Here’s the fifth and final episode of The Machine That Changed the World, this one focusing on global information networks including the Internet, and the communication benefits and privacy risks they create. This is the most familiar material of the documentary, so I’m going to skip the notes and annotations this time. I hope you enjoyed the documentary as much as I did.

And, as promised, here’s the BitTorrent file for high-resolution copies of all five videos. It’s a 3.1GB download with five H.264 encoded MP4 files. (If you only want a single video, use your BitTorrent client to select only the videos you need.) Enjoy!

Watch them all: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Interviews:

Robert Lucky (AT&T Bell Labs), Dave Hughes, Kathleen Bonner (Trader, Fidelity), George Hayter (Former Head of Trading, London Stock Exchange), Ben Bagdikian (UC Berkeley), Arthur Miller (Harvard Law School), Forman Brown (songwriter, died in 1996), Tan Chin Nam (Chairman, National Computer Board of Singapore), B.G. Lee (Minister of Trade and Industry, Singapore), Lee Fook Wah, (Assistant Traffic Manager, MRT Singapore), David Assouline (French Activist, now a senator), Mitch Kapor (founder, Lotus), Michael Drennan (Air traffic controller, Dallas-Fort Worth)

The fourth episode of The Machine That Changed the World covers the history of artificial intelligence and the challenges that come from trying to teach computers to think and learn like us.

Continue reading “The Machine That Changed the World: The Thinking Machine” →

The third episode of The Machine That Changed the World covers the development of the personal computer and the modern graphical user interface, which made computing easy to use for everyone. Highlights include interviews with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, drawing with a computer in 1963, great footage from Xerox PARC, and some 1992-era predictions of the future from Apple and others.

Continue reading “The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer” →

The first part of The Machine That Changed the World covered the earliest roots of computing, from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 1800s to the first working computers of the 1940s. The second part, “Inventing the Future,” picks up the story of ENIAC’s creators as they embark on building the first commercial computer company in 1950, and ends with the moon landing in 1969 and the beginning of the Silicon Valley.

Watch them all: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Notes:

Shortly after the war ended, ENIAC‘s creators founded the first commercial computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1946. The early history of the company’s funding and progress is told through interviews and personal home videos. They underestimated the cost and time to build UNIVAC I, their new computer for the US Census Bureau, quickly sending the company into financial trouble. Meanwhile, in London, the J. Lyons and Co. food empire teamed up with the EDSAC developers at Cambridge to build LEO, their own computer to manage inventory and payroll. It was a huge success, inspiring Lyons to start building computers for other companies.

The Eckert-Mauchly company was in trouble, with several high-profile Defense Department contracts withdrawn because of a mistaken belief that John Mauchly had Communist ties. After several attempts to save the company, the company was sold to Remington-Rand in 1950. The company, then focused on electric razors and business machines, gave UNIVAC its television debut by tabulating live returns during the 1952 presidential election. To CBS’s amazement, it accurately predicted an Eisenhower landslide with only 1% of the vote. UNIVAC soon made appearances in movies and cartoons, leading to more business.

IBM was late to enter the computing business, though they’d built the massive SSEC in 1948 for scientific research. When the US Census ordered a UNIVAC, Thomas Watson, Jr. recognized the threat to the tabulating machine business. IBM introduced their first commercial business computers in 1953, the mass-produced IBM 650. While inferior technology, it soon dominated the market with their strong sales force, relative affordability, and integration with existing tabulating machines. In 1956, IBM soared past Remington-Rand to become the largest computer company in the world. By 1960, IBM captured 75% of the US computer market.

But developing software for these systems often cost several times the hardware itself, because programming was so difficult and programmers were hard to find. FORTRAN was one of the first higher-level languages, designed for scientists and mathematicians. It didn’t work well for business use, so COBOL soon followed. This led to wider adoption in different industries, as software was developed that could automate human labor. “Automation” become a serious fear, as humans were afraid they’d lose their jobs to machines. Across the country, companies like Bank of America (with ERMA) were eliminating thousands of tedious tabulating jobs with a single computer, though the country’s prosperity and booming job market tempered some of that fear.

