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New York to San Francisco in one week on an Amtrak sleeper car. My wife forwarded me this email with one sentence: “This is my dream trip.”

There are so many reasons to enjoy Maximum PC’s“Computer Data Storage Through the Ages — From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray,” but I like the way it relates the technologies to the broader culture. For instance:

Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and magnetic tape all rose to prominence in the 1950s, and it was the latter that helped shape the recording industry. Magnetic tape also changed the computing landscape by making long-term storage of vasts amount of data possible. A single reel of the oxide coated half-inch tape could store as much information as 10,000 punch cards, and most commonly came in lengths measuring anywhere from 2400 to 4800 feet. The long length presented plenty of opportunities for tears and breaks, so in 1952, IBM devised bulky floor standing drives that made use of vacuum columns to buffer the nickel-plated bronze tape. This helped prevent the media from ripping as it sped and up and slowed down.

Likewise, audio quality of cassette tapes improved, “ushering in the era of boom boxes and parachute pants (thanks M.C. Hammer.” And “the floppy disk might one day go down as the only creature as resistant to extinction as the cockroach.” 

But my favorite digital storage media, hands-down, is paper tape:

Similar to punch cards, paper tape contained patterns of holes to represent recorded data. But unlike its rigid counterpart, rolls of paper tape could feed much more data in one continuous stream, and it was incredibly cheap to boot. The same couldn’t be said for the hardware involved. In 1966, HP introduced the 2753A Tape Punch, which boasted a blistering fast tape pinch speed of 120 characters per second and sold for $4,150. Yikes!

One thing I’ve always wondered about these early paper-based computer programs is whether they were copyrighted — and whether that, in part, led to the adoption of paper. One of Thomas Edison’s clever exploitations of copyright loopholes was to take celluloid moving pictures (which weren’t initially eligible for copyright) and copy them onto a long, continuous paper print — this meant that an entire feature film could be copyrighted as a single “photograph.”

I also wonder if/why early computer programmers didn’t use celluloid instead of paper. You can move it a lot faster than paper tape, and it’s generally stronger — except, perhaps, if you punch it with lots of little holes.

(Via Slashdot.)

Kottke reports that there’s a “Pepsi Natural” on the way to market — featuring cane sugar in lieu of corn syrup, and served in that most magnificent of beverage transportation devices, a solid glass bottle.

Needless to say, I approve of both of these retronovations. In fact, I make semi-regular trips to my local Mexican wholesaler to pick up soda served this way. But I’m strictly a Coca-Cola man. Let’s hope Coke follows Pepsi’s lead, and soon.

This is the part of the post where I quote Andy Warhol:

What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

Let’s make sugar cheap, corn expensive, and bring back those Cokes!

The incomparable Eileen Joy, on rebuilding modern ruins:

Some time yesterday afternoon, the six-story Cologne Archives, housing documents dating as far back as the tenth century, as well as the private papers of writers such as Karl Marx, Hegel, and Heinrich Böll, and also all of the minutes taken at Cologne town council meetings since 1376, collapsed as if hit by a missile, only there was no missile, but rather, some sort of structural flaw that caused the building to start cracking and tumbling down. Most visitors, plus some construction workers on the roof, were able to get out in time, although two or three persons may be buried underneath the rubble. Ironically, the Archives contained many documents that had been recuperated from library buildings destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and a small nuclear bomb-proof room that had been constructed in the basement to house the most rare materials was, at the time of the building’s collapse, only being used to store cleaning materials.

Amazon to Sell E-Books to Read on the iPhone and iPod Touch – NYTimes.com:

Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers.

The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.

But Amazon said that it sees its Kindle reader and devices like the iPhone as complementary, and that people will use their mobile phones to read books only for short periods, such as while waiting in grocery store lines.

“We think the iPhone can be a great companion device for customers who are caught without their Kindle,” said Ian Freed, Amazon’s vice president in charge of the Kindle. [emphasis mine]

Mr. Freed said people would still turn to stand-alone reading devices like the $359 Kindle when they want to read digital books for hours at a time. He also said that the experience of using the new iPhone application might persuade people to buy a Kindle, which has much longer battery life than the iPhone and a screen better suited for reading.

