Finished "Europe's Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp's Golden Age" Michael Pye -- it was crime incited by religious violence, the Spanish blockade, etc. Printing bibles in the vernacular was a dangerous business in the early 1500's
With that title and that cover, I had to peep it. Then I threw the $3 to read the whole thing.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R6X973N/
I'm not sure how it rates as fiction. It is an extended (6 books) alternate reality, where WLW-AM (see cover) has dominated the Republic's (not nation's) air waves for over 50 years, from Chicago or NYC (not clear yet), but San Francisco is vanished.
And there are passages on Ayran History which rub me a wrong way.
But the author knows electronics!!
Snips:
“You will learn on the job, in the process of repairing many different kinds of equipment and seeing how the designers solved various problems, or failed to solve them in some cases. For every repair, you will fill out a log describing the cause of the failure and what you did to rectify it. If you don’t understand something, you may consult the more experienced Technicians, including myself.”
He led the group down a wide hallway, and they crowded into a soundproofed studio.
“This is the backup broadcast studio, which kept operational at all times in case of a major failure in the main studio. The first item in the signal chain is the microphone. We use dynamic mics for DJ’s and guests, and various ribbons and condensers for radio plays and orchestral broadcasts. For pre-recorded sound sources, we have direct-drive turntables, cassette decks, open-reel decks, and cart machines. All machines are wired for remote start from the console.
“The consoles are vacuum tube type, fully balanced with input, output, and interstage transformers, and completely modular. They were designed in-house for absolute reliability. Channel modules can be hot-swapped without powering down the console, so that breakdowns can be fixed in a matter of seconds.
“The output of the console is wired to a stereo compressor, variable mu type, to regulate the overall volume. The studio switcher selects the currently active studio and routes it to the transmitter. The output passes through an additional compressor, VCA type, with sophisticated circuitry for leveling, peak limiting, soft clipping, filtering, and pre-emphasis, in order to maximize the station’s loudness without overmodulating the transmitter.”
“Once his affairs were in order, he reported for duty.
“How are you at soldering?” Chief Technician Scully said casually.
“Pretty good,” Philo replied. “I’ve done a fair amount of wiring and building things from scratch. None of it has failed so far.”
“Good. All the consoles in the station need to be re-capped. The heat from the vacuum tubes dries out the electrolytic capacitors over time, and we have to replace them every five years, before the audio performance starts degrading.”
Philo took an equipment cart to the backup studio, pulled all the modules out of the console, and carefully packed them in bubble wrap for transport back to the workshop.
He set a module on the bench and set up his vacuum desoldering station, soldering iron, magnifier, and boxes of new capacitors, organized by capacitance and voltage.
The channel modules were densely packed with components, providing all the capabilities of a modern console, but using subminiature vacuum tubes instead of transistors. Each channel module had two dozen electrolytic capacitors, and there were more in the output modules and power supplies.
Scully came along a while later to inspect his work. “Splendid! Very clean work. You’ll be on full-time recapping duty from now on.”
“You’re doomed,” said an older Technician, who was disassembling a condenser microphone on the other bench. “You never should have told him you were good at soldering.”
Once Philo was done with all the consoles, he moved on to the multi-track tape machines, which were transistorized but had a tendency to run hot. He recapped electronics ten hours a day, until he was desoldering capacitors in his sleep.”
“I suppose that ability is spread through most of the world’s population by now, however diluted. I’ve often wondered what you could accomplish if you could focus and direct that ability.”
“How would you do that?” said Philo.
“There’s a method of influencing brain waves that was discovered by accident, about forty thousand years ago. Do you know what it is?”
Philo tried to think of what could have happened forty thousand years ago, but he drew a blank. Prehistory wasn’t his strong suit.
“That’s the age of the earliest bone flutes,” said Viridios. “The first true musical instruments, able to produce precise, repeatable tones.
“Music evokes a powerful emotional response, ranging from joy to sadness to anger. It cannot be simulated or counterfeited. Any hint of insincerity breaks the spell. It’s almost like a form of telepathy, transferring emotions from one mind to another. I’ve spent years—centuries—trying to understand it. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“It consisted of a small unit with a keyboard and a monochrome 13” monitor.
“Where’s the rest of it?” said Philo.
“That’s the whole thing,” said the computer technician who was installing the machine.
“Where’s the mainframe?”
“There isn’t one. It uses a new type of chip called a microprocessor, right inside the keyboard unit. It runs at two megahertz and it has sixteen kilobytes of memory. This is one of the first off the production line.”
“It was a vast, low-ceilinged room in the lower levels of the basement. The ceiling was supported by pillars at regular intervals. The room was almost impossible to navigate, being crammed with sixty years’ worth of electronic flotsam and jetsam. He slowly worked his way backward, deeper into the room and further into the past.
