[HN Gopher] An Archive of a Different Type
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An Archive of a Different Type
Author : josephscott
Score : 149 points
Date : 2020-08-26 17:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.archive.org)
| earthboundkid wrote:
| If you like this, you may also like
| https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/the-las...
| in which the author interviews Mr. Tytell shortly before his
| death.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's great writing, thank you very much for posting this
| link, it deserves a thread of its own, if you submit I will
| definitely upvote.
| sanqui wrote:
| Bless the Internet Archive, despite being fairly well known in
| tech circles it doesn't get the recognition it deserves.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It's excellent that they could, institutionally, release their
| set margins, allowing carriage of such otherwise unjustified
| material.
| bluntfang wrote:
| i think they mean a normal archive of physical materials.
| archivist have been working with collections like these long
| before the internet archive existed.
| compyman wrote:
| It's a pun! :)
| jmholla wrote:
| > Imagine you mount a letter wrong while crafting a typewriter,
| and it causes a country (Burma) to change that letter to
| accommodate your mistake.
|
| Does anyone know the details behind this?
| nathillard wrote:
| I hadn't heard of this, but something similar has been attested
| with Thai:
|
| "Two of the consonants, kh (kho khuat) and kh (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...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| A few references I could find:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewri...
|
| http://languagehat.com/polyglot-typewriting/
| jmholla wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| > 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| Linked from a comment in the languagehat article is the
| Wikipedia talk page for the "Burmese alphabet" article, which
| puts that claim into doubt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal
| k:Burmese_alphabet#Glyph_in...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| textfiles wrote:
| I'm going to trust the family over Wikipedia.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Nice wordplay.
|
| 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.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.zeiss.com/metrology/home.html
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are neat companies in NL that do this:
|
| http://www.flex-form.nl/ (wow, http? really?)
|
| and
|
| https://www.floatscans.com/
|
| The latter makes _very_ impressive scans.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Funded enough? They probably won't even survive their recent
| library lending fiasco.
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(page generated 2020-08-27 23:00 UTC)