I think is pretty cool, and can potentially benefit everybody — if reading e-books on the iPhone takes off, iTunes could make a play for the market. In the meantime, it might even help them sell some iPhones — for Apple, the money’s in the hardware. Meanwhile, Amazon gets to take a crack at a bunch of readers who can now read e-books on a device that, whatever its relative limitations for reading, is one they already own.

John Gruber has a short review of the app at Daring Fireball.

As the only Kindle-less Snarkmaster, let me say this: I’d really like a freeware Kindle Reader for my MacBook. I like to read to relax, sure; but I also like to read where I do my work (a good deal of which involves reading books). I’m sure whatever prohibitions you’d wind up having to put on the books (no cut-and-pasting?) would make the experience stink. But it is one I would be willing to accept.

Let me put forward this thesis. There will be a lot of portable digital reading devices in the near future: dedicated readers, phones and PDAs, digital paper that you can wad up and throw away, tiny projectors that can use any sufficiently bright surface. But the most important one is and will continue to be the laptop computer. People in the electronic reading business need to continue to think about how they can make that experience both better and sustainable.

And let me also advance thesis #2: Don’t let the race to greater portability convince you that this is the end of the game. We need software and hardware that take advantage of BIG reading surfaces — from the TV-sized screen in your kitchen or living room to Penn Station and the Library of Congress. We don’t all always read tucked away in our own private worlds, nor should we — sometimes reading needs to be a spectacle, on a big public wall, where you can always be dimly aware of it, where it can’t ever be fully ignored.

Sarah Werner at Wynken de Worde:

Where are the antiquaries of yesteryear? Do they now collect twentieth century pulp fiction? Classic sci-fi? Modernist design magazines? Is it too expensive to collect earlier works? Are collectors and antiquaries the same thing, anyway?

Part of a longer, typically smart post about amateur scholars’ access to materials — particularly those electronic databases for which colleges and universities pay through the nose. Vive Digital Humanism!

Jonathan Hoefler on the beauty of collage: Vaughan Oliver (designer for The Pixies et al.), Shinro Ohtake, Eduardo Recife, Chip Kidd, and more.

Above: Joseph Cornell, Untitled Collage.

Andrew Blauvelt, at Design Observer:

The mutual dependency of city and suburb is both physical and psychological. City dwellers and suburbanites need each other to reinforce their own sense of place and identity despite ample evidence that what we once thought were different places and lifestyles are increasingly intertwined and much less distinct.

The revenge of the suburb on the city wasn’t simply the depletion of its urban population or the exodus of its retailers and office workers, but rather the importation of suburbia into the heart of the city: chain stores and restaurants, downtown malls, and even detached housing. If the gift of urban planners to suburbia was the tenets of the New Urbanism, it has been re-gifted, returned to cities not as tips for close-knit communities but as recipes for ever more intensive consumer experiences.

Suburbia has returned to the city just as most suburbs are experiencing many of the things about city life it sought to escape, both positive and negative: congestion, crime, poverty, racial and ethnic diversity, cultural amenities, and retail diversity. At the same time, cities have taken on qualities of the suburbs that are perceived as both good and bad, such as the introduction of big box retailing, urban shopping malls, and reverse suburban migration by empty nesters, who return to the city to enjoy the kind of life they lived before they had kids to raise.

For every downtown Olive Garden there is an Asian-fusion restaurant opening in a strip mall; for every derelict downtown warehouse there is an empty suburban office building waiting to be converted into lofts; the Mall of America is the largest shopping center in the country, but SoHo may be the nation’s largest retail neighborhood; and everywhere we have Starbucks.

Blauvelt’s exhibit on suburbia, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, is at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — in the Target Gallery. Where else?

Whoa — retired Marine officer Dave Dilegge and military blogger Andrew Exum (spurred by Thomas Ricks’s new book The Gamble) look at the effect of the blogosphere on how the military shares information and tactics:

Ricks cited a discussion on Small Wars Journal once and also cited some things on PlatoonLeader.org but never considered the way in which the new media has revolutionized the lessons learned process in the U.S. military. […] Instead of just feeding information to the Center for Army Lessons Learned and waiting for lessons to be disseminated, junior officers are now debating what works and what doesn’t on closed internet fora — such as PlatoonLeader and CompanyCommand — and open fora, such as the discussion threads on Small Wars Journal. The effect of the new media on the junior officers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was left curiously unexplored by Ricks, now a famous blogger himself.

