up for people having the specific link.
I hadn't heard of this, but something similar has been attested with Thai:
"Two of the consonants, ฃ (kho khuat) and ฅ (kho khon), are no longer used in written Thai, but still appear on many keyboards and in character sets. When the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space for all characters, thus two had to be left out."
(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_script , pointing to https://web.archive.org/web/20101219214315/http://www.t-h-a-... )
Some of these books are very old; an 1892 treatise on the ins and outs of bookkeeping was particularly beautiful.
One of the things I really like about books is the ease with which you can immediately start reading one, despite it possibly being over a century old; some things just have not changed much over time. It's a very refreshing feeling for someone working in an industry obsessed with change and breaking things every few months.
...and "prototype design drawings for the first HP laser printer" --- definitely looking forward to seeing that one!
I keep Tweeting about a 100 year hosting plan, and copying companies and libraries who ignore it. I do static generation a lot and it’d be nice to be able to leave something online for a while after I die.
It's a very refreshing feeling for someone working
in an industry obsessed with change and breaking
things every few months.
I agree. The last few hobbies I've acquired are pretty mature and they appeal to me for exactly that reason.
There are still exciting innovations occurring in each of these hobbies, but for the most part, they were perfected to a large extent in previous decades.
I love this and posts like it, it makes me want to quit my job and become an archivist, just spend my time going through all of this material, digitizing it and publishing about it and becoming a typewriter nerd even though I've never used one outside of playing with old busted ones.
If I were a rich internet company, I'd gladly fund them gratuitously. For now, a monthly contribution will have to do.
35 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 78.1 ms ] threadWhat an incredible collection. Once again, the IA is one of the most important bits to come out of the internet. Long after Facebook and Twitter are forgotten (does anybody remember the name of the town crier in Alexandria?) the Archive will hopefully continue to exist and will continue to amaze.
I learned how to type when I was 15 on one of those clunky old Scheidegger machines with anonymized key caps. 40 years later I still use that skill every day, so this article probably resonated with me for that reason alone.
But to see the physical part of the Archive really warms my heart, at least one group has their eye firmly on the ball and is able to say 'we'll take all of it' in cases like these.
We don't have nanoscale metrology yet, but it would be nice to start at least with this level of scanned-in measurements when the original manufacturing descriptions and specs are long gone. Maybe then, one day our descendants will thank us for the foresight to capture these relics in sufficient detail to make their VR games' retro artifacts authentic.
[1] https://www.zeiss.com/metrology/home.html
http://www.flex-form.nl/ (wow, http? really?)
and
https://www.floatscans.com/
The latter makes very impressive scans.
People were either locked at home, the libraries were closed, or else disease-ridden.
Archive.org was providing knowledge in a time of emergency when people had no other means of access to knowledge, and people who may have been out of work due to a pandemic, and thus unable to afford to buy the stuff if it even was available via mail.
It wasn't some trivial lark.
Does anyone know the details behind this?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewri...
http://languagehat.com/polyglot-typewriting/
> He (Martin Tytell) spent much of his time assigned to the Army’s Morale Services Division, at 165 Broadway, which dealt in information and propaganda. There he received his hardest job of the war—a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. Many of the languages he had never heard of before…. Morale Services found native speakers and scholars to help with the languages. Martin obtained the type and did the soldering and the keyboards. The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor’s Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin’s original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.
If I don't return before the reply window closes for this thread, check Wikipedia for those who encounter this thread in the future.
Regardless, thanks for the post, I really enjoyed a peak into Pearl and Martin’s work, and yours.
Glad you like the stuff; always up for people having the specific link.
"Two of the consonants, ฃ (kho khuat) and ฅ (kho khon), are no longer used in written Thai, but still appear on many keyboards and in character sets. When the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space for all characters, thus two had to be left out." (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_script , pointing to https://web.archive.org/web/20101219214315/http://www.t-h-a-... )
I originally heard about this in this fantastic book, which I read earlier this year: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Typewriter-Thomas-S-Mullaney-... . Its focus is mostly the Chinese keyboard, and it does a great job detailing this, but there's a section about Edwin Mcfarland and his theories: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/GuV1DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...
One of the things I really like about books is the ease with which you can immediately start reading one, despite it possibly being over a century old; some things just have not changed much over time. It's a very refreshing feeling for someone working in an industry obsessed with change and breaking things every few months.
...and "prototype design drawings for the first HP laser printer" --- definitely looking forward to seeing that one!
There are still exciting innovations occurring in each of these hobbies, but for the most part, they were perfected to a large extent in previous decades.
If I were a rich internet company, I'd gladly fund them gratuitously. For now, a monthly contribution will have to do.