Audio Documentary : An Account of Digital Evolution

After 4 years of studying Journalism in close quarters with technology at AUC, when given the chance to discuss the history of something, I felt that the technology we all use now could be a perfect candidate for my final project.  This was my attempt to bring into everyone's perspective, just how much of an extraordinary jump technology has experienced in the last half century.

Gaser's Final Documentary by gaser_elsafty

SCRIPT 

Length : (13:07)

*Fade In 'I Will Possess Your Heart*

Most of us don’t really think about how much technology has advanced in only the last 20 years.  We don’t notice it, especially people younger than 25, because we grew up in a time when the digital age was a given.

My name is Gaser El Safty, and I will take some of you down memory lane.  This documentary is about the history of technology on the A-U-C campus, but first, for everything to make sense to everyone, I'll explain the measure of memory on a computer.

 One Gigabyte is equal to roughly 1000 megabytes, and one megabyte is equal to roughly 1000 kilobytes.  Your average flash drive can store anywhere between one and 32 gigabytes.

On average, a minute of audio is about 1 megabyte, one minute of video and audio is equal to around 10 megabytes.

100 pages of plain text is equal to around 50 kilobytes.

A laptop's hard disk can carry anywhere between 250 to 1000 gigabytes

 Now that that's out of the way, do you remember floppy disks?

The "floppy" part referred to the thin magnetic disc inside a black square shaped case.

While researching this project I found out the floppy disks we all remember are 31/2 inch HD models introduced in 1987 that could store exactly 1.44 megabytes, that’s not even enough to store your favorite song.

Floppy disks have vanished in a sea of flash drives that are just bigger than a finger nail in size and can carry about 6000 times more memory.  This only happened in the last 10 years.

Wahib Basilious is the current assistant director of new projects in CTMS, the university Classroom Technologies and Media Services office.

BASILIOUS: "we received the first personal computers, with 2 5.25 inches disk drives,  that the first…it's amazing, it’s a computer with 2 floppy disks, one for the operating system and one for the data or for the program which we needed to enter, for us it was 'oh yeah, that's the technology', when we received the first 2 86 processor personal computer, that is the revolution of technology, now when I remember, when I remember the first storage I was working on, it was a hard disk with 4 mega, it's like the tire of a car, that is true, It's like the tire of a car or at least it's like the tire of the club car, and remember it can store only 4 mega, and when I'm looking now for any flash drive it can store up to 32 gigabytes." (1:41 – 2:54) (73s)

Everybody remembers desktops right?  They're still around today, but it won't be long before technology makes the best out of anything that bulky in size.

The very first laptops had to decrease the average computer specs in order to make the laptop what it essentially is; a smaller, portable computer.

What is available now on the market, is what people in the 70's thought was science fiction.  The Macbook Air, a fully capable, above than average laptop, is thinner than an average notebook while the iPad, thinner than a stack of 30 A4 pieces of paper, can simulate over thousands of books, journals and articles.  And that’s only one of the things it can do.

If this comparison still isn’t shocking enough, I can make it even better.

BASILIOUS: "the main frame computer if you're looking only at the processor, you can say 2 meters the length, 1 meter the height, and say 70 cm the width, that is only the processor, the memory is like  2 meter height, with 75 by 75, that is the memory for 96 Kbyte."(3:39 – 4:14) (35s)

So, remember this?

 *Nat sound of dial up*

Dial up has become obsolete with the introduction of ADSL.

*Fade in Nat sound of people on campus*

 High speed internet that is connected through an external modem, that allows you unlimited access to the internet for the duration of your subscription, and doesn’t use your phone line.

Dial up was always free in Egypt, but you would get charged to your phone bill.  You can get Internet that's 18 times faster than dial up and pay a fraction of what your phone bill would've been, had you kept dial up connected for an entire month.

*Fade out Dial up Nat sound*

Nagwa Nicola, the Chief Technology Officer of A-U-C, recalls the most recent changes to the telephone system on the downtown campus.

