[HN Gopher] Oldest recovered TV images (2013)
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Oldest recovered TV images (2013)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-05-28 04:00 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tvdawn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tvdawn.com)
| tigerlily wrote:
| I wonder if we can get old TV shows by listening for the radio
| waves bouncing off distant reflective objects in space?
|
| I'd wager Claude Shannon would laugh at the notion. Too much
| attenuation and not enough signal power reflected. Still it
| intrigues me, has anyone got the math?
| _joel wrote:
| It'd be like trying to use pluto for moonlight, just a lot
| worse.
| major505 wrote:
| Of course, is creepy as hell. not many things are as creep as a
| ventriloquist dummy
| yesenadam wrote:
| There's another fascinating page on that site with some modern
| recreations of what 30-line TV at 12.5 frames per second can look
| like - surprisingly good!
|
| http://www.tvdawn.com/other-projects/tvtests/
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| People wring their hands about media being harmful to children
| these days. Meanwhile back in 1927 they were expected to sleep
| after watching Stookie Bill.
| dang wrote:
| Those are much earlier than I expected. I've often had that
| reaction to the earliest photographs / daguerrotypes too - from
| the 1840s!
| vidarh wrote:
| I like to point out to people that a lot of the things in Jules
| Verne books that seems futuristic were contemporary.
|
| People might be aware that submarines predates 20,000 Leagues
| Under the Sea (the first submarine named Nautilus dates to
| 1800), though a surprising number aren't. In general,
| mechanical things seems to be the things people are most likely
| to believe are that old.
|
| But when he described a fax-like thing in his story Paris in
| the Twentieth Century, people tend to be sure it was a
| fantastic prediction.
|
| Only the book was written in 1863, and the first commercial
| fax-like service - the Pantelegraph - went into _commercial_
| operation between Paris and Lyon in 1863, and the invention
| happened many years before. Becquerel, Rossini and Napoleon III
| all were involved in demonstrations.
|
| Outside of Jules Verne, my other favourite tech that people
| think is more modern than it is, is video telephony. But when
| you think about it, the crudest version you can build of video
| telephony is "just" a pair of TV cameras and a pair of screens.
| Hence the video-telephony network set up in Germany in the
| 1930's (but people are often surprised at how old "real" video-
| telephony is too; people are even surprised to hear about CU-
| SeeMe these days; then again my son is surprised I had
| electricity when I grew up given I predate Youtube)
|
| I think a lot of it is because we think in terms of the modern
| conception of what something is. But as you can see if you look
| up the Pantelegraph, you can do "fax-like" fairly easy: The
| early variants tended be variants over the theme of breaking a
| current (like the Pantelegraph) or using magnetic ink with a
| simple scanning device that caused the resulting current to
| directly drive the rendering on the other side. And video-
| telephony a la Skype or Zoom is complex, but video-telephony a
| la the most basic camera and screen is simple once you have the
| cameras and screens.
|
| We see the same with photographs. If you look at modern
| cameras, they're of course complex and it's easy to imagine
| them as modern (imagine what it will seem like to kids growing
| up without having seen mechanical cameras...) but look back at
| the processes and the simplest cameras and simplest
| photographic processes are almost literally a science
| experiment for kids now that we know how to do it, and the
| genius lay in figuring out the concept.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Hence the video-telephony network set up in Germany in the
| 1930's
|
| "with a resolution of ... 180 lines running at 25 frames per
| second."
|
| I've seen video conferencing do much worse, 80 years
| later.(Looking at ya, Teams). Especially on those 25 frames
| per second. Actually, that's probably higher than what most
| video chats seem to use today (~10-15-ish fps?). And I mean
| 240p isn't actually that much more than 180 lines (and 144p
| is obviously less) if we're being real just for a second.
| vidarh wrote:
| A lot of the limitations of early TV are down to achieving
| reliable transmission and mass production. As such, when
| you had point to point fixed cabled circuits, and only a
| handful of endpoints you could do pretty ok very early.
| Steve44 wrote:
| > the first submarine named Nautilus dates to 1800
|
| It's possibly not what we'd call a submarine today but the
| first recorded use of one in warfare is from 1776.
|
| https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-
| sub...
|
| > On September 7, 1776, during the Revolutionary War, the
| American submersible craft Turtle attempts to attach a time
| bomb to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe's flagship
| Eagle in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine
| in warfare. > > Submarines were first built by Dutch inventor
| Cornelius van Drebel in the early 17th century, but it was
| not until 150 years later that they were first used in naval
| combat
| vidarh wrote:
| Yeah, there were certainly predecessors. But note the
| "named Nautilus" part.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The works of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky might interest you, if you
| haven't seen them yet (I bet they have been on HN): his color
| photographs (using color separation) look like they're at least
| 60-70 years newer than they are.
