Flat Earth Theatre presents "R.U.R." by Karel Capek. January 23 - 31, 2009. Featuring Michael Wayne Smith, Karen Hart, Valerie Daum, Jeff Tidwell, Kevin Kordis, James Rossi, Bill Conley, Justus Perry, and Amy Lehrmitt. Directed by Jake Scaltreto. Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown.

Robot: You Keep Using That Word But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

January 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

The flute player automaton by Innocenzo Manzetti (1840)

With many words which are commonly used in everyday vocabulary, we are certain that we have a solid grasp of what they do and do not mean, but is this really true? Take the word ‘robot’ for example, which is more commonly used wrongly rather than correctly when going by the definition of the person who coined it: [Karel Čapek]. It was the year 1920 when his play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti was introduced to the world, which soon saw itself translated and performed around the world, with the English-speaking world knowing it as R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.

Up till then, the concept of a relatively self-operating machine was known as an automaton, as introduced by the Ancient Greeks, with the term ‘android’ being introduced as early as the 18th century to mean automatons that have a human-like appearance, but are still mechanical contraptions. When [Čapek] wrote his play, he did not intend to have non-human characters that were like these androids, but rather pure artificial life: biochemical systems much like humans, using similar biochemical principles as proteins, enzymes, hormones and vitamins, assembled from organic matter like humans. These non-human characters he called ‘roboti’, from Old Czech ‘robot’ (robota: “drudgery, servitude”), who looked human, but lacked a ‘soul’.

Despite this intent, the run-away success of R.U.R. led to anything android- and automaton-like being referred to as a ‘robot’, which he lamented in a 1935 column in Lidové Noviny. Rather than whirring and clunking pieces of machinery being called ‘automatons’ and ‘androids’ as they had been for hundreds of years, now his vision of artificial life had effectively been wiped out. Despite this, to this day we can still see the traces of the proper terms, for example when we talk about ‘automation’, which is where automatons (‘industrial robots’) come into play, like the industrial looms and kin that heralded the Industrial Revolution.

(Heading image: Performance of R.U.R. by Flat Earth Theatre, showing the mixing of robot ingredients)

DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence

January 23, 2024 by Kristina Panos 47 Comments

It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016, this may be the year it cracks wide open. On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who would become known as DB Cooper due to a mistake by the media, skyjacked a Boeing 727 — Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 — headed from Portland to Seattle.

During the flight, mild-mannered Cooper coolly notified a flight attendant sitting behind him via neatly-handwritten note that he had a bomb in his briefcase. His demands were a sum of $200,000 (about $1.5 M today) and four parachutes once they got to Seattle. Upon landing, Cooper released the passengers and demanded that the plane be refueled and pointed toward Mexico City with him and most of the original crew aboard. But around 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper opened the plane’s aft staircase and vanished, parachuting into the night sky.

In the investigation that followed, the FBI recovered Cooper’s clip-on tie, tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. While it’s unclear why Cooper would have left the tie behind, it has become the biggest source of evidence for identifying him. New evidence shows that a previously unidentified particle on the tie has been identified as “titanium smeared with stainless steel”.

Continue reading “DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence” →

Testing The Atlas ICBM: A 1958 Time Capsule Video

January 19, 2024 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

The control room during the 1958 Atlas B 4B test. (Source: Convair)

Recently the [Periscope Film] channel on YouTube published a 1960 color documentary featuring the 1958 launch of the Atlas B (SM-65B) ICBM, in its second, Missile 4B iteration. This was the second model of the second prototype, which earned the distinction of being the first truly intercontinental ballistic missile upon its successful test completion, which saw the payload plummeting into its designated part of the Atlantic Ocean. This was a much better result than the previous test of the 3B, which suffered a yaw gyro issue that caused the missile to disintegrate partway into the flight.

In this historic documentary, the Atlas B’s manufacturer – Convair – takes us through all the elements of the test range, including all the downrange stations, their functions and how all the data from the test is captured, recorded (on reel to reel tape) and integrated into one coherent data set. This includes radar data, telemetry received from the missile, as well as the data tape that the ICBM ejects from the payload section shortly before impact.

Although it’s also a promotion piece for Convair Astronautics, this does little to mar the documentary aspect, which is narrated by William Conrad, who manages to both instill a sense of technological wonder and grim foreboding against the scenery of 1950s military high-tech in the midst of a heating up Cold War.

