I learned about the Button Museum more than twenty-five years ago. I was taking a walk along the Sumida River and noticed two big buttons on a sign overlooking the river:
> All media other than paper and stone will become extinct
Somewhat tangential...
I once worked for the national archives. Unlike libraries, the archives typically have the only copy of a specific piece of data. So if the lose the data, it is lost forever. My mission was to figure out how to deal with information storage in a millennial perspective.
There are tons of really interesting ways to store data. I think my favorite was printing QR codes on microfilm and then storing the film in an abandoned coal mine on Svalbard. The first frames on each roll with come with source code and instructions on how to decode the data.
FWIW; my recommendation was 3-way replicated object storage, until more stable form of storage presents itself and becomes reasonable.
Microsoft's Project Silica is intriguing and would be perfect for this if they can get the technology simplified and commoditized. It offers the Star Trek vision of mass storage that could outlast us. Not directly applicable to the needs in your case but is interesting.
The technology seems to work in the lab and the blocker is cheaper femto-second lasers. Others are working on similar approaches and there's likely to be real commercial projects in the future. As laser prices come down and patents expires, there is the possibility of a StarTrek-like glass storage media that can handle the flood of data being generated.
Real Soon Now™
Edit: The project is intended to be for Azure cold storage, so it's not directly consumer facing.
Considering that Azure has more marketshare than GCP we should not dismiss them lightly.
The fact that this is the case still kind of blows my mind. Azure? By those Windows guys? C'mon! Really?
Interesting: What was embedded in the QR code? An identifier for the object? If it's the object's textual data that is embedded: aren't archives as interested in storing the objects as as they are in the contents? Why not images of the object?
Been there. The place is tiny, but very well curated, and packed floor to ceiling with interesting gadgets, some of which you are even allowed to touch. They also sometimes organize small flea markets, the one time I visited they had one for vintage headphones going on.
Wow, a DAT Walkman [1]! I forgot that this existed, but I am remembering now that I heard about them in college and desperately wanted one. I was (and still am) an avid listener of music. Digital formats were such a leap over analog media at the time. There was an art to holding your portable CD player (on edge, cradled with your palm facing upward) so that the CD did not constantly slip as you walked. It always amused me that my portable CD player was called a “Discman” instead of a “Walkman”, as if Sony knew that walking with one was impractical. They solved that a bit later with portable CD players that had bigger buffers… But a DAT Walkman presumably would not have had the problem at all. But I had neither the funds nor the knowledge of where one might acquire something like this. Technology back then often felt just out of reach.
In college I had a Japanese-American friend who came back to school from a summer in Japan. She had what looked like a little toy cellphone on her keychain. She showed it to me and I said “cute toy” and she responded “it’s not a toy!” She powered it up and showed me the screen. It even had a little trackball to control an impossibly small cursor. Naturally it did not work with networks in the US. But it left me feeling a bit stunned and wondering what I was missing not living in Japan. I think this was in 1999 or 2000.
edit: it was probably more like 2002-2003 now that I think about it. It was probably more of a “joystick” than a “trackball.” I wonder if anyone on HN knows which one I’m talking about.
DAT Walkmans (Walkmen?) had other problems. DAT transports are vastly more complicated than those used for compact cassette, being a close relative to VHS and other video tapes. They're supposedly nice when they work though!
I remember a friend got one of the first mp3 players on the market. I think it was a Sony and could hold less than 10 highly compressed songs. Still, it was tiny and could fit in a pocket and didn’t skip!
I think this nostalgia is useful for reminding us there are aesthetic forms beyond what Jony Ive et al happened to design and became the dominant form factor. The 2000s explosion of MP3 players had a lot of little ideas like the iRiver Clix had 'press the side of the device' as a navigation system
I think the irony was that Jony Ive's design was best when juxtaposed.
Sleek minimal material design on the device that grants you access to a skeuomorphic, bevelled and highly-three dimensional interface (on a flat surface) is complementary.
You "feel" the leather grain thats merely visualised because the device leaves nothing else in your mind, you just have the physical touch of a premium material in your hand and nothing else to distract you from the visual.
When that's applied to everything it turns into a bland nothing.
It's also missing a large swath of computer-only things (that have some incidental overlap with what they have) - noticeably backup tapes; I'd expect to see QIC/SLR, for example.
There's some older stuff, but it seems kinda random. I see also two cameras in their collection (a Speed Graphic Pacemaker, and a Fuji GW690ii) that I have in my cabinet. I will refrain from telling them they are 'extinct' (at least until I run out of film for them).
It is not very big and was difficult for me to follow as I cannot read French. Even with those language barriers on my end, it was fun way to see how photographic media evolved.
I'm currently in the process of emptying a basement and a garage. Stuff from my great-mother, great-aunt, uncle, parents, brothers and myself.
Plenty of different media (medium?): Pathe Baby, Super 8, dia, very old pictures on glass plates, countless floppies, etc.