In the ’50s, vacuum tubes were an essential component of the electronics industry, located in every computer, radio, and television. Transistors meant that far more complex computers could be designed, but couldn’t be built because wiring them together was a logistical nightmare. The “tyranny of numbers” was solved in 1959 with the first working integrated circuit, developed and introduced independently by both Texas Instruments and Fairchild. But ICs were virtually ignored until adopted by NASA and the military for use in lunar landers, guided missiles, and jets. Electronics manufacturers soon realized the ability to mass-produce ICs. Within a decade, ICs cost pennies to produce while becoming a thousand times more powerful. The result was the birth of the Silicon Valley and a reborn electronics industry.

Interviews:

Ted Withington (network engineer, industry analyst), Paul Ceruzzi (Smithsonian), J. Presper Eckert (ENIAC co-inventor, died 1995), Morris Hansen (former US Census Bureau, died 1990), John Pinkerton (Chief Engineer, LEO, died 1997), Thomas J. Watson, Jr. (Chairman Emeritus, IBM, died 1993), James W. Birkenstock (retired Vice President, IBM, died 2003), Jean Sammet (programming language historian), Dick Davis (retired Senior V.P., Bank of America), Robert Noyce (co-inventor, integrated circuit, died 1990), Gordon Moore (former Chairman of the Board, Intel), Steve Wozniak (Co-founder, Apple)

Up Next…

Part 3: The Paperback Computer. The development of the personal computer and user interfaces, from Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC to the Apple and IBM PCs.

The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced, but since its release in 1992, it’s become virtually extinct. Out of print and never released online, the only remaining copies are VHS tapes floating around school libraries or in the homes of fans who dubbed the original shows when they aired.

It’s a whirlwind tour of computing before the Web, with brilliant archival footage and interviews with key players — several of whom passed away since the filming. Jointly produced by WGBH Boston and the BBC, it originally aired in the UK as The Dream Machine before its U.S. premiere in January 1992. Its broadcast was accompanied by a book co-written by the documentary’s producer Jon Palfreman.

With the help of Simon Willison, Jesse Legg, and (unofficially) the Portland State University library, we’ve tracked down and digitized all five parts. This week, I’m uploading them, annotating them with Viddler, and posting them here as streaming Flash video as they’re finished. Also, the complete set is available for download as high-quality MP4 downloads via BitTorrent.

Here’s the first of the five-part series, The Machine That Changed the World. Enjoy!

Watch them all: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Continue reading “The Machine That Changed the World: Giant Brains” →

Back in March, I posted the first episode of a BBC Two series called The Net from 1994. It’s a great time capsule of how the media portrayed cyberculture in the early 1990s, very much like a TV version of early Wired Magazine.

Thanks again to Martin Brewer, who also contributed the Horizon show, here are two more episodes from the first season of The Net from 1994.

Continue reading “BBC Two's "The Net," Episodes 2 and 5 from 1994” →

This Friday, I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland about Internet memes, how they spread, and how their distribution’s changed over time.

As part of that research, I’ve been digging into my original server logs from the Star Wars Kid debacle, five years after I played a major role in what some say is the biggest viral video of all-time.

Be warned, this is more detail than you’ll ever want about the origins of the Star Wars Kid meme and how it spread. You don’t care about this level of detail, but I’m writing this all down so that I never have to think about it again.

In addition, I’ve decided to release the first six months of server logs from the meme’s spread into the public domain — with dates, times, IP addresses, user agents, and referer information. (Download it below.)

