Audio preservation has evolved to the point where centuries-old recordings become computer files. From Edison’s phonograph that recorded onto wax cylinders, to vinyl (possibly the most debated form of recording), to the compact disc, these shifts focused primarily on audio quality. But there have been recordings for just that purpose: to preserve the audio. So when a possible recording showed up in the pages of a book, media preservationists took notice.

A few years ago, a survey was done of the different time-based media objects in the stacks of Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. An amazing 569,148 different forms were identified. What the report didn’t mention, however, was a hidden ‘record’. A member of the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) at IU Bloomington discovered a circular picture buried in a volume of German reference books. While not the first ever audio recording, it revealed much more upon further inspection.

The disc-shaped image was titled “Der Handschuh,” which is a poem by Friedrich Schiller. The MPI investigator proceeded to apply some slick audio recording tricks to the image. After a high-resolution scan was done of the image, the spiral was converted into parallel lines by a process called polar-to-rectangular-coordinates transformation. The lines were then ‘pasted’ together used audio editing software.

If it hadn’t gotten tricky yet, it certainly did on the next step. According to the MPI’s website, the engineer “[ran] these images through ImageToSound, a program that converts them into WAV files as though they were variable-area optical film sound tracks.” A stereo track was made into a WAV, and the seemingly mundane picture in the book came audibly alive.

The image turned out to be a demonstration on how the lines theoretically contained enough information to produce sound. The technology was first created by Emile Berliner, the creator of the gramophone. But the picture found in the depths of Wells Hall at IU Bloomington turned out to be “the oldest known recording of a complete literary work in the German language.” It’s eons behind that FLAC rip you did of a CD in terms of audio quality, but the fact that it was digitized from a book is one amazing feat. The WAV file can be heard at MPI’s website.

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Robots have slowly crept into our daily lives and now do a whole spectrum of jobs from vacuuming our floors to building cars. The amazing technology we enjoy today wouldn’t have been possible without pioneers in robotics such as Charles Rosen. Rosen and his team developed Shakey, the world’s first moving, “thinking” robot.

Rosen wanted to make a robot with neural networks, the brain “circuitry” that allows humans to see, think, and respond to environmental stimuli. Although this technology wasn’t available in 1963 when Shakey was built, the robot did attract the attention of DARPA, the research wing of the US military. DARPA gave the project a grant of $750,000, which in today’s dollars would be more than $5 million.

Thanks to a video camera on its head and wiry “whiskers” near its base, Shakey was able to “see” and interact with its environment. It connected via a head-mounted radio antenna with its massive brain: a room-size mainframe computer. The computer programs used to control the robot allowed it to respond to the unexpected with a quick change in plans. Shakey is now housed in the Computer History Museum in California, but in its short life it was able to astonish humankind and inspire future generations of robotics scientists. As the first robot of its kind, Shakey helped to define the future of robotics.

The post Meet Shakey, the Very First Mobile Thinking Robot (VIDEO) first appeared on Gajitz.

The next time you get upset about your iPad not downloading something fast enough or your laptop not acting exactly the way you want it to, maybe these vintage computer ads will help.

The ads show just how different the technology of the 1980s is from the gadgets we know, love and carry everywhere these days.

Ranging from early consumer technology to office machines, the ads depict a completely different generation of electronic devices.

All of the ads feature technology that is now outdated, but some of them have nostalgia value, such as the computer that runs on 5 1/4″ floppy disks and spits out printouts from its integrated dot matrix printer.

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Although the first full-length color movie wasn’t released until 1935, there were experiments in color well before then. This film test was produced by Kodak in 1922; the original film was only recently scanned to create this digital version. The color palette is pale, almost otherworldly, due to the process used to transform the black-and-white negative stock into color moving pictures.

This isn’t the oldest example of color motion picture, but it is a fascinating example from the birth of a new technology. According to George Eastman House, the repository for early Eastman Kodak film stock, the two-color system used to create color in early film was a subtractive color system. “Shot with a dual-lens camera, the process recorded filtered images on black/white negative stock, then made black/white separation positives. The final prints were actually produced by bleaching and tanning a double-coated duplicate negative (made from the positive separations), then dyeing the emulsion green/blue on one side and red on the other.”

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The gun-shaped digital camera we saw recently seemed like a misguided, if somewhat entertaining, pun on the phrase “point and shoot.” As it turns out, it wasn’t the first of its kind. Gun-shaped cameras have been around since at least 1916. These are only a few of the designs that have come and gone in the last century.

Believe it or not, cameras that look like guns haven’t always been exercises in testing limits for design students; some of them have very useful purposes. This gun camera was used to help military trainees develop their aerial gunnery skills. The gun was similar in size, shape and weight to the actual gun they would use later in their careers, and the resulting photographs were used to assess their “shooting” accuracy.

There’s not a lot of information on this handgun-style camera other than it was used by the police at some point. Imagine looking down the barrel of a police officer’s gun, only to hear him say “cheese” instead of “freeze.”

The Agent Zero M Snapshot wasn’t exactly a functional camera, but rather a toy cap gun that could be disguised as a camera. It was made by Mattel in the 1960s, when presumably parents were cool with their children carrying around concealed weapons.

This gun-shaped camera was never produced commercially – rather, it was produced just for a commercial. Visual effects company Modelwerkes put it together for a Toyota commercial. In the commercial, spies used the uber-cool gun to get the first pictures of the brand new Celica.

This machine-gun style camera was used in Japan in the 1940s to train aerial gunners, much like the English version above. This model does look arguably more intimidating, though.

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