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Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording

Prehistory for Today's Magnetic Media

Still, the once-new device helps us better understand how people initially learned to simultaneously ignore, trust, and desire magnetic storage—to examine how faith in magnetic recording emerged between the 1870s and 1910s, well before now-ubiquitous hard drives (not to mention seemingly unlimited cloud storage). Put this way, the story of a failed sound machine offers a prehistory for contemporary computing, invested as it often is in the automagical transubstantiation of magnetic impressions (on platters) into data expressions (on screens and through speakers).

This prehistory matters because it not only contextualizes contemporary computing and today's magnetic media through mechanical age audio cultures. It also sparks some speculation about what artifacts are not at hand, in the archive, or on file—about what does not ultimately go into storage. If, during the development of early magnetic technologies and media, the perfect record would never lie and would never be written, then we must ask how such a record was actively constructed, through what material procedures of impression and playback, and in what relation to transforming notions of proof, evidence, perception, and memory. To be clear, then, this prehistory is an account of making records, not giving or taking them.

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Magnetic Storage For a thoroughly materialist approach to the hard drive and contemporary magnetic recording, see Kirschenbaum (2008). In the first chapter, Kirschenbaum claims, quite importantly, that “computer storage media also have their affordances, but as storage in general has become more capacious and less immediately tangible it is easy to overlook them. . . . Attention to the affordances of various kinds of storage media can reveal much about computing in different contexts, allowing us to reconstruct salient aspects of now-obsolete systems and the human practices that attended them” (32). (This note comments on the page titled, "Prehistory for Today's Magnetic Media," as well as the attached video titled, "IBM 305 RAMAC: Promotional Material (ca. 1956).")
Making Records In their research on computation and new media, Wendy Chun and Johanna Drucker make similar observations about the construction—rather than the capture or permanence—of records and data. Chun (2008, 167) writes: “Digital media, which is allegedly more permanent and durable than other media (film stock, paper, and so on), depends on a degeneration actively denied and repressed. This degeneration, which engineers would like to divide into useful and harmful (eraseability versus signal decomposition, information versus noise) belies the promise of digital computers as permanent memory machines. If our memory machines’ memories are more permanent, if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack, it is because they are constantly refreshed so that their ephemerality endures, so that they may store the programs that seem to drive our machines.” Meanwhile, Drucker (2011, para. 3) observes the following: “Differences in the etymological roots of the terms data and capta make the distinction between constructivist and realist approaches clear. Capta is ‘taken’ actively while data is assumed to be a ‘given’ able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.” In this essay, I extend Drucker’s constructivist logic even further and replace “taken” with “making.” My argument is also informed by Chun’s (2008) enduring ephemeral and her emphasis on degenerating materials and memories—on active forgetting.

(This note comments on the page titled, "Prehistory for Today's Magnetic Media.")
Automagical Transubstantiation For instance, according to both Nick Montfort and Matthew Kirschenbaum, a bias (in media studies and elsewhere) for computer screens enables an inattention to the materiality of computational processes and electronic texts. For more, see Montfort (2004) and Kirschenbaum (2008, 31–35). Montfort’s term for this bias is screen essentialism.

(This note comments on the page titled, "Prehistory for Today's Magnetic Media.")
Some Speculation For more on speculative (or conjectural) approaches to archives and textual scholarship, see Kraus (2009, para. 64). There, she argues that “conjectural knowledge in the humanities is a manifestation of the inalienable human need to imagine what might have been or could be or almost was.”
(This note comments on the page titled, "Prehistory for Today's Magnetic Media.")

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