Toward the back, he came across a large cabinet that he mistook at first for an antique computer. It contained over a hundred vacuum tubes, each with its own set of inductors and capacitors. Then he uncovered the piano-style keyboard with the name HAMMOND above it.
“Oh, that must be the Novachord,” said the Teleplay Director. “It’s like an organ, except not. It was used on various radio dramas for a few years, but when we got the Hammond B3’s it went into storage.”
Philo told Viridios about it.
“They have a Novachord?” Viridios said in surprise. “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never played one. It was so far ahead of its time that nobody really knew what to do with it. It’s not an organ at all. It’s more like a polyphonic synthesizer.”
“That’s not all,” said Philo. “I found some of your old equipment. It’s marked ‘Valence Sound Laboratory.’ It doesn’t look like musical equipment at all, more like scientific equipment. There’s an eight-foot metal cabinet full of circuitry like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The front panel is full of knobs and jacks labeled with mathematical symbols.”
Viridios was astonished. “It still exists!” he exclaimed. “I thought it was dismantled and sold for scrap.”
“What is it?” “That’s the instrument we used to create the soundtrack for Prisoners of the Iron Star. It’s called a Magneto-Thermion.”
“The Device consists of a small telescreen, headset, and keypad. It combines the functions of telephone, radio, television, newspaper, and encyclopedia. Users are warned not to attempt to open the housing of the Device, or the power supply will explode. Every Device is keyed to a specific user, by means of electrodes built into the headset that recognize his unique brain-wave pattern. Signals from the Device are relayed by a network of thousands of tiny satellites in Low Earth Orbit, collectively known as the Cloud. The Device is so cheap and so useful that it soon becomes an indispensable part of daily life. It’s impossible to buy, sell, communicate, or travel without one. The Device becomes a de facto national ID card, to be carried at all times. Children are issued their own Device at the age of eight.”
“There really was a secret conspiracy of businessmen at the turn of the century, with strange and disturbing ideas. They talked about building a ‘City of the Future’ in the desert, near the Pacific coast, a cursed place where the Indians were afraid to go. Shining towers of glass and chrome, sixteen-lane elevated highways, service stations and billboards as far as the eye can see, vast aqueducts to suck up all the water in a thousand-mile radius, clear skies 284 days out of the year, five hundred square miles of unbroken pavement, and vast power plants to supply air conditioning for five million people just to make it livable!”
“It sounds hellish,” said Philo. “Who would want to live there?”
“They believed that the people should be designed to fit the city, not the other way around. They called it ‘social engineering.”
Fenton Wood, Five Million Watts
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"Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings" by Amy Kelly (Harvard University Press, 1950).
Pretty good yarn.
Pretty good yarn.
A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of Italians from Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, 1943-1956 by Arrigo Petacco. Or if I understand the family history correctly why I am Canadian.
An exciting era to be sure! Made into a movie in 1968: "The Lion in Winter"
Embarrassed to say I saw it when it was new! But so long ago I don't remember much, should try to watch it when I finish the book. She was quite a gal, and yes it was quite a period.
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just finished reading the history of the development of the mainframe by ibm
just started To The Lighthouse by V. Wolfe.
just started To The Lighthouse by V. Wolfe.
one of Tom Watson's first jobs was a traveling repair/salesman for National Cash Register "The Cash". One of his techniques to get more sales was to damage a gear in those old cash registers, requiring a more comprehensive repair in a few weeks.
And of course, the history of computer memory is equally fascinating. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the French and the jacquard loom!
I know someone who used to program a computer, by punching holes in card, he said it filled a room, kicked out tremendous heat and did nothing - when it worked. And now I'm typing this on a £45 'phone, that with the right app can rip a chess computer ( from a few years ago ) to shreds, store 1,000s of videos, show me millions of vids from you tube, and answer almost any question I ask it.
Finished 1984 about a week ago, then finished last light of the sun, now about to try some Carl Jung ( a work colleague has told me several times NOT to pronounce the " J " ) - I left school at 15, was in the thicko set foe English, so it might be heavy going. Dictionary!
We did that back in college, in computer science 101 with the IBM System/360.
https://twobithistory.org/2018/06/23/ibm-029-card-punch.html
Did the same on a System/360 about 50 years ago. My organic chem prof scoffed at the notion of designing molecules with a computer.
"Killing the Killers" by Bill O'Reilly is very interesting. It's in the current rotation.
The station was really noisy. And any mistakes resulted in a huge thick printout
with giant "ERROR" on many pages. Why they didn't just terminate the print job
after the first error page is beyond me. At least I was able to run ECAP at the time.
with giant "ERROR" on many pages. Why they didn't just terminate the print job
after the first error page is beyond me. At least I was able to run ECAP at the time.
