July 15, 2019 • 45 mins
From dialing a phone to making a mix tape, our language is filled with phrases spawned from obsolete tech. We take a look at some listener favorites.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and a love of
all things tech and over on Twitter, I posted a
simple question not too long ago, which was, what are
(00:27):
some tech phrases or terms we still use even though
the tech that those words referred to is out of
date or maybe even obsolete. And I got a lot
of responses. So on today's episode, I'm going to go
through those phrases, where they came from and what they
refer to, and we'll all chuckle about how we as
humans are slow to change in our ways, which can
(00:50):
be a really bad thing in many ways, but I
think for most of these examples it's largely harmless or
even silly. And you're probably thinking, huh, Jonathan's really phoning
it in on this one, and you're right, because I'm
recording this on July three, two nineteen, and our office
is closed the rest of the week, and I still
(01:12):
have to record another episode after this one before I
can go home. So when I have to do five
days of work in three days get a bit desperate
for easy topics, al Z. Now, there are a lot
of phrases in terms will be going through on here,
so I've decided to group them according to subject matter.
So let's start off with phrases we still use regarding
(01:36):
phones and phone behavior. Now, first of all, some of
the phrases I'll say might be dying out simply because
millennials and and the younger generations don't tend to make
very many phone calls. Heck I don't either, and I'm
a gen xer, so a lot of us are spending
time on our phones. In fact, the average amount of
(01:57):
time spent on a phone in the United States is
a hundred seventy one minutes per day. That's just under
three hours of your day spent on your phone, not
all at once, obviously, but throughout the day. Brazilians, by
the way, spend even more time on their mobile devices.
So I don't want to give you guys the impression
that we Americans are the most addicted. But who boy,
(02:18):
we're up there anyway. We might not use some of
these phrases as much as old fogies do. By old fogies,
I also mean me there as we ride off into
the sunset. We might see these terms fade away, but
for the time being, let's talk about making an ending calls,
which brings us to the phrase dialing a number. Dialing
(02:42):
refers back to rotary phones, which featured an actual dial
on them. And yes, I know a lot of you
listeners out there are old enough to remember rotary phones,
but some of you might not be, and so this
episode is going to end up bridging some gaps. So
the earliest reference I could find of a rotary phone
in actual use dated to eighteen ninety two, but there
(03:07):
were a lot of inventors who filed for patents as
early as the mid eighteen seventies. Before the rotary phone,
you'd simply pick up a phone which would light up
a bulb on a phone operator's desk at a telephone exchange.
The operator would connect to your line and ask you
about whom you wished to call, and you would give
the call signal to the operator, who would then use
(03:30):
a patch cable to connect your line with the appropriate
phone line to complete the call. And coincidentally, one of
the other suggestions I got when I asked about outdated
tech phrases was what happens if you ask an operator
to connect a call, though I don't know how frequently
that happens these days, but it was a suggestion I got.
(03:51):
But as you can imagine, this system of having a
human operator manually connect calls together wasn't terribly efficient, and
you could quickly overwhelm the telephone exchange once you've got
a good number of phones on the service, even if
you had multiple operators working at the exchange, eventually you
get to a size where it's not sustainable with that approach.
(04:14):
Rotary phones would remove the need to have an operator
make that patch connection. Once the system was upgraded to
allow for these types of phones, it wasn't like it
just magically worked. It all had to be upgraded together.
The dial had a disc that measured about three inches
across that's about seven point six centimeters, and the disc
had ten holes in it along the outer edge, And
(04:36):
there were several different numbering systems in place until it
was finally standardized so that the numbers under the dial
would go from one to nine with a zero at
the very end. Other systems would have the zero come first,
or the numbers were listed in descending order, but that
would mean that phones using one numbering system could only
work on a telephone exchange designed for that numbering system.
(04:59):
So as these telephone exchanges grew, As these systems grew,
there was a need for standardization because otherwise you couldn't
actually interconnect the systems. Because if I dial a one,
but it sends the same signal as a nine would
on a different system, then that other system is never
gonna know what number I'm calling. It's going to it's
(05:22):
going to interpret the wrong numbers as I dial the number.
That's because dialing a number would actually cause a series
of pulses to go out over the exchange from the
original telephone. So each space on the dial was a
pulse or another pulse. So if you dial to one,
it would send one pulse out, if you dial to two,
(05:43):
then you would get two pulses, and if you dial
to zero, it would send out ten pulses to represent
that particular character. And you have to wait for that
dial to rotate all the way back into the starting
position before you could dial the next number. So I
can tell you from experience, you're really hated it if
the person you were calling had a lot of eights, nines,
(06:03):
and zeros in their phone number. After you dialed a
full telephone number, which for a local call in the
United States for a long time was seven digits, the
pulses would tell the system which lines to engage, in
other words, which telephone line corresponds with that telephone number.
The rotary phone saw wide adoption, and it became common
(06:24):
parlance to talk about dialing a phone number. Bell Telephone
would introduce the first commercial push button phone on November
nineteen sixty three, but we would keep using the word
dial even with push button phones. Now. Part of that
was because the rotary phones remained in service for a
really long time. It wasn't really until the nineteen eighties
(06:46):
that they started to truly fade away. Another part was
that customers were actually a little leery of switching to
push button phones. They used a totally different system called
touch tone dialing, even though there were no die else again,
but touch tone was how these operated as opposed to
the pulsing that the rotary phones used. By the nineteen eighties,
(07:07):
those rotary phones, like I said, we're largely phased out,
and in some some cases you actually had to opt
in for an added service to have rotary dialing supported
on your phone line. Oh and here's another fun one.
One person said, it's only sort of related to tech,
but she wondered why she still bothered to say hello
on the phone since with caller I D, she already
(07:28):
knows who is calling her. And this is an excellent
point as it does relate to tech from a social
and cultural point of view. And now we get to
talk about the origin of the word Hello. Isn't mean
you're looking for so the word hello is actually older
than telephones. But you frequently will hear that the word
(07:50):
was quote unquote invented, possibly by Thomas Edison for use
over the phone. Edison certainly popularized using it for the phone,
and she ange the meaning if you if you really
want to think about it. But the earliest written example,
the published example that the Oxford English Dictionary editors found,
dates from eighteen twenty seven. Alexander Graham Bell, whom we
(08:14):
often credit as the inventor of the telephone, wouldn't file
a patent for that invention until the eighteen seventies. But
even if you were to argue that the real inventor
was someone like Antonio Meucci, who many point to as
the first person to create what was essentially a telephone.
That still puts the earliest date for the telephone at
eighteen forty nine. That's still decades after that first published
(08:37):
instance of Hello that we know about. And now the
plot thickens because the word hello didn't initially indicate a greeting.
It was more like saying, take a look at this
thing here, earle as an hello, what's this now? In
that instance, which you could just imagine was spoken by
someone who was very, very English, the speaker is clearly
(09:00):
not greeting anyone. Rather, they are drawing focus towards something
in particular, and that was the use for Hello for
quite some time, just sort of a get a load
of this thing over here, Hello, this is curious. Now
skip ahead to Alexander Graham Bell, who might not have
strictly invented the technology of the telephone, but certainly was
(09:22):
able to realize it as a business and patent it.
He saw the challenge behind identifying someone on the other
end of the line, so if you got a call,
you had no way of knowing who it was that
was calling you. I mean, at first, there weren't that
many telephones, so the odds of you guessing who it
was that was calling you were actually pretty good. But
obviously that would change over time. So how do you
(09:44):
ask for the identity of the person who is calling you?
Presumably they know who you are because they called you,
but how do you know who they are? There's no caller.
I d well, you could ask who are you? Who
sent you? But then every phone call would be like
one of those Liam Neeson taken films. Alexander Graham Bell
(10:06):
thought a more civilized approach would be that you would
pick up the phone and you would say ahoy. That
was a tried and true method of hailing someone from
a distance, often used by sailors, as the old ahoy
there has been used, or ahoy there. Maybe if you
really want to get piratical with it, you could even
spice it up on the telephone a bit with ahoy hoy. Now.
(10:31):
Thomas Edison wasn't putting up with any of that. He
preferred the word hello, using that to mean I am
greeting you, and I would very much appreciate it if
you would identify yourself over the phone. That didn't please
Alexander Graham Bell. In fact, a T and T which
grew out of Bell's telephone company tried to suppress the
(10:53):
use of the word Hello on the telephone, stating that
the word itself was vulgar, but vulgarity one out and
A T and T decided to up the game where
vulgarity is concerned, eventually referring to the company's phone operators
as Hello girls. Yuck. Anyway, the whole purpose of Hello
(11:16):
wasn't just to greet someone, but to initiate the process
to find out who the hell they were, and so yes,
it doesn't make much sense for us to use it anymore.