Sadly "items you own own you" and there's no way I'm letting my kid having to sort, recycle, give as many items as I had to. We're talking, easily, 30 000 items from deceased people. Probably more.
Old pictures from cities (there's probably some interest in those). Old movies too.
Countless pictures from people I don't even know.
I know there's some stuff historians and museum would like.
But I only have one life: I can't take the time to send everything to enthusiasts, museums, etc. So I'm keeping some stuff (those in the best shape) but I'm basically sorting and filling cars and cars and trailers and going to the recycling center.
It's soul crushing.
P.S: and I wonder... Do I have an obligation to digitize some of this stuff so AIs can eventually be trained on it? (seen that they're trained on the entirety of the recorded world's knowledge) Or do I have an obligation to get rid of it so that AI do not get trained on it? Or neither?
I think a wonderful thing about being human is the ability to forget. Not every little detail needs to be preserved forever. What you have is the memories of people that had a well lived life and leave it at that
If you like this, the Dead Media Project's working notes are fascinating, if they're still out there (90s project, Bruce Sterling-adjacent). I was on the mailing list, way back when.
The Extinct Media Museum (Tokyo,Japan) is a private museum that collects and exhibits media and media equipment that have died out or are dying out in the process of evolution based on the belief that all media other than paper and stone will become extinct. ……..
Some other museums to visit while you’re in Tokyo:
JCII Camera Museum https://www.jcii-cameramuseum.jp/top-e/
Small Worlds Miniature Museum https://smallworlds.jp/en/
Button Museum https://button-museum.jp/en/
World Bags and Luggage Museum https://www.ace.jp/en/museum/
Meguro Parasitological Museum https://www.kiseichu.org/e-top
I learned about the Button Museum more than twenty-five years ago. I was taking a walk along the Sumida River and noticed two big buttons on a sign overlooking the river:
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.691592,139.7887136,2a,15y,24...
Haven’t visit the museum yet, though.
I really enjoyed the Ad Museum when I went a few years ago.
https://www.admt.jp/en/
These all look fascinating too. God, Tokyo's really an incredible city, huh.
I would second the ad museum. I really enjoyed it.
Please allow me to add the following Japan Stationery Museum (Nihon Bungu Shiryokan) only in Japanese: https://www.nihonbungu.or.jp/shiryokan
Meguro Parasitological Museum is fantastic and en...grossing. :) It's a fun area to visit in general. Highly recommend it.
Also...
Yamato History Museum: https://www.yamato-hd.co.jp/museum/en/
... and if you are near Hiroshima, the Toto Museum is a history of toilets + washroom innovation and surprisingly fascinating. https://jp.toto.com/en/knowledge/visit/museum/
This is great. Tokyo seems to have everything!
> All media other than paper and stone will become extinct
Somewhat tangential...
I once worked for the national archives. Unlike libraries, the archives typically have the only copy of a specific piece of data. So if the lose the data, it is lost forever. My mission was to figure out how to deal with information storage in a millennial perspective.
There are tons of really interesting ways to store data. I think my favorite was printing QR codes on microfilm and then storing the film in an abandoned coal mine on Svalbard. The first frames on each roll with come with source code and instructions on how to decode the data.
FWIW; my recommendation was 3-way replicated object storage, until more stable form of storage presents itself and becomes reasonable.
Microsoft's Project Silica is intriguing and would be perfect for this if they can get the technology simplified and commoditized. It offers the Star Trek vision of mass storage that could outlast us. Not directly applicable to the needs in your case but is interesting.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/project-silica...
> Microsoft's Project > if they can
They can't. Even if they manage to ship something, they will destroy it with an "update".
The technology seems to work in the lab and the blocker is cheaper femto-second lasers. Others are working on similar approaches and there's likely to be real commercial projects in the future. As laser prices come down and patents expires, there is the possibility of a StarTrek-like glass storage media that can handle the flood of data being generated.
Real Soon Now™
Edit: The project is intended to be for Azure cold storage, so it's not directly consumer facing.
Considering that Azure has more marketshare than GCP we should not dismiss them lightly.
The fact that this is the case still kind of blows my mind. Azure? By those Windows guys? C'mon! Really?
You might be interested in IBM's archival digital storage on microfilm format from the early 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360
Interesting: What was embedded in the QR code? An identifier for the object? If it's the object's textual data that is embedded: aren't archives as interested in storing the objects as as they are in the contents? Why not images of the object?
This reminds me of the episode of the old anime series Cowboy Bebop where the crew explore an abandoned museum in a buried city searching for a Betamax player: https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/Speak_Like_A_Child
Been there. The place is tiny, but very well curated, and packed floor to ceiling with interesting gadgets, some of which you are even allowed to touch. They also sometimes organize small flea markets, the one time I visited they had one for vintage headphones going on.
