The bad old days

Too often we glorify the past. To a point, this kind of reverence is helpful to teach ourselves humility, in that we do not consider ourselves greater than our ancestors. However, extreme nostalgia clouds our judgment of all previous periods: we voluntarily abandon the ability to objectively identify what changes are actually improvements.

It is my hope that readers of various ages and demographics permit themselves to be gently reminded how so many of the things they might take for granted were nonexistent within the lifespan of our parents or grandparents. The goal of this post is to help spread the spirit of contentment for the present and optimism for the future. 

The criteria for this list are:

1. There was a well-defined problem in the past which may remain relevant today. It may have had no solution at all at the time. It should not be excessively obscure or too far in the past (in the view of the author).
2. If the problem had a process, tool, or material to manage it, this is considered inconvenient or undesirable by today's standards (and in the view of the author).
3. By modern standards, the problem has been dealt with so effectively by other means, and the technology so prevalent, that there are reasonably mature human beings alive today who have never heard of the older alternative.

I want this to be an organic, growing list which takes into account trends that others point out. Please leave a comment if you have an idea that meshes with my three criteria for inclusion. Leave a comment with the following two components:

• A general subject (e.g. "Internet access", "Music", or a topic not yet started)
• One or two sentences to describe the problem in the context of how it is to be detailed in one paragraph.

Internet access

• Before the mid-2000s, most US families had dial-up internet. This required internet users to wait for a connection over their phone line rather than having a continuous internet connection available to them. It also meant that phone usage over the same line was impossible, and anyone who picked up any phone in the house was likely to boot you offline. The connection over dial-up is accompanied by a fairly noisy connection signal involving actual dial signals over the public switched telephone network. It is demonstrably worse in every single way compared to DSL, cable, or satellite internet.

Phone access

• At one time, payphones were ubiquitous as a way to place a call when outside the home or office. In my earliest memories from c. 1990, a local call was 25 cents; long-distance calls were substantially more. The prevalence of cell phones in the 2010s make payphones increasingly difficult to find except in poorer neighborhoods and very old facilities. As of this writing, most Americans of my age (25) will probably remember using a payphone at some point, but the children who are currently in elementary and middle school may go through their entire lives without having to use a payphone.
• Before the early 1980s, most phones in use in the United States were rotary-dial phones. This required the user to place a finger in the hole for the appropriate number, twist the dial, and let it return to the default position. Doing this for each digit is rather time-consuming by modern standards. I only have the faintest memories of seeing a rotary telephone in use, and it was at my great grandmother's house in rural Indiana perhaps 18-20 years ago. Even at the time, it was uncommon to see the old-fashioned Ma Bell rotary phones.

Music

• Electric power generation on a large scale was invented in the last quarter of the 19th century, and its processes were surprisingly mature by 1900, but most households did not have electrical power, even well into the early 20th century. The Victrola, a popular phonograph of the 1910s-1930s, was available in a hand-cranked version, which was substantially less expensive. Until the onset of the 1930s, most phonographs were hand-cranked.
• The vinyl LP record was released in 1948 and was the primary high-fidelity means of playback all the way until the Compact Disc (CD) of the early 1980s. LPs are not actually obsolete, since they are still used for vinyl recordings on rare occasions. Before CDs, vinyl could be either cheap and extremely low quality, or very expensive and high quality. The amount of care and attention that vinyl records required to maintain their sound is a bit fastidious by modern standards.
• The first viable competitor for the record was the cassette tape, which was extremely popular in cars due to its greater resistance to vibration. Unfortunately, cassettes are very vulnerable to prolonged temperature differences. The degradation of sound quality after leaving tapes in a car throughout a hot summer is very pronounced. Most surviving cassette tapes from the 1980s or 1990s that spent their lives in a glove compartment or center console are almost unplayable. There is still more maintenance required than CDs, since cassette decks do need to have their head cleaned by playing a "cleaning" tape. In practice, I have never actually seen these used; most motorists did not keep their cars long enough for the cassette deck to degrade noticeably.