| woleium wrote:
| It's often said that "the future is already here, it's just not
| well distributed yet"
| vidarh wrote:
| Specifically, that's a quote from William Gibson, though
| variants on the theme predates his quote:
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
| amelius wrote:
| These are also the first images which aliens will receive from us
| in the future.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I'm afraid they may already have.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| All we have to do to get the lost Doctor Who episodes is invent
| FTL drives, fly far enough away and wait for them to reach us!
| throw0101a wrote:
| In addition to old images, there are very few old televisions
| floating around:
|
| > _To put this special set in some context, there are more 18th
| century Stradivarius violins in existence than pre-World War II
| TVs and, to make it that bit rarer, this TV has only had two
| owners. "I've handled 38 pre-war tells and this is the finest and
| even comes with the original invoice," said Bonhams specialist
| Laurence Fisher. "It cost a huge amount and the owner must have
| had wealth and means...It is a very rare thing and there are
| collectors who would love to have it."_
|
| * https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/05/do-not-adjust-your-set-...
|
| Post-pandemic, if you're ever in Toronto, you may want to visit
| the MZTV Museum of Television:
|
| > _In the heart of Liberty Village lives one of the rarest
| televisions on the planet. This 82-year-old Lucite-encased TRK-12
| upends what a TV should look like, thanks to its see-through body
| and screen-reflecting mirror._
|
| > _Only one of this exact model was made, for the 1939 World
| Fair, and the collector who owns it has been sharing its journey,
| among many others, at a museum devoted to his passion for the
| fascinating history of television sets._
|
| * https://www.thestar.com/life/together/people/2021/03/14/mose...
|
| * https://archive.is/4X17C
| malexw wrote:
| Incredible, thank you for sharing this. I live within walking
| distance of this museum and have a small collection of various
| early radio and television pieces, yet I had never heard of
| this place before.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| How is the video signal on the discs modulated? Because I assume
| they would need to be modulated on a carrier since the tonearm
| itself would otherwise act like a low pass filter.
|
| Edit: meant high pass filter
| gugagore wrote:
| I don't have a direct answer. I'm not sure how the signal is
| synchronized. But I will say that the tonearm of a record
| player exhibits the same behavior, yet the signal on a record
| is not modulated.
| taylorfinley wrote:
| It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over his
| restorations of the original content. Could I claim copyright
| over a public domain audio recording from the same time period,
| if I reproduced it from a wax disk to an mp3? What about early
| software recovered from a stack of punch cards, could I decode
| the format, put it up as a binary, and copyright it?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| In Europe, potentially yes.
|
| There is some precedent for a fresh (though limited) copyright
| in previously unpublished manuscripts for example, and it is
| common for museums to control the copyright for the only high
| quality photograph of otherwise out of copyright art works and
| as such charge for it.
| foobarthrowaway wrote:
| > It's quite interesting that he has asserted copyright over
| his restorations of the original content.
|
| Derivative work is a foundation of open source software
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work.
|
| You can likewise take the Linux Kernel source, make a small but
| significant chance to it, and claim copyright over your
| additions to the original content.
|
| Whether his work meets the bar for such work I don't know.
| Anybody can _claim_ copyright on anything of course. Something
| that might be relevant is that he 's not changing the work to
| something of his own expression so much as trying to restore it
| to close to the original. Seems like there could be an argument
| there is less creative work there. I don't mean the creative
| process of doing the restoration, I mean the piece of work that
| comes out the other end.
|
| > Could I claim copyright over a public domain audio recording
| from the same time period, if I reproduced it from a wax disk
| to an mp3? What about early software recovered from a stack of
| punch cards, could I decode the format, put it up as a binary,
| and copyright it?
|
| As the other reply said, you can (generally) only copyright
| original creative work.
| zarzavat wrote:
| In the US at least, a mechanical conversion is not
| copyrightable. If there is a creative act e.g. colorizing an
| old photo by hand then that could be copyrightable.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Ironically, oldest surviving discs can't be shown on the page
| because adobe flash didn't survive to this day:
| http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...
|
| It would be nice if the author released the audio from those
| discs.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| After way too much googling, decompiling the swf, and finding a
| python v2 snippet to decode them, here are the urls for the
| audio files from that page. They seem to just be clips however?
|
| http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/SWT515-4-ex...
|
| http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-4-ex...
|
| http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-6-ex...
|
| http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT620-11-R...
|
| http://www.tvdawn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/RWT115-3-ex...
|
| I found the code here: "sixbitdecode" and "sixbitencode" and it
| is ported from the actionscript you can find in the SWF file.
| https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/sixbitencode.52185/
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Awesome work!
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Well, it's a good thing it wasn't reruns of Gilligan's Island.
| It's a shame though that it wasn't the Harlem Globetrotters.
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(page generated 2021-05-28 23:03 UTC)