But then we also use hello outside the realm of
the phone call these days, so it's grown beyond its
initial purpose. Another Twitter followers suggested the phrase to ring
(11:37):
someone up, also meaning to call them on the phone.
And it's true that most folks don't have phones that
really ring anymore, though I guess we still call stuff
ring tones, even if that description isn't totally apt. But
let me tell you what answering the phone was like
in the old days. For you young uns out there,
way back when when you only have the telephone, maybe
(12:01):
you had an answering machine, but many of us didn't
have those. They were rare for a very long time.
I remember it was a big day when my family
got our first answering machine when I was a kid. Well, anyway,
back then, answering the phone was important. When someone called you,
you had no way of knowing who they were because
there was no color idea, there was no Star sixty nine.
There was no way of knowing who it was. So
(12:24):
if you missed a call, you missed it. It was gone.
And telephones had very loud rings, like their bells would
ring quite loudly so that you could hear it from
pretty much anywhere in the house, and calls were important.
It could be anything. It could be an old friend reconnecting.
It could be a message from work. It could be
an emergency. Maybe it's a wrong number. But once that
(12:47):
phone started ringing, you would rush to the phone to
pick it up and answer it for no other reason
than to stop the darn ringing noise. These days, I
answer maybe one out of every twenty calls I get,
since most calls I get tend to be marked as
spam or are from an unrecognized number that's popping up
(13:07):
on my smartphone, So I just swiped to decline the call,
and that brings me to the next phone topic. Ending
a phone call is called hanging up, and that also
dates to the time when people were using rotary or
push button phones, because those would sit in a cradle
when they weren't in use. The rotary phone sort of
(13:28):
acted like a pedestal with a little cradle that the
handset would rest in, and push buttons usually had a
cradle that could either sit flat, horizontally on a table
or be mounted vertically on a wall. There'd be a
switch on these cradles, and that switch would close the line,
ending a call and making your phone line available for
(13:49):
future calls to you. You physically have to hang the
phone on the cradle or place it in the cradle
for those push button models. And yeah, that phrase is
stuck around two for those of us who still talk
on the phone now and again, we have been known
to hang up on people even though you're not really
hanging anything on anything else for most of those situations. Okay,
(14:12):
we're done with phones. When we come back, I'll cover
a few other shenanigans, but first, let's take a quick break.
All right. Now that we're back, let's talk about the
world of the written word and correspondence, and we'll start
(14:34):
with the word writing itself. I had one Twitter followers
suggest I add in writing simply because all the writing
she does these days involves a keyboard. The actual physical
process of writing, in the sense of holding a pen
or pencil and writing on a piece of paper, has
all but disappeared for her, and I can dig it.
(14:55):
I rarely write anymore unless it's in a greeting card
of some sort. I do want to get into writing,
actually writing letters, like actually taking a pen and writing
it out, because I feel the mindfulness it inspires might
make the messages I create more special both for me
and the recipient. Or maybe no one will be able
(15:15):
to read it because my handwriting was already atrocious, and
on top of that now I'm out of practice. Alright, fine,
so we tend to use electronic devices to write stuff
these days. There are some other outdated phrases we tend
to rely upon in that world too, For example, the
(15:36):
good old copy and paste function that you'll find in
everything from word processing programs to smartphone user interfaces. That
term dates back to the days when people would do
manuscripts and page layouts with physical pieces of paper and
with words that have been cut out, phrases, pictures. The
process of making a manuscript or a layout was laborious.
(16:00):
Designers would have to determine how big a layout would
need to be. For example, so let's say you're in
charge of making a layout for a magazine advertisement. You've
got a full page ad in a magazine, and you
are a graphic designer and you're an ad executive type,
you know, a madman, kind of dude or a woman,
(16:22):
and you want to work this out. Well, first you
would get an oversight sheet of paper. It would be
larger than whatever you were planning on actually creating, but
that's the the canvas you would be using. And then
you would draw the borders of that piece of paper
to mark out how large the final piece of of
(16:42):
advertisement was going to be, because i'd be very important.
So you would use tools like a T square and
a quick square or speed square. Those are those little
right triangles that are made out a flat piece of
metal that you use too for drafting purposes, and you
would use those to carefully measure out and mark the
(17:03):
boundaries for your layout. Then to place copy or images
on the paper, you would physically paste those elements in
the right position on your little boundary. So typically you'd
use something like rubber cement, which would dry slowly enough
to let designers move elements around a bit without having
(17:24):
to scrap everything and start over if they decided they
didn't like the placement of an element. So you might
put a headline, for example, and you might think, no,
I want a little more white space between the top
of the page and the headline, so you would actually
be able to move it down a little bit before
that rubber cement would dry enough so that such a
thing would not be practical anymore. So in the old days,
(17:46):
you would physically have to make a copy of something
and you physically have to paste it on the paper
to create your layout. The manuscript process was similar, though
it would typically involve cutting words out of a page
and pasting them into a new one. You were laying
out a new page of manuscript, so you had cut
and copy and paste all in the physical world. You
(18:07):
were physically doing these actions. When did those make the
move over to the computer age. Well, that was in
the early to mid nineteen seventies and a couple of
guys named Larry Tesler and Tim Mott, both of whom
worked at Xerox's Park facility. That was that's xerox is
research and development facility, also known for creating or at
(18:27):
least popularizing things like the computer mouse. Anyway, they created
the first cut copy and paste functions for computers as
part of a document preparation system, which had the unfortunate
name gypsy. Now, I say unfortunate because that term is
considered by many to be a slur today. I doubt
those working on the system at the time had any
(18:48):
awareness of that. I would like to think that they
were just ignorant that that term could be offensive to people,
so they were just picking it, uh, for whatever other reason.
At least I'd like to think that, I honestly don't know.
The function proved to be quite useful and found its
way into word processing programs like word Star and word
(19:10):
Perfect and all of those kinds of word processing programs
in the nineteen seventies and beyond, and it's become a
key feature in numerous programs since. So we're all familiar
with copy and paste, even though now it's all digital.
We're not physically copying and pasting stuff anymore, at least
not most of us. Now, while we're talking about terms
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related to writing, how about we talk about something that
a lot of people get persnickety over, and that's the
difference between typeface and fonts. Now, this is one that
drives some folks crazy because we typically use the words
interchangeably these days, but once upon a time, they meant
separate things, or at least, you know, things that that
(19:55):
had a definitive meaning, and we're not interchangeable. And the
pedantic folks out there who may have worked in a
printer's office might still get their proverbial danders up about it.
And I'm not being dismissive. I am a pedantic individual,
so goodness knows if I had that background, I would
be one of these people. I have to do a
full episode about the history of typography one day because
(20:16):
it is fascinating and it's a complicated story. But today
we're going to focus on type face versus fonts for
this part of the episode. So back in the very
old printing press days, to print on a piece of paper,
you first would have to arrange metal blocks on the
press with the letters set out in relief on one
(20:36):
face of the blocks. The type face each block was
a single letter in a particular style. Size and weight.
Weight refers to the thickness of the line, and the
weights could be bold, light, or medium. The side of
the metal block with the letter on it that was
the type face, and that face of the block would
(20:57):
be inked and then pressed onto a sheet of paper
to create the print. So really you would have a
whole series of these blocks with the type face out,
you'd think all of them, and you would then press
it against a sheet of paper to get a printed sheet.
So a typeface came to mean the style of this lettering.
So Garamond, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Ariel are all
(21:22):
type faces. Those are all type faces, and the word
typeface really refers to that actual stylistic design of each
collection of characters. It's what makes Garamond look different from
Times New Roman, which looks different from Helvetica, etcetera, etcetera.
But that just denotes which stylistic family each set of
(21:42):
characters belongs to. You can also describe those characters by
how large each character is. We measure characters by units
called points. Now, I would love to tell you that
the unit we call a point has had a specific
value since the dawn of typography. I would love to
tell you that, but it would be a lie. The
(22:03):
value of a point has changed many times over the
centuries since the invention of the printing press, but today
the standard is essentially a point equals one seventy second
of an inch. That's point three five millimeters or so.
So does that mean a character at seventy two points
(22:23):
is a full inch tall? No, But that's because there's
an invisible square around each character. It's a little bit
above and a little bit below the tallest and lowest
points on a or the ascension and decension if you prefer,
of the upper case largest character. So the seventy two
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points really refers to the size of this invisible square,
not the actual character that's printed. So if you were
to think of it as the old printing days, you
could say it's a larger block the actual physical block
that has that letter out in relief on the type face.