Vehicle starting

• Before electric starters, motorists had to start a vehicle by turning a hand crank which was connected directly to the crankshaft. The sudden forward motion of the crank when the engine started meant you had to cup your hand rather than firmly grasp it; the punishment for poor hand posture was a broken thumb. If the engine kicked back, the punishment was a broken wrist or arm. As the technique for starting these cars becomes more obscure, but the cars themselves still remain, its danger becomes even more real. Members of historical societies who lack the proper technique will be far more likely to break their arm in starting a Locomobile than veteran drivers of 1905, who were more accustomed to the process (and probably had bigger arms as a result).
• In cold weather, modern vehicles will probably start up on the first crank and require very little warm-up time before they can be safely operated. For very cold climates, vehicles are sometimes fitted with block heaters, a plug-in electrical device that heats the engine block directly to aid in starting. All early vehicles were unlikely to start at all in such conditions. Any of these were common in very cold climates at various points in time.
• Draining the engine's oil overnight so it could be poured back into the engine when warm
• Placing hot coals on the engine block
• Pouring boiling water over the engine block

Vehicle maintenance

• Batteries once needed to be topped off regularly with water. Today few automotive owners even know of any battery maintenance.
• Motor oil has gotten a lot more expensive over the years, but the engine's requirement has greatly diminished. Almost all vehicles of 50 years ago would consume oil in regular amounts, and need to be topped up with oil. It was impossible to treat an engine of 1963 with the same careless abandon as an engine of 2013.

Vehicle safety

• Vehicles generally lacked seatbelts until the 1950s. Even then, the seatbelt used was a lap belt which did not cover the shoulder, so it did not stop a passenger from hitting the dashboard.
• Vehicles before the 1970s generally did not have collapsible steering columns. If the driver did not have a shoulder belt, an accident at high speed was likely to cause a massive impact right in the chest area, with disproportionate likelihood of causing lethal injuries to the heart and/or lungs.
• Vehicles before the 1970s generally did not have shoulder belts. As stated before, lap belts offer much less protection than the combined lap/shoulder combination. By modern standards, lap belts alone would be considered practically useless. Shoulder belts and lap belts in combination are still the most important safety feature ever added to vehicles, and should be worn 100% of the time when in a non-parked motor vehicle.
• Vehicles generally lacked airbags until the early to mid-1990s. Until the turn of the 21st century, two airbags was the common number (one for driver, one for passenger.) In the first decade of the 21st century, side-curtain airbags became common, and other airbag placements would proliferate throughout the interior of modern vehicles. Vehicles made from 2010 onward are massively safer than those made even 15 years earlier.
• US vehicles of the 1940s-1960s had a very large amount of chrome on their dashboards, which could reflect light directly into the motorist's eyes in the wrong conditions, making him or her momentarily blind. Largely due to changing styles rather than a concern for safety, this trend was on the decrease by 1965, and by 1969 there was almost no dashboard chrome left.
• Automatic seat belts were extremely common on US cars from 1990 to 1995. As a result of US federal legislation, automakers had to ensure that all new cars were equipped with at least one form of active safety, and the choices were automatic seat belts or airbags. Airbags would be much better, but automatic seat belts were cheaper. Rather than doing nothing at all, the government decided to form a meaningless compromise that resulted in automatic seat belts becoming ubiquitous. The depressing thing is that automatic seat belts merely automate the process of buckling the shoulder belt, and don't do anything better than ordinary seat belts. As a result, airbags were obviously the superior solution for safety, and they became mandated by 1995, making automatic seat belts obsolete. My parents had two Ford Escort wagons from 1993 that had automatic seat belts. My grandfather's 1989 Honda Civic did not have it, but I did own a 1991 Honda Civic that did have this installed. I remember them as being perfectly ordinary as a child, but as the years went on I found them very restrictive and irritating. If you don't ride in a car made from 1990-1995 in your life, you may never know what an automatic seat belt is. It's a jarring experience if you're new to it!

