Art Bell

[ziznak]

Where do I look, Ziz?  A quick Google didn't find much.

I'm sure you could find it in ol jorchy's toilet.... ah you mean the audio clip?? well, I really don't know where to look for that.  Somebody here has it somewhere in one of the "archives."

unfortunately not a lot of dreamland made it out of the 90's.

Just think... every time you listen to the files in that "ultimate collection" torrent... some of those files were mic'd from a boombox onto cassette tape and then at some point transferred over to digital with one of those cassette tape to digital conversion do-hickies.  There's so many possible points of failure in that procedure it's mindblowing that ANY of it made it to our ears here in 2016.

[creepygreenlight]

I never got to hear Dreamland back in the day, knew it existed because of the commercials and even called to try and get it on our station- To no avail.

Listening to C2C high? Yup- In fact I hate to admit it but Ive skipped school and work on occasion because of a good guest (couldnt afford that C crane radio that could record the entire show but damn I wanted one-)

Anyone remember one night Art was having an interview and it started getting close to the end of the show and he was like "fuck it, Ima keep interviewing and hopefully the stations will keep running it" and ran C2C for like an extra hour?

Yeah lots of sleepless night , some missed school and work and in all honesty probably a defining era in forming many of my interests and love and the bizarre.

Same here.  I'm too old now, so I paid $10 for the Tune In app with recording for MITD.

Needless to say that was a waste of money after Art quit again

Where do I look, Ziz?  A quick Google didn't find much.

Alright ya'll, I found it but I don't have a clip.  Art had an amazing ability to attract these "special" callers LOL

He calls in during the first segment before the guest on this episode:

"3-27-2001 - Technology Failures - Matt Stein"

[DarKPenguiN]

I'm sure you could find it in ol jorchy's toilet.... ah you mean the audio clip?? well, I really don't know where to look for that.  Somebody here has it somewhere in one of the "archives."

unfortunately not a lot of dreamland made it out of the 90's.

Just think... every time you listen to the files in that "ultimate collection" torrent... some of those files were mic'd from a boombox onto cassette tape and then at some point transferred over to digital with one of those cassette tape to digital conversion do-hickies.  There's so many possible points of failure in that procedure it's mindblowing that ANY of it made it to our ears here in 2016.

We were in the final stages of losing media forever- Imagine everything that had been broadcasted since the 1920s or whatever and how little of it we will ever hear. Now we are getting a preserved snapshot into time and will soon be at a point where nothing is lost- Ever.

Imagine in 100 years studying the 2016 presidential election that was the turning point to "making America great again!" and being able to hear the interviews, see the conversations and have all the media that corresponded to that event. The thing is, sometimes we have no idea what will have value and importance in the future and now we have a sort of catchall.

Can you imagine being able to read about events like the shootout at Ok corrale and then being able to have all the newspapers, the audio interviews of Doc and Wyatte, the actually words of those debate who was 'right' and a snapshot in time? because when that 30 second battle happened- Nobody even thought it was an issue of any great importance beyond Tombstone and they had no idea a legend would grow uo around the event that leaves us with questions even today.

The internet and whatever it becomes is going to be a scary place to get lost in in a century or so (if we are still around)- The real changes are still a long way off and most people dont recognize that we are at the start of the biggest thing to hit humanity and evolve society since  the discovery of the wheel and of fire.

Pre 2000 might as well be BC vs AD- An invisible line that most who are alive in that time have no idea they've crossed.

[PB the Deplorable]

We were in the final stages of losing media forever- Imagine everything that had been broadcasted since the 1920s or whatever and how little of it we will ever hear. Now we are getting a preserved snapshot into time and will soon be at a point where nothing is lost- Ever.

Imagine in 100 years studying the 2016 presidential election...

We are actually losing media at an alarming rate.  Because of technological advances, things recorded and stored in legacy formats are becoming ever less accessible.  Very little is being re-recorded onto current media, and much is being lost, thrown away, haphazardly stored, inaccessible, media such as tapes and even CDs/DVDs are disintegrating...

Everything we are producing currently is being made and stored on media that will similarly soon be obsolete..

[Auslandia]

It's cooler if there's no record.  That way you had to be there or you're just not in the know.

[creepygreenlight]

We are actually losing media at an alarming rate.  Because of technological advances, things recorded and stored in legacy formats are becoming ever less accessible.

You've got that backwards.  Because of technological advances people now are able to convert tape/film to digital, it's a time consuming process, but it certainly enables us to preserve legacy formats like never before in history.  The biggest hurdle is preserving them before it's too late, which takes considerable amounts of time and money.

Everything we are producing currently is being made and stored on media that will similarly soon be obsolete..

Can you explain this statement?  We are producing digital content stored on hard drives and in the cloud.  You seem to have it backwards again because the media we are producing today is more versatile than ever, it can be converted to different formats and therefore will never be obsolete.