*Fade In 'Megrez'*

NICOLA: “we had several buildings and streets in the middle so we had to do a lot business continuity things for the network mainly and that included having a mesh network so that if, for example  they were digging on the street and putting in new pipes or anything and they break down one of our network cables then there would be another route from another way, and this was one of the main problems we faced Downtown because of the buildings and the streets in the middle and we had to control what was happening on the streets, there were also a lot of upgrades that we had, we introduced fiber at the time, when we first started.  In 2002 we introduced voice over IP, IP telephony, we started getting rid of the old pbxs, the old telephone system, I think this was a great change, it put in a lot of new functions that weren’t there on the phones, it was a lot cheaper,  we got to communicate through the network to the New York office, which of course made the cost go down, big amount of money communicating especially with the New York office.” (4:55 – 6:16) (80s)

*Fade out campus Nat sound*

Thanks to the unbelievable availability of the Internet now, keeping in touch with people and the world through social networks has become a lot easier, so much easier that you don’t even need a computer to connect.  And this brings me onto my next point.

Remember when there was no Facebook?

Seriously, how many social networks can you name now?  There's Facebook, and Myspace, Hi5, Twitter, Flickr and countless other websites to keep you in touch with friends and exchange photos and news on what's been going on in your life.

Before social networking and the Internet, keeping in touch with your high school friends who went to different countries for college was almost impossible. Sending regular mail took forever, international call rates were off the charts, and it almost seems to us now like too much of an effort to make just to keep in touch with people.

Remember seeing the first phone with a camera?

*Nat sound of camera click*

The first Nokia with a camera was the 7650 model that came out in 2002.  The phone camera's lens was a 0.3 megapixel.  In 2010, most smart phones and particularly Sony Ericsson phones, have better lenses than most mid-price range digital cameras in 2001.  Now a digital camera can go up to 16 megapixels.  A life size representation of a photo with that kind of resolution would take up an entire wall.

Professor Firas Al-Atraqchi, is a Journalism Professor at AUC and the current advisor of the journalism department funded newspaper; the Caravan.

He was once an AUC student who majored in Physics between 1989 and 1994. He later received a Master's in Journalism in 1997.

During his time as an undergraduate, he became the Editor in Chief of the Caravan.

*Fade in campus Nat sound*

*Fade in 'Ending Credits' while Al-Atraqchi is speaking*

AL-ATRAQCHI : "One thing that stands out as a huge difference is obviously the time it took  to take a picture and get it into the newspaper, right now you can take a picture and within 5 minutes have it downloaded onto your computer and ready to be uploaded to a website or to be used as a part of the graphic design of your newspaper, whereas before you either sent the film off to a photo lab off campus or if you were a good enough photographer you would develop the film on campus, so the whole process could take two to three hours, obviously that’s 175 minutes longer than it does take now."(7:55 – 8:39) (44s)

I'm a Journalism senior, and in my field, technology is very heavily present.  Out of print, broadcast and online journalism, print is the one that uses the least technology.  However, there has been a revolutionary jump in terms of what goes into the making of a newspaper or magazine.       

AL-ATRAQCHI: "Fortunately by the time that I got into the Caravan, a few years prior to that they had stopped using actual, I don’t even know what it's called, using printing press technology where they actually get letters and line them up and you know the old way of printing newspapers that was radically changed with computing." (8:56 – 9:26) (29s)

The current method for printing a newspaper is a program that’s part of the Adobe Master Suite called InDesign.

It visually represents the newspaper or magazine for you and you can go in and add your photos, articles, and headlines. You can easily move them around and resize them to the way you want.

*Fade out campus nat sound*

The essential idea of computers is hardware put together that runs on software.  That alone is practically useless unless you build programs using coding language that will do certain tasks for you.

Today the process of building a program involves a programmer sat in a seat in front of a computer.  The programmer will input coding language and that's all there was to it, but did you know that that wasn’t always the case?