Your characters would have to have larger blocks. You couldn't
fit a huge t uppercase t on a tiny little block.
(23:08):
You would have to have a bigger one anyway. That's
why we described those characters in terms of points, such
as twelve point Times New Roman. So each type face
would have its own huge collection of blocks with each
of the sizes and each of the weights in the
printing house. So these these weights and sizes were the fonts.
(23:29):
So let's say you're printing a page in Times New
Roman at twelve point size with a medium weight. The
type faces Times New Roman. The font is Times New
Roman at twelve point size and medium weight. So you
could argue that fonts are really specific instances of type faces.
But if you were to switch that up, maybe you
have a section that's italicized or at fourteen point or
(23:54):
at a heavy weight, but it's still Times New Roman,
then you would still have to change out the font
for that section. It would still be Times New Roman
all the way through the document, but now you're dealing
with a different font from the twelve point medium weight
font you used earlier. So you could have a page
with multiple fonts on it, but they're all the same
type face. You would have Times New Roman from top
(24:16):
to bottom, but the different sizes and the different weights
would denote specific fonts of that Times New Roman. Now
enter the era of desktop publishing, when any goof is
such as yours truly can create a virtual page in
the digital realm and then send it whisking off to
a printer. At this stage, fonts aren't physical blocks. Fonts
(24:39):
are really files that could scale to whatever requirement you
happen to have. So the Times New Roman font can
scale to whatever point size I need or wait, for
that matter, I'm technically choosing a font because I'm choosing
a specific instance of this type face style. But now
we typically use the word font to refer to type
(25:00):
face in general. We say the Times New Roman font
as opposed to the Times New Roman type face at
twelve point medium weight font. And while this is technically
incorrect to refer to them both as a font from
a typographical standpoint, anyway, the fluidity of language doesn't really
give a crap about that, because language means what people
(25:22):
say it means, and meanings change over time. This is
something I've had to come to terms with myself, because,
as anyone close to me can tell you, Pedantic might
as well be my middle name. But it's not because
I'm pedantic, but I'm not Jonathan Pedantic Strickland. Before I
get away from the written word, let's talk about c
(25:43):
C as into CC someone in an email the letter
C and the letter C. You probably know that c
C stands for carbon copy. And I'm sure more than
a few of you out there have created carbon copies,
actual real ones. But for the rest of us, what
the heck is a carbon copy? All right? So let's
turn the clocks back to the turn of the nineteenth century.
(26:05):
The early eight hundreds, A couple of different people, such
as Pellegreen not Toury in Italy and Ralph Wedgewood in England,
invented what we would call carbon paper. Both Torry and
Wedgwood were trying to create a way for blind people
to more easily right. Torrey was working on an early
typewriter device, and his carbon paper invention would be used
(26:28):
sort of like a typewriter ribbon. Wedgewood created what he
called a stylographic manifold writer. The carbon paper, or carbonated paper,
as Wedgewood called it, was paper that had been soaked
in pigment and oil and then allowed to dry. To
use the paper, you would make a little bit of
a sandwich. On the bottom layer would be a fresh
(26:49):
piece of clean paper. Then you would lay a piece
of carbon paper on top of that. Then on top
of the carbon paper, you would lay a transparent sheet
of paper, something that was thin but fairly strong. With
Wedgewood's device, you'd use a stylus. They had no ink
or graphit or anything. Essentially just a pointed stick, you know,
(27:10):
there's no inked tip or anything like that. You would
put pressure on the top sheet as you would go
through the motions of writing. The ink on the middle
layer would actually transfer to the back of the translucent
sheet and also on top of the clean sheet underneath,
so you would get sort of a negative on the
(27:32):
top sheet. But since the paper was translucent, you could
read the ink through the paper and you would get
a just a regular copy on the sheet underneath. The
ink on the paper in the middle layer would transfer,
and it made it really easy to make copies. So
Wedgewood's manifold writer had these metal wires that were meant
(27:56):
to help guide blind people as they wrote across the page.
But later people began to adopt this method to make
copies of documents, seeing its application beyond a writing tool
for people who had visual impairment. Thomas Jefferson was known
to have used such an approach to make copies of
some of his works, but the adoption wasn't exactly lightning fast.
(28:18):
For one thing, the mixture of oil and pigment was
said to be a bit odoriferous. It stunk like the blazes,
in other words. So it wasn't until the eighteen seventies,
when people began to introduce typewriter inc. That was less
offensive to the old factory system, that we started seeing
a more widespread use of carbon paper for making copies.
(28:38):
And it was a quick, portable and easy way to
produce a copy, much faster than going to a printing house.
And you could conceivably produce more than one copy if
you're using enough pressure to sandwich multiple layers together. So
you have transparent paper, you have carbon paper, you've got
a solid piece of paper. You've got maybe a another
(29:00):
barrier there, another piece of carbon paper, another solid piece
of paper, etcetera. If you did enough pressure, you could
make multiple copies, but you would run the risk of
having lower copies be extremely light and faded and possibly
tearing through the top page because you're using so much pressure.
So it wasn't exactly a reliable way to make lots
of different copies at once. Carbon copies were used and
(29:23):
in some cases still are used for lots of stuff,
like taking credit card transactions quickly before the digital transaction
process days, you'd have that that machine where you'd lay
the the card down, you have some carbon paper on it,
you run this, uh, this roller across really quickly and
it ends up capturing the credit card information through this
(29:47):
carbon copy process. But you might have seen it also
from someone taking orders at a restaurant or in any
other number of applications. And it became a way to
produce a copy of a letter if you wanted to
send it to more than one person. And so the
term transferred over to the desktop publishing world in the
form of c C. While no carbon or carbonated paper
(30:08):
is used in that process, everybody already knew that it
meant the letter was being sent out and it was
going to people besides just the primary recipient. It was
going to other people as well, and so we still
use that phrase today. Now, when we come back, I'll
switch over to the world of entertainment, which also relies
heavily on some antiquated terminology. But before we do that,
(30:29):
let's take another quick break. All right, Let's pop on
over to television for a second. One of the derogatory
phrases to describe television, and more importantly, the content available
to watch on television is the boob tube. Now, in
(30:53):
this case, boob is meant to be a gullible person
or someone who is the brunt of a joke or
just a goofus in other words. But tube, well, that
comes from the old cathode ray tube style of television,
the big bulky TVs of yesteryear. Some of you may
have one. I certainly do have one that's sitting in
(31:13):
on a shelf in a garage. I need to actually
find a place where I can recycle it. But I've
talked a lot about CRT technology a few times. Here's
just a quick summary. Older televisions have a cathode ray
tube inside them, which looks a bit like a super
weird lightbulb. The cathode ray tube generates a stream of electrons,
(31:34):
and it does this by using electricity to heat up
a filament inside a vacuum tube, and the heat transfers
enough energy to electrons in that filament to have them
break free of their atomic orbits and fly out in
a stream. Those electron stream through what is called an
electron gun. And are shot towards the back side of
the television screen, which has a coding of phosphor. Foster's
(31:57):
an organic material that gives off light after being struck
by electrons. So the old televisions literally had tubes inside
of them. Now these days, that's not how modern television's work.
They might be L C D, L E ED or
maybe even a plasma based screen or an O led screen.
But calling the television the tube is still something that
(32:20):
occasionally happens, even though no tubes are involved. It's like
the Internet being a series of tubes that was never
right anyway. Now, pop over the film for a second.
So first of all, the word film is already nearly obsolete.
Now film is not completely done. There are some directors
who still insist on working with film. Quentin Tarantino is
(32:42):
one of those directors. He views film as in the
physical medium of film with reverence. The film is made
of plastic, as a plastic strip essentially coated with a
federal reactive chemical that could preserve images after that has
been exposed to light, and classic film is exposed at
a rate of twenty four frames or photographs if you like,
(33:05):
per second. So when we played that back at the
same speed of twenty four frames per second and a projector.
Then it creates the illusion of motion, even though if
you were to take the film out of the projector
and look at it as a scene by scene sort
of thing, you would just see a series of photographs,
one after the other. But of course, these days, most
(33:26):
movies are shot using digital cameras, which record not to
film but to digital files, digital video files that live
quote unquote on hard drives. Digital video gives filmmakers a
lot more access to the footage they shoot. It's easy
to review a shot even right after you've completed it,
so it gives directors more options. They can see if
(33:47):
they really captured what they wanted in a scene. And
you're not limited by the physical amount of film you
have available on hand. Like in the old days. Film
is a limited resource. You only have so much of
it on hand on an a given day, and it
gets expensive. And once you shoot on film, that's it.