[DarKPenguiN]

We are actually losing media at an alarming rate.  Because of technology advances, things recorded and stored in legacy formats are becoming ever less accessible.  Very little is being re-recorded onto current media, and much is being lost, thrown away, haphazardly stored in inaccessible areas, media such as tapes are disintegrating...

Everything we are producing currently is being made and stored on devices that will similarly soon be obsolete..

Oh but I disagree- yes some media gets lost but we are even at the stages now of archiving the remaining newspapers still floating around. there are scanners that read the print and transfer to digital.Hundreds of thousands of pages are added daily.

Yes, we are losing things at an alarming rate but the rate is slowing exponentially and as the tech gets better and better things are being transferred and future tech is being made with a nod towards backward compatibility in a sense.

The start of this really didnt begin until 2005ish, once the internet became more mainstream and the tech was getting sorted out. Since then the trend has been smaller/faster- Thats why we went from .wav to .mp3- because I can have 500 songs take the same space as 10 songs in a different format. This will continue- Plus hard drives are becoming insanely cheap and astronomically big. I have a terabyte in a laptop .

When Myspace went down I had a buddy who had ,lost his brother to cancer and who had thought that was lost (his brother was one of the first to get into myspace) and then he found webarchives like waybackmachine https://archive.org/web/

-The rate of loss is slowing and will eventually be almost nothing. This is where things are going. 20 years ago I had CDs. Today I carry a tablet that has a library (well over 1000) books, massive audio and music collection, etc... Whats coming in the next 20 years?

[DarKPenguiN]

It's cooler if there's no record.  That way you had to be there or you're just not in the know.

Its going to completely steal our humanity.

the virtual worlds that are coming are going to be so much more interesting and'real' than the 'real' world that theres going to be a merging and an addiction the likes of which has never been seen.

The overload of information is just one facet and it truly is terrifying. Its not going to be good for us in the long run- But its not something we can change now. genie is out of the bottle.

The coolness factor though- Really cool and interesting stuff imho.

[The Snorchlax]

We were in the final stages of losing media forever- Imagine everything that had been broadcasted since the 1920s or whatever and how little of it we will ever hear. Now we are getting a preserved snapshot into time and will soon be at a point where nothing is lost- Ever.

Imagine in 100 years studying the 2016 presidential election that was the turning point to "making America great again!" and being able to hear the interviews, see the conversations and have all the media that corresponded to that event. The thing is, sometimes we have no idea what will have value and importance in the future and now we have a sort of catchall.

Can you imagine being able to read about events like the shootout at Ok corrale and then being able to have all the newspapers, the audio interviews of Doc and Wyatte, the actually words of those debate who was 'right' and a snapshot in time? because when that 30 second battle happened- Nobody even thought it was an issue of any great importance beyond Tombstone and they had no idea a legend would grow uo around the event that leaves us with questions even today.

The internet and whatever it becomes is going to be a scary place to get lost in in a century or so (if we are still around)- The real changes are still a long way off and most people dont recognize that we are at the start of the biggest thing to hit humanity and evolve society since  the discovery of the wheel and of fire.

Pre 2000 might as well be BC vs AD- An invisible line that most who are alive in that time have no idea they've crossed.

Great post

[PB the Deplorable]

...  The biggest hurdle is preserving them before it's too late, which takes considerable amounts of time and money.

Exactly.  It can be preserved, but how much is actually being converted?  It would take an enormous amount of management and planning, not to mention manpower, just to identify what should be preserved and to ensure that it is.  What's being done now is done piecemeal by those who identify what they consider worthy and wish to pay for.

... Can you explain this statement?  We are producing digital content stored on hard drives and in the cloud...

Everything we are using now will be updated, and eventually made obsolete and replaced.  Hard drives, the cloud, everything.

It's not possible to convert all the old information at the current rate of preservation, and it won't be possible to preserve the new information at the rate it is being generated.  Certain amounts of it will be selected to be converted, certain of it probably isn't deemed worthy of being converted, but much will continue to be lost.


I didn't realize this was a controversial topic.  Too bad Art retired and won't be doing a show on it.

[Richard Groyper]

Its going to completely steal our humanity.

the virtual worlds that are coming are going to be so much more interesting and'real' than the 'real' world that theres going to be a merging and an addiction the likes of which has never been seen.

The overload of information is just one facet and it truly is terrifying. Its not going to be good for us in the long run- But its not something we can change now. genie is out of the bottle.

The coolness factor though- Really cool and interesting stuff imho.

No true human fallacy. I miss rotary phones. 

[GravitySucks]

No true human fallacy. I miss rotary phones. 

More than that, I miss being able to slam the receiver down.

[ziznak]

holy shit did the art bell thread just get interesting for a page?