BASILIOUS: "With the mainframe if you would like to enter, say, data or compile a program, then you needed to follow the following process, write your program on a coding sheet, each character in a separate square, with a capital character not with a small character.  Enter your coding sheet to the data entering rooms, which have a punching machine, to convert your data sheet to a number of cards,  each line you entered in the coding sheet is converted to a line, take your program from the data entry rooms to the computer room for compiling, if you received any error, you should follow the same sequence, enter the correct line in a coding sheet, enter the coding sheet to the data entry room, take the card with  your whole programs, to recompile, for each mistake you need to repeat the whole process."(10:09 – 11:20) (71s)

*Fade out Ending Credits*

*Fade in Patterns in the Ivy while Nicola is speaking*

NICOLA: "well when I was a student, I graduated in 82’, when I was a student at AUC, I remember we used to go to the science building, the mainframe was there, and we used to get our programs on punched cards at the time, it was the NCR century, and so you’d have a stack of cards representing one program of say 120 or 150 lines, so you’d have 120 or 150 cards, and I remember one time I was going up the stairs taking my project just to do some changes in one of the lines for a syntax, and the rubber band that held the cards got broken and all the cards fell on the ground, it was really tiresome, it was really difficult to get a program running at the time, you had to go and beg somebody , one of the data entry people up in the computer lab, to change a letter or a word in one of the lines for you, and then you compile the program and run it all over again, now it's so much easier I think” (11:21 – 12:20)  (59s)

Takes you back does it?

These are all things that have happened in the last 40 years.  A 5-year-old today, in 2010, will not recognize a floppy disk, and it's crazy to think that in another 20 years people might not recognize CDs or flash drives.

Oh and one last thing, do you know what happened to A-U-C's old mainframes, cupboard sized processors and tire sized hard disks after they were rendered practically useless by time?

They were sold as scrap metal by the kilo, that’s right, so they could very well be in parts of your car.

*Fade out 'Patterns in the Ivy'"

*End of Documentary*

Credits:

The Rare Books Library for their invaluable archive of flyers, documents and posters of the Computer Centre.

Nagwa Nicola, Firas Al-Atraqchi and Wahib Basilious for their time and stories.

Music:

Death Cab for Cutie – I Will Possess Your Heart

Opeth – Ending Credits

Opeth – Patterns in the Ivy

Gordian Knot - Megrez

Podcast 3: Man on the Street

Script:

The Cairo Chamber of Commerce is considering posing a curfew for stores in Cairo to close by 9 pm in the winter, and 10 pm in the summer starting as early as January 2011.  The man on the street had mixed opinions on this curfew.

"Okay I think it'll be problematic for the people, the vendors, to close them at 10 o'clock because Egyptians usually stay at night, they usually like go home at 2 am or something, so when you close something like that you close the ability of these vendors to sell from 10 until like 12 o'clock or something which will affect at the end of the day their sales, it will affect their profits and at the end of the day it's going to be reflected on the taxation and reflecting on the problems they have with the government, and so creates more problems with the government and more destabilization in the political arena."

"Well my opinion would be like it's not going to be a convenient way for me because I return back really late from the university and I have to get supplies and refreshments for myself, also you know for teenagers and people in university they usually hang out together outside and usually consider being late you know what I'm saying and you know if all the stores or all the places are closed you know there's nothing to do."

"I think it’s a bad because we usually get done with our classes late so if we want to get anything, we'll find all the shops closed, and the traffic in cairo wont help, we can spend like two or more hours trying to get to a store we want and then by getting there, it's going to be closed."

Not everyone disagreed to the proposed curfew, some thought it could be beneficial and could lead to a potentially safer city.

"I'm neutral to the idea since already I have a curfew I don’t mind the shops closing up early."

"I think it’s a good idea because it'd standardize all the closing times, however it might be problematic for certain people who get off work at a late hour and its inconvenient for them, but I think it’s a step forward towards enhancing security in places because it's easier when everything's closed at one time, there are less problems in the streets of Cairo."

  

Credits:

Song: Grace - Gordian Knot