You can't delete it and then shoot something else on it.
(34:09):
You have to live with whatever it was you shot.
You're stuck with it. That's why we call it footage.
It actually refers to the physical amount of film that
you've exposed to light during a film shoot. So how
many film feet of film did you shoot? How many
feet of film do you have left? If you're running out,
you got to go out and buy more, which adds
(34:29):
more to the production costs of a movie. Digital video
remove a lot of those barriers, so you wouldn't have
to worry about running up the production costs simply because
you want another take, because you weren't eating through more
physical film. For a while, there was a risk that
the move to digital cinema would actually kill the actual
film industry entirely, as in the physical medium of film,
(34:53):
because there wouldn't be enough demand for that physical stuff
to keep the businesses involved in producing and processing film afloat.
And ever since the studio days of the movie industry,
those businesses had to be separate because the US government said,
you can't have a movie studio that owns the entire
process from beginning to end. That's anti competitive. But in
(35:16):
two thousand fifteen, Kodak secured agreements with several film studios
to stay in business in that industry. Each studio promised
to order an undisclosed amount of film at minimum for
several years and many prominent movies in the recent past
were in fact shot on film. It's not like it's
unheard of. Kodak, by the way, is essentially the only
(35:39):
game intenseiltown as far as film goes, because Fujifilm got
out of that business way back in. There are other
film related phrases and terms in the movie making business
that have stuck around, even for productions that use digital
video and not film cameras. For example, the phrase role
camera to describe a camera actively recording. It's still pretty common,
(36:02):
even though that originally referred to rolling film, and again
because the film represented money. Hearing a director's assistant call
out roll camera meant shut the heck up and let
the cast and crew do their thing, because any wasted
film was money down the drain. There's also roll sound,
which technically you would say before you would say roll camera.
It's a similar concept, except it's a signal to the
(36:24):
production sound mixer to start the sound recording equipment, and
both the camera operator and the sound mixer would respond
with speed, indicating that they are recording at the appropriate speed,
which also is a largely antiquated notion these days. On
the editing side, of filmmaking, you have the term splicing,
the definition for splices to unite. Usually it would refer
(36:47):
to something like splicing two ropes together by interweaving them.
So with film, traditionally, splicing would refer to taking two
different physical pieces of film and joining them together using
a splicer. Of that they become a sequence. You're essentially
gluing two pieces of film together. So imagine you're shooting
a conversation between two characters and you decide to do
(37:09):
three different camera angles for this scene. You've got a
wide shot has both characters in it. Then you do
a couple of over the shoulder shots so that you're
looking at both of the characters head on, with them
looking off as if they're looking at their scene partner.
So you've shot all three of these separately, because setting
(37:30):
up all three cameras to shoot them all at once
rarely works. You usually can't get the camera angles for it.
And you've set up each shot so it looks just right,
and in the editing room you want to take that
footage and you want to combine it to make a
compelling scene so that the conversation is actually interesting and dramatic.
You do that by physically cutting links of film and
(37:51):
using the splicer to join them together into a finished sequence.
Now with digital movies, you don't have to do all
that physical stuff, but the concept is still valid. So
now you can digitally splice together clips to get the
same effect you would with physical film. The term splicing
has also sometimes been used to describe a process that's
more appropriately called compositing. This is a different notion. It's
(38:15):
when you take images or visuals from separate sources and
you combine them together to make a new image. So
a very common example would be shooting actors against a
green screen, and then you would chromakey in a different
background behind them in the finished shot. Some people refer
to that process as splicing, referring to the fact that
you're actually combining these different elements together into a new,
(38:38):
unified hole, though again compositing is really the more appropriate
phrase for that. Now let's pop on over to audio entertainment.
A few people suggested I mentioned records or albums, but
I do so with a few caveats. First, the vinyl
record album has made a little bit of a comeback
in recent years, so it's not quite as antiquated as
(39:00):
it once was when it first went out of fashion. Second,
I think the word record, which many associate with a
physical vinyl disc like a forty five or thirty three
long playing album, the kind of thing you would put
on a turntable. You think of that as a record,
but I think it could easily refer to any recording,
as in it's a record of what has happened. But
(39:20):
let's talk about albums. Where did that name come from? Well,
I talked about this a little bit when I did
my series on turntables. But the word album comes from
the old days of seventy eight RPM records. These were
typically made of stuff like shellac back in the old days,
and they predated the vinyl era. The RPM means revolutions
(39:40):
per minute, so one of these discs would actually rotate
seventy eight times every sixty seconds, as assuming it's running
at the right speed on a turntable. And these discs
would come in a couple of different sizes. They usually
ranged between ten inches which is about twenty five centimeters
to twelve inches or thirty centimeters, and they could only
(40:01):
hold a few minutes of audio on each side. Now,
because of that limited capacity to record a longer piece
of music or audio would require several discs. Music publishers
would sell these collections in large bound books, with each
disc in slipped into a page of these books, and
they looked kind of like an old fashioned photo album.
(40:24):
There's another antiquated phrase for you. So you might purchase
a single performance of a classical music piece that would
span multiple discs, and thus you'd have to buy a
record album of that performance. Later on, when vinyl became
a practical alternative, and after micro grooves made it possible
to record more audio on a single side of a disc,
(40:46):
the word album stuck, and it was meant to describe
a collection of related music, like an artist's album of music.
It's several songs that are all related in some way,
or maybe it was thematically related. But there was no
physical album anymore. We just used the word to describe
(41:06):
a collection of songs or pieces, and we still use
that word today even to describe collections of digital music
files to get by an artist's new album, even though
it may just be a bunch of MP three's or
some other music file, or really, I guess I should
say compression file. Now. I know a lot of people
who still use the term mix tape to refer to
(41:28):
music playlists. And in the good old days, and I'm
being a bit facetious here, you would take a blank
audio cassette tape that is a medium for audio storage
that relied on a plastic film codd with a magnetic material,
and then you would transfer songs over to that mixtape.
Giving someone a mix tape was often seen as a
big power move as far as friendship is concerned. It's
(41:49):
saying I think I know what you're gonna dig, and
I curated this group of songs for you, and I
put them in this specific order, and that's the order
you would have to listen to the songs in because
they were all recorded onto a physical length of tape.
You could fast forward or rewind, but there was no
guarantee you would stop at the right spot to skip
over a song or go back to the very beginning
(42:11):
of a specific song, unless it was the very first
one on the tape. It's much easier today when you
can create a digital playlist on one of any number
of apps or services out there, and it's very easy
to share those with as many people as you like.
Although a lot of those services will allow people to
rearrange playlists, so maybe they won't have the experience you
intended for them to have. But yeah, some folks still
(42:33):
call it a mix tape, and I think stuff like
Guardians of the Galaxy really brought that back a little bit.
If anyone were actually giving a physical mixtape now, I
would be thrilled right up until the point where I
realized I had to go out and buy a tape
player because I don't have one anymore, and if I
wanted to listen to it, I would have to go
out and buy one. Oh and related to that is
(42:55):
the concept of rewinding, which literally just meant to rewind
the tape in an audio or video cassette, either so
that you could go back to the beginning of the
recorded media, or just to run it back a little
bit so you could experience a specific moment. Again, we
still use the word rewinding to describe this process, but
you're no longer actually winding anything around anything else. You're
(43:18):
just going back to an earlier moment in a timeline hack.
Lots of people still use the word taping to mean recording,
as in, did you watch Game of Thrones last night? No,
but I taped it, so I'll watch it soon. No
one really tapes anything anymore, or at the very least
very few people tape anything anymore. The companies that once
made VCRs all got out of that industry years ago.
(43:40):
So if you do still have a VCR a working one,
use it gently because it's not likely that you're going
to find a replacement out there if something goes wrong.
But most of us just record something, or rather we
copy it digitally, and no tape is actually involved. And
there are many other examples I could have included in
this episode. You guys really responded with a lot of
(44:02):
fun ones. But it's time for me to head out
and start my holiday after a record one more episode,
so I promise the next episode is going to be
more substantial, because I've got the notes ready to go.
To be honest, this episode involved a lot more research
than I had originally intended because it covered a fairly
wide range of topics, but it seemed like a good
(44:22):
idea at the time. If any of you have any
suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a
message the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter.
The handle, there is text stuff h s W. Head
on over to tech stuff podcast dot com for our
website that has an archive of all of our past episodes.
