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'"
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
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