Wow, a DAT Walkman [1]! I forgot that this existed, but I am remembering now that I heard about them in college and desperately wanted one. I was (and still am) an avid listener of music. Digital formats were such a leap over analog media at the time. There was an art to holding your portable CD player (on edge, cradled with your palm facing upward) so that the CD did not constantly slip as you walked. It always amused me that my portable CD player was called a “Discman” instead of a “Walkman”, as if Sony knew that walking with one was impractical. They solved that a bit later with portable CD players that had bigger buffers… But a DAT Walkman presumably would not have had the problem at all. But I had neither the funds nor the knowledge of where one might acquire something like this. Technology back then often felt just out of reach.
In college I had a Japanese-American friend who came back to school from a summer in Japan. She had what looked like a little toy cellphone on her keychain. She showed it to me and I said “cute toy” and she responded “it’s not a toy!” She powered it up and showed me the screen. It even had a little trackball to control an impossibly small cursor. Naturally it did not work with networks in the US. But it left me feeling a bit stunned and wondering what I was missing not living in Japan. I think this was in 1999 or 2000.
[1] https://extinct-media-museum.blog.jp/archives/22934077.html
edit: it was probably more like 2002-2003 now that I think about it. It was probably more of a “joystick” than a “trackball.” I wonder if anyone on HN knows which one I’m talking about.
DAT Walkmans (Walkmen?) had other problems. DAT transports are vastly more complicated than those used for compact cassette, being a close relative to VHS and other video tapes. They're supposedly nice when they work though!
I remember a friend got one of the first mp3 players on the market. I think it was a Sony and could hold less than 10 highly compressed songs. Still, it was tiny and could fit in a pocket and didn’t skip!
I think this nostalgia is useful for reminding us there are aesthetic forms beyond what Jony Ive et al happened to design and became the dominant form factor. The 2000s explosion of MP3 players had a lot of little ideas like the iRiver Clix had 'press the side of the device' as a navigation system
I think the irony was that Jony Ive's design was best when juxtaposed.
Sleek minimal material design on the device that grants you access to a skeuomorphic, bevelled and highly-three dimensional interface (on a flat surface) is complementary.
You "feel" the leather grain thats merely visualised because the device leaves nothing else in your mind, you just have the physical touch of a premium material in your hand and nothing else to distract you from the visual.
When that's applied to everything it turns into a bland nothing.
It seems like most of the collection is post-1960, leaving out many earlier types of media such as the ediphone and graphophone cylinders.
https://obsoletemedia.org/ediphone/
It's also missing a large swath of computer-only things (that have some incidental overlap with what they have) - noticeably backup tapes; I'd expect to see QIC/SLR, for example.
There's some older stuff, but it seems kinda random. I see also two cameras in their collection (a Speed Graphic Pacemaker, and a Fuji GW690ii) that I have in my cabinet. I will refrain from telling them they are 'extinct' (at least until I run out of film for them).
This sort of reminded me of my visit to https://www.cameramuseum.ch/en/themuseum/mission/ Camera museum in Vevey, Switzerland.
It is not very big and was difficult for me to follow as I cannot read French. Even with those language barriers on my end, it was fun way to see how photographic media evolved.
I have a single-sided 8-inch floppy disk somewhere
I think it held 160K
But also TRS-80 cassette tape which would be oldest computer medium I have
You would have to save things half a dozen times because most would not load later
It made me realize I could "save" dial-up computer terminal connections to cassette and play them back later (300 baud was very forgiving)
I'm currently in the process of emptying a basement and a garage. Stuff from my great-mother, great-aunt, uncle, parents, brothers and myself.
Plenty of different media (medium?): Pathe Baby, Super 8, dia, very old pictures on glass plates, countless floppies, etc.
Sadly "items you own own you" and there's no way I'm letting my kid having to sort, recycle, give as many items as I had to. We're talking, easily, 30 000 items from deceased people. Probably more.
Old pictures from cities (there's probably some interest in those). Old movies too.
Countless pictures from people I don't even know.
I know there's some stuff historians and museum would like.
But I only have one life: I can't take the time to send everything to enthusiasts, museums, etc. So I'm keeping some stuff (those in the best shape) but I'm basically sorting and filling cars and cars and trailers and going to the recycling center.
It's soul crushing.
P.S: and I wonder... Do I have an obligation to digitize some of this stuff so AIs can eventually be trained on it? (seen that they're trained on the entirety of the recorded world's knowledge) Or do I have an obligation to get rid of it so that AI do not get trained on it? Or neither?
I think a wonderful thing about being human is the ability to forget. Not every little detail needs to be preserved forever. What you have is the memories of people that had a well lived life and leave it at that
Related this week:
Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49025766
If you like this, the Dead Media Project's working notes are fascinating, if they're still out there (90s project, Bruce Sterling-adjacent). I was on the mailing list, way back when.
I went and I loved it. The owner encourages you to pick things up and try them. I am glad I went.
Techmoan has to visit this place
From the main page ……
What is the Extinct Media Museum ?
The Extinct Media Museum (Tokyo,Japan) is a private museum that collects and exhibits media and media equipment that have died out or are dying out in the process of evolution based on the belief that all media other than paper and stone will become extinct. ……..