(44:44):
You'll also find a link to our online store, where
every purchase you make goes to help the show and
we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you
again really soon. Text Stuff is a action of I
heart Radio's How stuff Works. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:07):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and a love of
all things tech and over on Twitter, I posted a
simple question not too long ago, which was, what are
(00:27):
some tech phrases or terms we still use even though
the tech that those words referred to is out of
date or maybe even obsolete. And I got a lot
of responses. So on today's episode, I'm going to go
through those phrases, where they came from and what they
refer to, and we'll all chuckle about how we as
humans are slow to change in our ways, which can
(00:50):
be a really bad thing in many ways, but I
think for most of these examples it's largely harmless or
even silly. And you're probably thinking, huh, Jonathan's really phoning
it in on this one, and you're right, because I'm
recording this on July three, two nineteen, and our office
is closed the rest of the week, and I still
(01:12):
have to record another episode after this one before I
can go home. So when I have to do five
days of work in three days get a bit desperate
for easy topics, al Z. Now, there are a lot
of phrases in terms will be going through on here,
so I've decided to group them according to subject matter.
So let's start off with phrases we still use regarding
(01:36):
phones and phone behavior. Now, first of all, some of
the phrases I'll say might be dying out simply because
millennials and and the younger generations don't tend to make
very many phone calls. Heck I don't either, and I'm
a gen xer, so a lot of us are spending
time on our phones. In fact, the average amount of
(01:57):
time spent on a phone in the United States is
a hundred seventy one minutes per day. That's just under
three hours of your day spent on your phone, not
all at once, obviously, but throughout the day. Brazilians, by
the way, spend even more time on their mobile devices.
So I don't want to give you guys the impression
that we Americans are the most addicted. But who boy,
(02:18):
we're up there anyway. We might not use some of
these phrases as much as old fogies do. By old fogies,
I also mean me there as we ride off into
the sunset. We might see these terms fade away, but
for the time being, let's talk about making an ending calls,
which brings us to the phrase dialing a number. Dialing
(02:42):
refers back to rotary phones, which featured an actual dial
on them. And yes, I know a lot of you
listeners out there are old enough to remember rotary phones,
but some of you might not be, and so this
episode is going to end up bridging some gaps. So
the earliest reference I could find of a rotary phone
in actual use dated to eighteen ninety two, but there
(03:07):
were a lot of inventors who filed for patents as
early as the mid eighteen seventies. Before the rotary phone,
you'd simply pick up a phone which would light up
a bulb on a phone operator's desk at a telephone exchange.
The operator would connect to your line and ask you
about whom you wished to call, and you would give
the call signal to the operator, who would then use
(03:30):
a patch cable to connect your line with the appropriate
phone line to complete the call. And coincidentally, one of
the other suggestions I got when I asked about outdated
tech phrases was what happens if you ask an operator
to connect a call, though I don't know how frequently
that happens these days, but it was a suggestion I got.
(03:51):
But as you can imagine, this system of having a
human operator manually connect calls together wasn't terribly efficient, and
you could quickly overwhelm the telephone exchange once you've got
a good number of phones on the service, even if
you had multiple operators working at the exchange, eventually you
get to a size where it's not sustainable with that approach.
(04:14):
Rotary phones would remove the need to have an operator
make that patch connection. Once the system was upgraded to
allow for these types of phones, it wasn't like it
just magically worked. It all had to be upgraded together.
The dial had a disc that measured about three inches
across that's about seven point six centimeters, and the disc
had ten holes in it along the outer edge, And
(04:36):
there were several different numbering systems in place until it
was finally standardized so that the numbers under the dial
would go from one to nine with a zero at
the very end. Other systems would have the zero come first,
or the numbers were listed in descending order, but that
would mean that phones using one numbering system could only
work on a telephone exchange designed for that numbering system.
(04:59):
So as these telephone exchanges grew, As these systems grew,
there was a need for standardization because otherwise you couldn't
actually interconnect the systems. Because if I dial a one,
but it sends the same signal as a nine would
on a different system, then that other system is never
gonna know what number I'm calling. It's going to it's
(05:22):
going to interpret the wrong numbers as I dial the number.
That's because dialing a number would actually cause a series
of pulses to go out over the exchange from the
original telephone. So each space on the dial was a
pulse or another pulse. So if you dial to one,
it would send one pulse out, if you dial to two,
(05:43):
then you would get two pulses, and if you dial
to zero, it would send out ten pulses to represent
that particular character. And you have to wait for that
dial to rotate all the way back into the starting
position before you could dial the next number. So I
can tell you from experience, you're really hated it if
the person you were calling had a lot of eights, nines,
(06:03):
and zeros in their phone number. After you dialed a
full telephone number, which for a local call in the
United States for a long time was seven digits, the
pulses would tell the system which lines to engage, in
other words, which telephone line corresponds with that telephone number.
The rotary phone saw wide adoption, and it became common
(06:24):
parlance to talk about dialing a phone number. Bell Telephone
would introduce the first commercial push button phone on November
nineteen sixty three, but we would keep using the word
dial even with push button phones. Now. Part of that
was because the rotary phones remained in service for a
really long time. It wasn't really until the nineteen eighties
(06:46):
that they started to truly fade away. Another part was
that customers were actually a little leery of switching to
push button phones. They used a totally different system called
touch tone dialing, even though there were no die else again,
but touch tone was how these operated as opposed to
the pulsing that the rotary phones used. By the nineteen eighties,
(07:07):
those rotary phones, like I said, we're largely phased out,
and in some some cases you actually had to opt
in for an added service to have rotary dialing supported
on your phone line. Oh and here's another fun one.
One person said, it's only sort of related to tech,
but she wondered why she still bothered to say hello
on the phone since with caller I D, she already
(07:28):
knows who is calling her. And this is an excellent
point as it does relate to tech from a social
and cultural point of view. And now we get to
talk about the origin of the word Hello. Isn't mean
you're looking for so the word hello is actually older
than telephones. But you frequently will hear that the word
(07:50):
was quote unquote invented, possibly by Thomas Edison for use
over the phone. Edison certainly popularized using it for the phone,
and she ange the meaning if you if you really
want to think about it. But the earliest written example,
the published example that the Oxford English Dictionary editors found,
dates from eighteen twenty seven. Alexander Graham Bell, whom we
(08:14):
often credit as the inventor of the telephone, wouldn't file
a patent for that invention until the eighteen seventies. But
even if you were to argue that the real inventor
was someone like Antonio Meucci, who many point to as
the first person to create what was essentially a telephone.
That still puts the earliest date for the telephone at
eighteen forty nine. That's still decades after that first published
(08:37):
instance of Hello that we know about. And now the
plot thickens because the word hello didn't initially indicate a greeting.
It was more like saying, take a look at this
thing here, earle as an hello, what's this now? In
that instance, which you could just imagine was spoken by
someone who was very, very English, the speaker is clearly
(09:00):
not greeting anyone. Rather, they are drawing focus towards something
in particular, and that was the use for Hello for
quite some time, just sort of a get a load
of this thing over here, Hello, this is curious. Now
skip ahead to Alexander Graham Bell, who might not have
strictly invented the technology of the telephone, but certainly was
(09:22):
able to realize it as a business and patent it.
He saw the challenge behind identifying someone on the other
end of the line, so if you got a call,
you had no way of knowing who it was that
was calling you. I mean, at first, there weren't that
many telephones, so the odds of you guessing who it
was that was calling you were actually pretty good. But
obviously that would change over time. So how do you
(09:44):
ask for the identity of the person who is calling you?
Presumably they know who you are because they called you,
but how do you know who they are? There's no caller.
I d well, you could ask who are you? Who
sent you? But then every phone call would be like
one of those Liam Neeson taken films. Alexander Graham Bell
(10:06):
thought a more civilized approach would be that you would
pick up the phone and you would say ahoy. That
was a tried and true method of hailing someone from
a distance, often used by sailors, as the old ahoy
there has been used, or ahoy there. Maybe if you
really want to get piratical with it, you could even
spice it up on the telephone a bit with ahoy hoy. Now.
(10:31):
Thomas Edison wasn't putting up with any of that. He
preferred the word hello, using that to mean I am
greeting you, and I would very much appreciate it if
you would identify yourself over the phone. That didn't please
Alexander Graham Bell. In fact, a T and T which
grew out of Bell's telephone company tried to suppress the
(10:53):
use of the word Hello on the telephone, stating that
the word itself was vulgar, but vulgarity one out and
A T and T decided to up the game where
vulgarity is concerned, eventually referring to the company's phone operators
as Hello girls. Yuck. Anyway, the whole purpose of Hello
(11:16):
wasn't just to greet someone, but to initiate the process
to find out who the hell they were, and so yes,
it doesn't make much sense for us to use it anymore.