Early Origins

Like I mentioned in my original entry, the video was first released by Ghyslain’s schoolmates to Kazaa on April 19, 2003 with the original filename “ghyslain_razaa.wmv.” Within three days, it was being passed around in the offices of Raven Software in Madison, Wisconsin, where a game developer named Bryan Dube posted it on his personal website on April 22. Two days later, he created the first Star Wars Kid remix, adding lightsabers and sound effects in a new video titled “TheLastHope.avi.”

On April 27, a mostly-NSFW online community called Sensible Erection linked to the video on Bryan’s website. Later that evening, an SE user cross-posted it to a private file-sharing community I belong to with the new filename “star_wars_guy.wmv.” It quickly became the most popular file on the site, which is where I found it the following day, April 28 at 7:52pm.

On April 29, I renamed it Star_Wars_Kid.wmv and posted it to my site at 4:49pm — inadvertently giving the meme its permanent name. (Yes, I coined the term “Star Wars Kid.” It’s strange to think it would’ve been “Star Wars Guy” if I was any lazier.) An hour later, Scott Gowell becomes the first person to link to the video.

From there, for the first week, it spread quickly through news site, blogs and message boards, mostly oriented around technology, gaming, and movies. Throughout the life of the meme, most of the referers are blank, suggesting people were primarily sending the links by email or instant message.

The chart below shows the distinct top-level domains that appeared in the referral logs grouped by day.

It’s worth noting that the majority of sites sent less than 10 referers in that first month, and 21% of domains referred only one user. (Note: The chart below is on a logarithmic scale for both axes.)

Mainstream News Coverage

Here’s some of the highlights from the mainstream media coverage. The New York Times was the first major paper to report on it, almost a week after I tracked Ghyslain down, Jish and I interviewed him for the first time, and we started the fundraiser.

May 19, New York Times

May 19, Wired News

May 20, Public Radio International’s “The World” (radio program)

May 20, Globe and Mail

May 20, National Post

May 23, The Mirror UK

Jun 6, LA Times

Jul 4, The Independent UK

Jul 12, The Age

Jul 23, Wired News

Jul 25, BBC News

Jul 31, NPR w/Tavis Smiley (radio interview)

Aug 21, USA Today, syndicated Associated Press article

Aug 25, NBC’s Today Show (TV program)

Aug 26, MSNBC’s Countdown (TV program)

Aug 28, USA Today

Aug 30, Seattle P-I

Sep 8, SF Chronicle

Sep 15, Variety

Sep 16, Globe and Mail

Nov 18, CBS Evening News

Statistics

Here’s what the Star Wars Kid meme did to my overall traffic. At its peak, I received almost a million pageviews in a single day.

That includes all pageviews on my weblog entries. Isolating only the video downloads from my site, or later redirected to one of the mirrors, gives the following chart.

Download the Data

This file is a subset of the Apache server logs from April 10 to November 26, 2003. It contains every request for my homepage, the original video, the remix video, the mirror redirector script, the donations spreadsheet, and the seven blog entries I made related to Star Wars Kid. I included a couple weeks of activity before I posted the videos so you can determine the baseline traffic I normally received to my homepage.

The file is 158 megabytes — 1.6GB uncompressed — so I’m distributing it with BitTorrent. The data is public domain. If you use it for anything, please drop me a note!

Download: star_wars_kid_logs.zip.torrent

In a bizarre example of Second Life leaking into the real world, a political assembly on Saturday led by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was disrupted by a flying penis.

Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia movement, a loose coalition of activists opposing Vladamir Putin and the current Russian government. Over 700 people showed up for the event in central Moscow, but Kasparov’s speech was interrupted when a large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room. The Moscow Times attributed the prank to “a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists.”

Warning: Mildly NSFW images and video follow.

Continue reading “Garry Kasparov Griefed by Flying Penis” →

How has the record industry changed in the last 50 years? Using the Whitburn Project spreadsheet I talked about yesterday, I’ve been trying to dig into some of the underlying trends. Today, I’ll be tackling the longevity and diversity of pop songs, and a look at which decades had one-hit wonders.