[DarKPenguiN]

Exactly.  It can be preserved, but how much is actually being converted?  It would take an enormous amount of management and planning, not to mention manpower, just to identify what should be preserved and to ensure that it is.  What's being done now is done piecemeal by those who identify what they consider worthy and wish to pay for.


Everything we are using now will be updated, and eventually made obsolete and replaced.  Hard drives, the cloud, everything.

It's not possible to convert all the old information at the current rate of preservation, and it won't be possible to preserve the new information at the rate it is being generated.  Certain amounts of it will be selected to be converted, certain of it probably isn't deemed worthy of being converted, but much will continue to be lost.


I didn't realize this was a controversial topic.  Too bad Art retired and won't be doing a show on it.

I dont think its controversial. I think you're mistaken but theres no way we'll know for many years so really its just something to speculate over.

People trying to identify trends are wrong all the time and things often happen (outside the trend they are looking at) that change everything. For instance pretty much everyone notable in trends and tech swore that the internet would never have much in the way of commerce because people couldnt trust the security using credit cards and (the best part) "People will always prefer a face to face salesperson with knowledge"- Now we see the exact opposite to be true- Now we see a whole new era of commerce that is not only shutting down the big box stores but is changing the way we do business.

I dont hold onto my thoughts and opinions on future trends as gospel whatsoever- I know I could be wrong for a million reasons. I would think that my feelings on this are a safe bet but like everything else- Time will tell.

Just sharing thoughts.

[Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost]

No true human fallacy. I miss rotary phones. 

I still have and occasionally use a red one I got during the Cold War because I thought red gave it a cool "Dr. Strangelove" hotline to the Kremlin look. I was technically just leasing it from Ma Bell, but when AT&T was broken up nobody asked for it back.  For some reason, it foiled Caller ID until a few years ago, but I have no idea why.  Any techies know why that might have been?

[GravitySucks]

holy shit did the art bell thread just get interesting for a page?

I don't know, but I have a couple of Zip drives and several boxes of 100mb and 25omb Zip disks if anyone needs them.

[Richard Groyper]

More than that, I miss being able to slam the receiver down.

The satisfaction of dialing, too. Ahhh! Yeah, that feels good. It makes a man feel like a private investigator, or sumthin.

[Richard Groyper]

I don't know, but I have a couple of Zip drives and several boxes of 100mb and 25omb Zip disks if anyone needs them.

What about floppy disks?

[GravitySucks]

What about floppy disks?

I have a hundred or so of the 1.4 meg floppies, but I think I finally threw out my 5.25 and 8 inch floppies the last time I cleaned my computer room. Didn't have a drive for those anymore.

[starrmtn001]

What about floppy disks?

What about floppy disks?  :

\./\./

[Richard Groyper]

What about floppy disks?  :

\./\./

How floppy? Dragging the ground or no...

[DarKPenguiN]

How floppy? Dragging the ground or no...

[starrmtn001]

How floppy? Dragging the ground or no...

Knee knockers!

[Richard Groyper]

Knee knockers!

Still Acceptable. 

[GravitySucks]

Discuss.

[ItsOver]

Discuss.

No, Art.  I cancelled because I'd signed-up to listen to you.  I don't care if you support Maj. Ed Dames for President.

[trostol]

Discuss.

yes..thats why they cancelled lol

[creepygreenlight]

Everything we are using now will be updated, and eventually made obsolete and replaced.  Hard drives, the cloud, everything.

I was just curious because I'm an IT sys admin/nerd.

The world runs on digital storage now, and there's no escaping it.  I disagree with you on this because I think that the most common formats such as wav and mp3 audio will always be relevant in our digital age.  Hell, just look at MIDI... even Windows 10 can still naively play MIDI files that have arguably been deemed "obsolete" a long time ago.  Why?  Because it's digital and modern media programs can easily support these old "legacy" formats that already have codecs built in.

Cloud storage is a relatively new idea and storage media is still getting cheaper and cheaper every day... trust me on this, hard drives will not be phased out anytime soon.  Things are moving to sold state drives, but the digital media format itself hasn't changed much and I highly doubt it will change much in the next 100 years.

[creepygreenlight]

Discuss.

Art has some really ignorant FB friends.

[Uncle Duke]

No true human fallacy. I miss rotary phones. 

Funny you should say this.  I've been helping a longtime friend clear out the house his mother, who died late last year, had lived in for over fifty years. The house, a smallish brick ranch style, still has the one and only phone it has ever had, a black rotary dial wall phone in the kitchen.  Technically those phones were the property of the Bell system, the long gone "Ohio Bell" in this case.  One of the last things on his list of things to do is to call AT&T to see if they want to come get the phone.

By the way, he told me he bought his Mom a cell (flip) phone back in the early 2000s, but he's pretty sure she never used it.