But then we also use hello outside the realm of
the phone call these days, so it's grown beyond its
initial purpose. Another Twitter followers suggested the phrase to ring
(11:37):
someone up, also meaning to call them on the phone.
And it's true that most folks don't have phones that
really ring anymore, though I guess we still call stuff
ring tones, even if that description isn't totally apt. But
let me tell you what answering the phone was like
in the old days. For you young uns out there,
way back when when you only have the telephone, maybe
(12:01):
you had an answering machine, but many of us didn't
have those. They were rare for a very long time.
I remember it was a big day when my family
got our first answering machine when I was a kid. Well, anyway,
back then, answering the phone was important. When someone called you,
you had no way of knowing who they were because
there was no color idea, there was no Star sixty nine.
There was no way of knowing who it was. So
(12:24):
if you missed a call, you missed it. It was gone.
And telephones had very loud rings, like their bells would
ring quite loudly so that you could hear it from
pretty much anywhere in the house, and calls were important.
It could be anything. It could be an old friend reconnecting.
It could be a message from work. It could be
an emergency. Maybe it's a wrong number. But once that
(12:47):
phone started ringing, you would rush to the phone to
pick it up and answer it for no other reason
than to stop the darn ringing noise. These days, I
answer maybe one out of every twenty calls I get,
since most calls I get tend to be marked as
spam or are from an unrecognized number that's popping up
(13:07):
on my smartphone, So I just swiped to decline the call,
and that brings me to the next phone topic. Ending
a phone call is called hanging up, and that also
dates to the time when people were using rotary or
push button phones, because those would sit in a cradle
when they weren't in use. The rotary phone sort of
(13:28):
acted like a pedestal with a little cradle that the
handset would rest in, and push buttons usually had a
cradle that could either sit flat, horizontally on a table
or be mounted vertically on a wall. There'd be a
switch on these cradles, and that switch would close the line,
ending a call and making your phone line available for
(13:49):
future calls to you. You physically have to hang the
phone on the cradle or place it in the cradle
for those push button models. And yeah, that phrase is
stuck around two for those of us who still talk
on the phone now and again, we have been known
to hang up on people even though you're not really
hanging anything on anything else for most of those situations. Okay,
(14:12):
we're done with phones. When we come back, I'll cover
a few other shenanigans, but first, let's take a quick break.
All right. Now that we're back, let's talk about the
world of the written word and correspondence, and we'll start
(14:34):
with the word writing itself. I had one Twitter followers
suggest I add in writing simply because all the writing
she does these days involves a keyboard. The actual physical
process of writing, in the sense of holding a pen
or pencil and writing on a piece of paper, has
all but disappeared for her, and I can dig it.
(14:55):
I rarely write anymore unless it's in a greeting card
of some sort. I do want to get into writing,
actually writing letters, like actually taking a pen and writing
it out, because I feel the mindfulness it inspires might
make the messages I create more special both for me
and the recipient. Or maybe no one will be able
(15:15):
to read it because my handwriting was already atrocious, and
on top of that now I'm out of practice. Alright, fine,
so we tend to use electronic devices to write stuff
these days. There are some other outdated phrases we tend
to rely upon in that world too, For example, the
(15:36):
good old copy and paste function that you'll find in
everything from word processing programs to smartphone user interfaces. That
term dates back to the days when people would do
manuscripts and page layouts with physical pieces of paper and
with words that have been cut out, phrases, pictures. The
process of making a manuscript or a layout was laborious.
(16:00):
Designers would have to determine how big a layout would
need to be. For example, so let's say you're in
charge of making a layout for a magazine advertisement. You've
got a full page ad in a magazine, and you
are a graphic designer and you're an ad executive type,
you know, a madman, kind of dude or a woman,
(16:22):
and you want to work this out. Well, first you
would get an oversight sheet of paper. It would be
larger than whatever you were planning on actually creating, but
that's the the canvas you would be using. And then
you would draw the borders of that piece of paper
to mark out how large the final piece of of
(16:42):
advertisement was going to be, because i'd be very important.
So you would use tools like a T square and
a quick square or speed square. Those are those little
right triangles that are made out a flat piece of
metal that you use too for drafting purposes, and you
would use those to carefully measure out and mark the
(17:03):
boundaries for your layout. Then to place copy or images
on the paper, you would physically paste those elements in
the right position on your little boundary. So typically you'd
use something like rubber cement, which would dry slowly enough
to let designers move elements around a bit without having
(17:24):
to scrap everything and start over if they decided they
didn't like the placement of an element. So you might
put a headline, for example, and you might think, no,
I want a little more white space between the top
of the page and the headline, so you would actually
be able to move it down a little bit before
that rubber cement would dry enough so that such a
thing would not be practical anymore. So in the old days,
(17:46):
you would physically have to make a copy of something
and you physically have to paste it on the paper
to create your layout. The manuscript process was similar, though
it would typically involve cutting words out of a page
and pasting them into a new one. You were laying
out a new page of manuscript, so you had cut
and copy and paste all in the physical world. You
(18:07):
were physically doing these actions. When did those make the
move over to the computer age. Well, that was in
the early to mid nineteen seventies and a couple of
guys named Larry Tesler and Tim Mott, both of whom
worked at Xerox's Park facility. That was that's xerox is
research and development facility, also known for creating or at
(18:27):
least popularizing things like the computer mouse. Anyway, they created
the first cut copy and paste functions for computers as
part of a document preparation system, which had the unfortunate
name gypsy. Now, I say unfortunate because that term is
considered by many to be a slur today. I doubt
those working on the system at the time had any
(18:48):
awareness of that. I would like to think that they
were just ignorant that that term could be offensive to people,
so they were just picking it, uh, for whatever other reason.
At least I'd like to think that, I honestly don't know.
The function proved to be quite useful and found its
way into word processing programs like word Star and word
(19:10):
Perfect and all of those kinds of word processing programs
in the nineteen seventies and beyond, and it's become a
key feature in numerous programs since. So we're all familiar
with copy and paste, even though now it's all digital.
We're not physically copying and pasting stuff anymore, at least
not most of us. Now, while we're talking about terms
(19:31):
related to writing, how about we talk about something that
a lot of people get persnickety over, and that's the
difference between typeface and fonts. Now, this is one that
drives some folks crazy because we typically use the words
interchangeably these days, but once upon a time, they meant
separate things, or at least, you know, things that that
(19:55):
had a definitive meaning, and we're not interchangeable. And the
pedantic folks out there who may have worked in a
printer's office might still get their proverbial danders up about it.
And I'm not being dismissive. I am a pedantic individual,
so goodness knows if I had that background, I would
be one of these people. I have to do a
full episode about the history of typography one day because
(20:16):
it is fascinating and it's a complicated story. But today
we're going to focus on type face versus fonts for
this part of the episode. So back in the very
old printing press days, to print on a piece of paper,
you first would have to arrange metal blocks on the
press with the letters set out in relief on one
(20:36):
face of the blocks. The type face each block was
a single letter in a particular style. Size and weight.
Weight refers to the thickness of the line, and the
weights could be bold, light, or medium. The side of
the metal block with the letter on it that was
the type face, and that face of the block would
(20:57):
be inked and then pressed onto a sheet of paper
to create the print. So really you would have a
whole series of these blocks with the type face out,
you'd think all of them, and you would then press
it against a sheet of paper to get a printed sheet.
So a typeface came to mean the style of this lettering.
So Garamond, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Ariel are all
(21:22):
type faces. Those are all type faces, and the word
typeface really refers to that actual stylistic design of each
collection of characters. It's what makes Garamond look different from
Times New Roman, which looks different from Helvetica, etcetera, etcetera.
But that just denotes which stylistic family each set of
(21:42):
characters belongs to. You can also describe those characters by
how large each character is. We measure characters by units
called points. Now, I would love to tell you that
the unit we call a point has had a specific
value since the dawn of typography. I would love to
tell you that, but it would be a lie. The
(22:03):
value of a point has changed many times over the
centuries since the invention of the printing press, but today
the standard is essentially a point equals one seventy second
of an inch. That's point three five millimeters or so.
So does that mean a character at seventy two points
(22:23):
is a full inch tall? No, But that's because there's
an invisible square around each character. It's a little bit
above and a little bit below the tallest and lowest
points on a or the ascension and decension if you prefer,
of the upper case largest character. So the seventy two
(22:44):
points really refers to the size of this invisible square,
not the actual character that's printed. So if you were
to think of it as the old printing days, you
could say it's a larger block the actual physical block
that has that letter out in relief on the type face.