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Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair

January 18, 2024 by Al Williams 18 Comments

The cover of the infamous issue of Astounding, March 1944

There’s an upcoming movie, Argylle, about an author whose spy novels are a little too accurate, and she becomes a target of a real-life spy game. We haven’t seen the movie, but it made us think of a similar espionage caper from 1944 involving science fiction author Cleve Cartmill. The whole thing played out in the pages of Astounding magazine (now Analog) and involved several other science fiction luminaries ranging from John W. Campbell to Isaac Asimov. It is a great story about how science is — well, science — and no amount of secrecy or legislation can hide it.

In 1943, Cartmill queried Campbell about the possibility of a story that would be known as “Deadline.” It wasn’t his first story, nor would it be his last. But it nearly put him in a Federal prison. Why? The story dealt with an atomic bomb.

Nothing New

By itself, that’s probably not a big deal. H.G. Wells wrote “The World Set Free” in 1914, where he predicted nuclear weapons. But in 1914, it wasn’t clear how that would work exactly. Wells mentioned “uranium and thorium” and wrote a reasonable account of the destructive power: Continue reading “Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair” →

Retrotechtacular: Rebuilding A Fire-Ravaged Telephone Exchange

January 11, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Those who haven’t experienced the destruction of a house fire should consider themselves lucky. The speed with which fire can erase a lifetime of work — or a life, for that matter — is stunning. And the disruption a fire causes for survivors, who often escape the blaze with only the clothes on their backs, is almost unfathomable. To face the task of rebuilding a life with just a few smoke-damaged and waterlogged possessions while wearing only pajamas and slippers is a devastating proposition.

As bad as a residential fire may be, though, its impact is mercifully limited to the occupants. Infrastructure fires are another thing entirely; the disruption they cause is often felt far beyond the building or facility involved. The film below documents a perfect example of this: the 1975 New York Telephone Exchange fire, which swept through the company’s central office facility at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 13th Street in Manhattan and cut off service to 300 blocks of the East Village and Lower East Side neighborhoods.

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Liftoff! The Origin Of The Countdown

December 27, 2023 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

What’s the most thrilling part of rocketry? Well, the liftoff, naturally. But what about the sweet anticipation in those tense moments leading up to liftoff? In other words, the countdown. Where did it come from?

Far from being simply a dramatic device, the countdown clock serves a definite purpose — it lets the technicians and the astronauts synchronize their actions during the launch sequence. But where did the countdown — those famed ten seconds of here we go! that seem to mark the point of no return — come from? Doesn’t it all seem a little theatrical for scientists?

It may surprise you to learn that neither technicians nor astronauts conceived of the countdown. In their book, “Lunar Landings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon”, media scholars Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew reveal that a little-known Fritz Lang movie called Woman In the Moon both “predicted the future of rocketry” and “played an effective role in its early development”.

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The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.

Bringing APL To The Masses: The History Of The IBM 5100

December 19, 2023 by Maya Posch 42 Comments

The 1970s was a somewhat awkward phase for the computer industry — as hulking, room-sized mainframes became ever smaller and the concept of home and portable computers more capable than a basic calculator began to gain traction. Amidst all of this, two interpreted programming languages saw themselves being used the most: BASIC and APL, with the latter being IBM’s programming language of choice for its mainframes. The advantages of being able to run APL on a single-user, portable system, eventually led to the IBM 5100. Its story is succinctly summarized by [Bradford Morgan White] in a recent article.

Although probably not well-known to the average computer use, APL (A Programming Language) is a multi-dimensional array-based language that uses a range of special graphic symbols that are often imprinted on the keyboard for ease of entry.

It excels at concisely describing complex functions, such as the example provided on the APL Wikipedia entry for picking 6 pseudo-random, non-repeating integers between 1 and 40 and sorting them in ascending order:

x[⍋x←6?40]

Part of what made it possible to bring the power of APL processing to a portable system like the IBM 5100 was the IBM PALM processor, which implemented an emulator in microcode to allow e.g. running System/360 APL code on a 5100, as well as BASIC.

Despite [Bradford]’s claim that the 5100 was not a commercial success, it’s important to remember the target market. With a price tag of tens of thousands of (inflation-adjusted 2023) dollars, it bridged the gap between a multi-user mainframe with APL and far less capable single-user systems that generally only managed BASIC. This is reflected in that the Commodore SuperPET supported APL, and the 5100 was followed by the 5110 and 5120 systems, and that today you can download GNU APL which implements the ISO/IEC 13751:2001 (APL2) standard.

We’ve previously looked at the Canadian-made MCM/70, another portable APL machine that embodied the cyberdeck aesthetic before William Gibson even gave it a name.

Top image: The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.