Longevity of a Pop Song

One of the trickier questions I’ve been trying to visualize is how long pop songs are staying on the charts relative to the past. Are they staying on the charts longer than in the past?

In the chart below, I plotted the total number of weeks charted for all 23,924 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1957 to earlier this year. (In other words, a little dot on the “60” line means there was a song released that week that stayed on the Hot 100 chart for 60 weeks.)

See the heavy dropoff on the 20th week starting in 1991? In an attempt to increase diversity and promote newer artists and songs, Billboard changed their methodology, removing tracks that had been on the Hot 100 for twenty consecutive weeks and slipped below the 50th position. These songs, called “recurrents,” were then moved to their own chart in 1991, the Hot 100 Recurrent.

Unfortunately, this shift makes it much harder to compare the last 15 years to the decades before it. In the chart below, I’ve isolated the effect by only showing songs that reached the top 50.

A couple interesting observations… Looking at the very bottom of the chart, you can see that in the last couple years, it’s become very common for a single to appear in the Top 50 and fall out of the Hot 100 within four weeks. Prior to the mid-1990s, this almost never happened.

Also, songs are staying in the Top 50 for far longer than they used to. Unfortunately, I don’t have any actual sales numbers to compare to, so it’s hard to say if these 30-70 week singles are massive megahits eclipsing the #1 singles of the past, or if it’s because the record industry is producing fewer hits than before.

Diversity

Did Billboard’s methodology changes in 1991 make the charts more diverse, like they hoped? By looking at the total number of unique songs that have charted yearly, it’s clear their changes did nothing to slow the decline.

According to Billboard, the late 1960s were the peak of musical diversity in popular music, with 743 different songs appearing on the 1966 Billboard Top 100. It’s fallen consistently since, hitting an all-time low in 2002 with only 295 songs. Since then, it’s improved only slightly, with 351 unique songs appearing on last year’s Top 100.

One Hit Wonders

I’ve always thought the 1970s were the decade of the one-hit wonder, but now I have the data to see for sure.

In raw numbers, the 1960s had more one-hit wonders than any other decade, followed closely by the 1950s. But that’s not entirely fair since, as we saw earlier, there were simply more unique songs on the 1960s charts. To find out the true numbers, we need to look at the number of one-hit wonders as a percentage of all songs in the Top 100.

This tells a totally different story. The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s all had about the same ratio of one-hit wonders to hits by more established artists. The big surprise for me is that 1950s, 1990s, and 2000s really seem to be the eras where one-hit wonders dominated the charts.

Joshua Porter was wondering about the longest-charting one-hit wonders of all time. The longest-charting one-hit wonder to hit the #1 spot is Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” from 2006, which stayed on the charts for 32 weeks. The one-hit wonder that stayed at the #1 longest is Anton Karas’ “The Third Man Theme” from 1950, which stayed in the #1 position for 11 weeks. Finally, the longest-charting one-hit wonder to appear anywhere in the Top 100 is Duncan Sheik’s “Barely Breathing” from 1997, which peaked at #16 but stayed in the top 100 for 55 weeks.

Have any other questions about the data, or done any analysis yourself? I’d love to hear about it.

May 20: Don’t miss Mike Frumin’s chart of pop longevity,from 1998-2002.

May 21: Using the Whitburn data, Tom Whitwell generated a tag cloud showing the top 100 commonly-used words in song names. Dianne Warren should write a #1 hit called “Love my Baby Blue Heart: A Girl’s Night Song.”

July 14: Pedro did some additional analysis, including artists with multiple hits in the same week and one-week wonders.

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.

As far as I know, this is the first time the project and its data have ever been discussed outside of Usenet. Despite its illegality, they’ve created a wonderful resource and you can do some fun things with the data. For the next three days, I’m going to publish some analysis and insights gleaned from their work. Update: I published an entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity.

Continue reading “The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music Chart History” →