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