Your characters would have to have larger blocks. You couldn't
fit a huge t uppercase t on a tiny little block.
(23:08):
You would have to have a bigger one anyway. That's
why we described those characters in terms of points, such
as twelve point Times New Roman. So each type face
would have its own huge collection of blocks with each
of the sizes and each of the weights in the
printing house. So these these weights and sizes were the fonts.
(23:29):
So let's say you're printing a page in Times New
Roman at twelve point size with a medium weight. The
type faces Times New Roman. The font is Times New
Roman at twelve point size and medium weight. So you
could argue that fonts are really specific instances of type faces.
But if you were to switch that up, maybe you
have a section that's italicized or at fourteen point or
(23:54):
at a heavy weight, but it's still Times New Roman,
then you would still have to change out the font
for that section. It would still be Times New Roman
all the way through the document, but now you're dealing
with a different font from the twelve point medium weight
font you used earlier. So you could have a page
with multiple fonts on it, but they're all the same
type face. You would have Times New Roman from top
(24:16):
to bottom, but the different sizes and the different weights
would denote specific fonts of that Times New Roman. Now
enter the era of desktop publishing, when any goof is
such as yours truly can create a virtual page in
the digital realm and then send it whisking off to
a printer. At this stage, fonts aren't physical blocks. Fonts
(24:39):
are really files that could scale to whatever requirement you
happen to have. So the Times New Roman font can
scale to whatever point size I need or wait, for
that matter, I'm technically choosing a font because I'm choosing
a specific instance of this type face style. But now
we typically use the word font to refer to type
(25:00):
face in general. We say the Times New Roman font
as opposed to the Times New Roman type face at
twelve point medium weight font. And while this is technically
incorrect to refer to them both as a font from
a typographical standpoint, anyway, the fluidity of language doesn't really
give a crap about that, because language means what people
(25:22):
say it means, and meanings change over time. This is
something I've had to come to terms with myself, because,
as anyone close to me can tell you, Pedantic might
as well be my middle name. But it's not because
I'm pedantic, but I'm not Jonathan Pedantic Strickland. Before I
get away from the written word, let's talk about c
(25:43):
C as into CC someone in an email the letter
C and the letter C. You probably know that c
C stands for carbon copy. And I'm sure more than
a few of you out there have created carbon copies,
actual real ones. But for the rest of us, what
the heck is a carbon copy? All right? So let's
turn the clocks back to the turn of the nineteenth century.
(26:05):
The early eight hundreds, A couple of different people, such
as Pellegreen not Toury in Italy and Ralph Wedgewood in England,
invented what we would call carbon paper. Both Torry and
Wedgwood were trying to create a way for blind people
to more easily right. Torrey was working on an early
typewriter device, and his carbon paper invention would be used
(26:28):
sort of like a typewriter ribbon. Wedgewood created what he
called a stylographic manifold writer. The carbon paper, or carbonated paper,
as Wedgewood called it, was paper that had been soaked
in pigment and oil and then allowed to dry. To
use the paper, you would make a little bit of
a sandwich. On the bottom layer would be a fresh
(26:49):
piece of clean paper. Then you would lay a piece
of carbon paper on top of that. Then on top
of the carbon paper, you would lay a transparent sheet
of paper, something that was thin but fairly strong. With
Wedgewood's device, you'd use a stylus. They had no ink
or graphit or anything. Essentially just a pointed stick, you know,
(27:10):
there's no inked tip or anything like that. You would
put pressure on the top sheet as you would go
through the motions of writing. The ink on the middle
layer would actually transfer to the back of the translucent
sheet and also on top of the clean sheet underneath,
so you would get sort of a negative on the
(27:32):
top sheet. But since the paper was translucent, you could
read the ink through the paper and you would get
a just a regular copy on the sheet underneath. The
ink on the paper in the middle layer would transfer,
and it made it really easy to make copies. So
Wedgewood's manifold writer had these metal wires that were meant
(27:56):
to help guide blind people as they wrote across the page.
But later people began to adopt this method to make
copies of documents, seeing its application beyond a writing tool
for people who had visual impairment. Thomas Jefferson was known
to have used such an approach to make copies of
some of his works, but the adoption wasn't exactly lightning fast.
(28:18):
For one thing, the mixture of oil and pigment was
said to be a bit odoriferous. It stunk like the blazes,
in other words. So it wasn't until the eighteen seventies,
when people began to introduce typewriter inc. That was less
offensive to the old factory system, that we started seeing
a more widespread use of carbon paper for making copies.
(28:38):
And it was a quick, portable and easy way to
produce a copy, much faster than going to a printing house.
And you could conceivably produce more than one copy if
you're using enough pressure to sandwich multiple layers together. So
you have transparent paper, you have carbon paper, you've got
a solid piece of paper. You've got maybe a another
(29:00):
barrier there, another piece of carbon paper, another solid piece
of paper, etcetera. If you did enough pressure, you could
make multiple copies, but you would run the risk of
having lower copies be extremely light and faded and possibly
tearing through the top page because you're using so much pressure.
So it wasn't exactly a reliable way to make lots
of different copies at once. Carbon copies were used and
(29:23):
in some cases still are used for lots of stuff,
like taking credit card transactions quickly before the digital transaction
process days, you'd have that that machine where you'd lay
the the card down, you have some carbon paper on it,
you run this, uh, this roller across really quickly and
it ends up capturing the credit card information through this
(29:47):
carbon copy process. But you might have seen it also
from someone taking orders at a restaurant or in any
other number of applications. And it became a way to
produce a copy of a letter if you wanted to
send it to more than one person. And so the
term transferred over to the desktop publishing world in the
form of c C. While no carbon or carbonated paper
(30:08):
is used in that process, everybody already knew that it
meant the letter was being sent out and it was
going to people besides just the primary recipient. It was
going to other people as well, and so we still
use that phrase today. Now, when we come back, I'll
switch over to the world of entertainment, which also relies
heavily on some antiquated terminology. But before we do that,
(30:29):
let's take another quick break. All right, Let's pop on
over to television for a second. One of the derogatory
phrases to describe television, and more importantly, the content available
to watch on television is the boob tube. Now, in
(30:53):
this case, boob is meant to be a gullible person
or someone who is the brunt of a joke or
just a goofus in other words. But tube, well, that
comes from the old cathode ray tube style of television,
the big bulky TVs of yesteryear. Some of you may
have one. I certainly do have one that's sitting in
(31:13):
on a shelf in a garage. I need to actually
find a place where I can recycle it. But I've
talked a lot about CRT technology a few times. Here's
just a quick summary. Older televisions have a cathode ray
tube inside them, which looks a bit like a super
weird lightbulb. The cathode ray tube generates a stream of electrons,
(31:34):
and it does this by using electricity to heat up
a filament inside a vacuum tube, and the heat transfers
enough energy to electrons in that filament to have them
break free of their atomic orbits and fly out in
a stream. Those electron stream through what is called an
electron gun. And are shot towards the back side of
the television screen, which has a coding of phosphor. Foster's
(31:57):
an organic material that gives off light after being struck
by electrons. So the old televisions literally had tubes inside
of them. Now these days, that's not how modern television's work.
They might be L C D, L E ED or
maybe even a plasma based screen or an O led screen.
But calling the television the tube is still something that
(32:20):
occasionally happens, even though no tubes are involved. It's like
the Internet being a series of tubes that was never
right anyway. Now, pop over the film for a second.
So first of all, the word film is already nearly obsolete.
Now film is not completely done. There are some directors
who still insist on working with film. Quentin Tarantino is
(32:42):
one of those directors. He views film as in the
physical medium of film with reverence. The film is made
of plastic, as a plastic strip essentially coated with a
federal reactive chemical that could preserve images after that has
been exposed to light, and classic film is exposed at
a rate of twenty four frames or photographs if you like,
(33:05):
per second. So when we played that back at the
same speed of twenty four frames per second and a projector.
Then it creates the illusion of motion, even though if
you were to take the film out of the projector
and look at it as a scene by scene sort
of thing, you would just see a series of photographs,
one after the other. But of course, these days, most
(33:26):
movies are shot using digital cameras, which record not to
film but to digital files, digital video files that live
quote unquote on hard drives. Digital video gives filmmakers a
lot more access to the footage they shoot. It's easy
to review a shot even right after you've completed it,
so it gives directors more options. They can see if
(33:47):
they really captured what they wanted in a scene. And
you're not limited by the physical amount of film you
have available on hand. Like in the old days. Film
is a limited resource. You only have so much of
it on hand on an a given day, and it
gets expensive. And once you shoot on film, that's it.