It seems clear that blogging and internet forums disrupt lots of traditional thinking regarding the way information is generated and disseminated — but it’s a testament to how powerful it can change readers’/writers’ expectations that that disruption can carry through to the military, the top-down bureaucracy if ever there was one.

In related news, the recent New Yorker article about the low-recoil automatic shotguns mounted on robots was awesome.

Just as at a certain point, the military decided it was a waste to have a professional soldier cook a meal or clean a latrine, we’ll come to see it as a waste for a professional soldier NOT to provide decentralized information that can help adjust intelligence and tactics: all soldiers will be reporters. Soon all of our wars are going to be fought by robots, gamers, and bloggers. Our entire information circuitry will have to change.

Farhad Manjoo’s jeremiad about the dangers of the Kindle is, um, weird. Give him points for originality, though — for Manjoo, the Kindle isn’t a joke that nobody will read, or an electronic interloper that will kill the book.

Instead, the Kindle is too good — which means that Amazon will dominate the market and control book publishing the way iTunes controls the music industry.

The Kindle isn’t the first electronic device to impose unpalatable restrictions on users. Until recently, if you wanted to (legally) download a broad range of major-label music for your iPod, you had to buy it from Apple.* (Ironically, it was Amazon that launched the first big online store that sold music without restrictions.) The same goes for video games. You can’t play just any game on your Xbox. You can play only the games that have been approved and licensed by Microsoft. Then there’s the iPhone, a veritable electronic Attica. The iPhone lets you buy music wirelessly — as long as you buy it from Apple. The iPhone lets you add new programs to your device — though only the programs that Apple approves of. Other than that, you’re free to do what you like!

But the Kindle’s restrictions are more worrying than those associated with the iPhone, the iPod, and other gizmos. For one thing, if you objected to the iTunes Store’s policies, there was always another way to legally buy music for your iPod — you could buy CDs (from Amazon, perhaps) and rip the tracks to MP3. That’s not an option for books; there’s no easy way to turn dead trees into electrons. Moreover, books are important. As a culture, we’ve somehow determined that it’s OK for a video-game console maker to demand licensing fees and exercise complete control over the titles that get on to their systems. Sure, this restricts creativity and free expression, but if that’s the business model that keeps the game business alive, so be it.

But we’ve come to a different cultural consensus on books. First, we’ve decided that books should be sharable — when you buy a book, you can pass it along to others freely. In fact, governments and large institutions actively encourage the practice; we build huge, beautiful buildings devoted to lending books to perfect strangers. We’ve also decided that there should be an aftermarket for books: When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to sell that book when you’re done with it. This not only helps people who can’t afford new books, it also encourages those who can afford them to buy more — it’s much less risky to buy a $30 hardcover if you know you can sell it for $15 in six months. (Amazon is one of the biggest players in the used-book market.) And we’d certainly balk at a world in which your books were somehow locked to the store where you bought them. Say Barnes & Noble signed a deal to sell the next Twilight book at a huge discount. But with a catch — the book would be published in invisible ink, and in order to read it you’d need to buy a special Barnes & Noble black light. This is ludicrous, of course, and no bookstore would ever attempt such a deal. But what’s the Kindle other than a fancy digital decoder ring?

I don’t understand how Manjoo can move so effortlessly from totally legitimate comparisons — the answer to this last rhetorical question is that the Kindle is very much like a video game console, and that’s a powerfully suggestive way to look at it — to “ludicrous” ruminations about invisible ink and digital decoders, usw.

We didn’t “decide” that books were especially important for our culture and deserved a special status under the law, anymore than we decided that shoes or clothes deserved the same — we trade and lend those secondhand, too. That’s one of the intrinsic benefits (or, if you’re a content owner, a drawback) of the technology. And we have, at different points in our history, placed pretty serious restrictions on what can be published, printed, and sold. We fought that out, politically and economically — and if the Kindle starts to bring unnecessary weight, we’ll fight that out too. As, if you haven’t noticed, we are everywhere these days — not least because industrious people are turning dead trees into electrons every day. (It may not be as easy as ripping a CD — but it can be done.)