You can't delete it and then shoot something else on it.
(34:09):
You have to live with whatever it was you shot.
You're stuck with it. That's why we call it footage.
It actually refers to the physical amount of film that
you've exposed to light during a film shoot. So how
many film feet of film did you shoot? How many
feet of film do you have left? If you're running out,
you got to go out and buy more, which adds
(34:29):
more to the production costs of a movie. Digital video
remove a lot of those barriers, so you wouldn't have
to worry about running up the production costs simply because
you want another take, because you weren't eating through more
physical film. For a while, there was a risk that
the move to digital cinema would actually kill the actual
film industry entirely, as in the physical medium of film,
(34:53):
because there wouldn't be enough demand for that physical stuff
to keep the businesses involved in producing and processing film afloat.
And ever since the studio days of the movie industry,
those businesses had to be separate because the US government said,
you can't have a movie studio that owns the entire
process from beginning to end. That's anti competitive. But in
(35:16):
two thousand fifteen, Kodak secured agreements with several film studios
to stay in business in that industry. Each studio promised
to order an undisclosed amount of film at minimum for
several years and many prominent movies in the recent past
were in fact shot on film. It's not like it's
unheard of. Kodak, by the way, is essentially the only
(35:39):
game intenseiltown as far as film goes, because Fujifilm got
out of that business way back in. There are other
film related phrases and terms in the movie making business
that have stuck around, even for productions that use digital
video and not film cameras. For example, the phrase role
camera to describe a camera actively recording. It's still pretty common,
(36:02):
even though that originally referred to rolling film, and again
because the film represented money. Hearing a director's assistant call
out roll camera meant shut the heck up and let
the cast and crew do their thing, because any wasted
film was money down the drain. There's also roll sound,
which technically you would say before you would say roll camera.
It's a similar concept, except it's a signal to the
(36:24):
production sound mixer to start the sound recording equipment, and
both the camera operator and the sound mixer would respond
with speed, indicating that they are recording at the appropriate speed,
which also is a largely antiquated notion these days. On
the editing side, of filmmaking, you have the term splicing,
the definition for splices to unite. Usually it would refer
(36:47):
to something like splicing two ropes together by interweaving them.
So with film, traditionally, splicing would refer to taking two
different physical pieces of film and joining them together using
a splicer. Of that they become a sequence. You're essentially
gluing two pieces of film together. So imagine you're shooting
a conversation between two characters and you decide to do
(37:09):
three different camera angles for this scene. You've got a
wide shot has both characters in it. Then you do
a couple of over the shoulder shots so that you're
looking at both of the characters head on, with them
looking off as if they're looking at their scene partner.
So you've shot all three of these separately, because setting
(37:30):
up all three cameras to shoot them all at once
rarely works. You usually can't get the camera angles for it.
And you've set up each shot so it looks just right,
and in the editing room you want to take that
footage and you want to combine it to make a
compelling scene so that the conversation is actually interesting and dramatic.
You do that by physically cutting links of film and
(37:51):
using the splicer to join them together into a finished sequence.
Now with digital movies, you don't have to do all
that physical stuff, but the concept is still valid. So
now you can digitally splice together clips to get the
same effect you would with physical film. The term splicing
has also sometimes been used to describe a process that's
more appropriately called compositing. This is a different notion. It's
(38:15):
when you take images or visuals from separate sources and
you combine them together to make a new image. So
a very common example would be shooting actors against a
green screen, and then you would chromakey in a different
background behind them in the finished shot. Some people refer
to that process as splicing, referring to the fact that
you're actually combining these different elements together into a new,
(38:38):
unified hole, though again compositing is really the more appropriate
phrase for that. Now let's pop on over to audio entertainment.
A few people suggested I mentioned records or albums, but
I do so with a few caveats. First, the vinyl
record album has made a little bit of a comeback
in recent years, so it's not quite as antiquated as
(39:00):
it once was when it first went out of fashion. Second,
I think the word record, which many associate with a
physical vinyl disc like a forty five or thirty three
long playing album, the kind of thing you would put
on a turntable. You think of that as a record,
but I think it could easily refer to any recording,
as in it's a record of what has happened. But
(39:20):
let's talk about albums. Where did that name come from? Well,
I talked about this a little bit when I did
my series on turntables. But the word album comes from
the old days of seventy eight RPM records. These were
typically made of stuff like shellac back in the old days,
and they predated the vinyl era. The RPM means revolutions
(39:40):
per minute, so one of these discs would actually rotate
seventy eight times every sixty seconds, as assuming it's running
at the right speed on a turntable. And these discs
would come in a couple of different sizes. They usually
ranged between ten inches which is about twenty five centimeters
to twelve inches or thirty centimeters, and they could only
(40:01):
hold a few minutes of audio on each side. Now,
because of that limited capacity to record a longer piece
of music or audio would require several discs. Music publishers
would sell these collections in large bound books, with each
disc in slipped into a page of these books, and
they looked kind of like an old fashioned photo album.
(40:24):
There's another antiquated phrase for you. So you might purchase
a single performance of a classical music piece that would
span multiple discs, and thus you'd have to buy a
record album of that performance. Later on, when vinyl became
a practical alternative, and after micro grooves made it possible
to record more audio on a single side of a disc,
(40:46):
the word album stuck, and it was meant to describe
a collection of related music, like an artist's album of music.
It's several songs that are all related in some way,
or maybe it was thematically related. But there was no
physical album anymore. We just used the word to describe
(41:06):
a collection of songs or pieces, and we still use
that word today even to describe collections of digital music
files to get by an artist's new album, even though
it may just be a bunch of MP three's or
some other music file, or really, I guess I should
say compression file. Now. I know a lot of people
who still use the term mix tape to refer to
(41:28):
music playlists. And in the good old days, and I'm
being a bit facetious here, you would take a blank
audio cassette tape that is a medium for audio storage
that relied on a plastic film codd with a magnetic material,
and then you would transfer songs over to that mixtape.
Giving someone a mix tape was often seen as a
big power move as far as friendship is concerned. It's
(41:49):
saying I think I know what you're gonna dig, and
I curated this group of songs for you, and I
put them in this specific order, and that's the order
you would have to listen to the songs in because
they were all recorded onto a physical length of tape.
You could fast forward or rewind, but there was no
guarantee you would stop at the right spot to skip
over a song or go back to the very beginning
(42:11):
of a specific song, unless it was the very first
one on the tape. It's much easier today when you
can create a digital playlist on one of any number
of apps or services out there, and it's very easy
to share those with as many people as you like.
Although a lot of those services will allow people to
rearrange playlists, so maybe they won't have the experience you
intended for them to have. But yeah, some folks still
(42:33):
call it a mix tape, and I think stuff like
Guardians of the Galaxy really brought that back a little bit.
If anyone were actually giving a physical mixtape now, I
would be thrilled right up until the point where I
realized I had to go out and buy a tape
player because I don't have one anymore, and if I
wanted to listen to it, I would have to go
out and buy one. Oh and related to that is
(42:55):
the concept of rewinding, which literally just meant to rewind
the tape in an audio or video cassette, either so
that you could go back to the beginning of the
recorded media, or just to run it back a little
bit so you could experience a specific moment. Again, we
still use the word rewinding to describe this process, but
you're no longer actually winding anything around anything else. You're
(43:18):
just going back to an earlier moment in a timeline hack.
Lots of people still use the word taping to mean recording,
as in, did you watch Game of Thrones last night? No,
but I taped it, so I'll watch it soon. No
one really tapes anything anymore, or at the very least
very few people tape anything anymore. The companies that once
made VCRs all got out of that industry years ago.
(43:40):
So if you do still have a VCR a working one,
use it gently because it's not likely that you're going
to find a replacement out there if something goes wrong.
But most of us just record something, or rather we
copy it digitally, and no tape is actually involved. And
there are many other examples I could have included in
this episode. You guys really responded with a lot of
(44:02):
fun ones. But it's time for me to head out
and start my holiday after a record one more episode,
so I promise the next episode is going to be
more substantial, because I've got the notes ready to go.
To be honest, this episode involved a lot more research
than I had originally intended because it covered a fairly
wide range of topics, but it seemed like a good
(44:22):
idea at the time. If any of you have any
suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a
message the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter.
The handle, there is text stuff h s W. Head
on over to tech stuff podcast dot com for our
website that has an archive of all of our past episodes.
(44:44):
You'll also find a link to our online store, where
every purchase you make goes to help the show and
we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you
again really soon. Text Stuff is a action of I
heart Radio's How stuff Works. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:07):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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