Building safety

• Asbestos was used universally in building construction during the early 20th century. Usage remained steady until it began to fall off in the 1970s, and during the 1980s it was banned in certain building insulation applications. Asbestos is an amazing material, with extraordinary resistance to fire, electricity, and chemical damage. For centuries, it was a peerless insulator. But once a building reaches the end of its lifecycle, tearing it down will cause asbestos fibers to become airborne. Repeated scientific studies have verified that continued exposure to asbestos causes life-threatening respiratory conditions. Asbestosis is a highly painful way to die. The lack of asbestos in modern buildings actually makes them substantially cheaper to clean up after demolition, which makes them more economical over their lifetime.

Public health

• Smoking of cigarettes was once conducted by a decided majority of American males, and a much larger percentage of American females than today. Smoking was popular from the outset of the 20th century, and continued to gain in popularity up to WWII and into the 1950s. The first major condemnation of smoking for its health hazards was the landmark 1964 Surgeon General's report. The Surgeon General's Office has periodically released reports that inevitably describe smoking as a serious risk to the health of the smoker and all others around the smoker. In today's society, smoking of tobacco is much less common, and its popularity continues to decrease every year. Despite libertarian objections, no-smoking zones have been implemented in many public areas of the United States.
• Fluoridation of water is something that most Americans deal with every single day when they drink tap water. Fluoride is added to most of the US public water supply to improve dental health and fight cavities. In the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, fluoridation was considered a Communist plot by the primary antagonist, the insane General Ripper. Although a minority objected to fluoridation, the general public placed a great deal of faith in the scientific establishment in the 1950s and 1960s, and did not object to the widespread application of fluoridation. Prior to the widespread use of fluoride toothpaste in the 1970s, fluoridated water was the only way to raise the dental health standards of the nation collectively.
• There was once a time not long ago when parents feared very seriously for the lives and livelihoods of their children. Polio affected tens of thousands of children per year prior to 1954, and those who survived the disease were often handicapped for life. The polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by the famous Dr. Jonas Salk, and immediately entered intense testing on a small scale prior to its announcement in 1953. In 1954, the polio vaccine was subject to the largest-scale human experimentation in US history, eventually involving 1.8 children across the United States. The favorable conclusion of the test was announced on April 12, 1955- the polio vaccine was found to be safe and extremely effective, and at unprecedented speed almost complete vaccination was undertaken. More than 100 million doses were administered in the US over the next four years. By 1961, only 161 cases were reported. Polio took much longer to eradicate worldwide, but it was finally declared eradicated in 2012.
• Even greater a threat than polio was smallpox. The bane of civilization for centuries, smallpox has killed countless millions of people of all ages and classes. Various outbreaks have totally depopulated great cities throughout history. Because of the intense contagiousness and worldwide scope of the disease, it was impossible to eradicate it immediately. In fact, Edward Jenner's invention of the smallpox vaccine in 1796 is considered the first-ever vaccine, but the more-dangerous technique of innoculation persisted well into the 20th century, and smallpox continued to remain a threat in Africa and Asia. Worldwide, from 1800 to 1950, there was insufficient willpower and funds to destroy the disease, so it remained a threat to all people. Starting in 1950, the Pan American Health Organization undertook an eradication of the disease from the Western Hemisphere. Beginning in 1958, worldwide efforts were managed by the World Health Organization. WHO's Smallpox Eradication Team was led by Donald Henderson from 1966 onwards- at this point, millions still contracted the disease every year. Working on a global scale and with close cooperation with local authorities, they fought every single outbreak until the disease was declared eradicated globally in 1979.

Libraries

• Although the Dewey decimal system remains in place for physical order of a library, there was once a physical card catalog system to assist lookup of books. Each book had a card that located it. If you wanted to find a book, you had to look up an actual piece of paper that contained the code where you could find it. If you see the movie Ghostbusters from 1984, the opening scene shows huge cabinets full of cards that correspond to the inventory of the library. If such pieces of furniture still exist in modern libraries, they are mostly ceremonial. The real organization is handled by a computerized database in almost all libraries.
• Public libraries were once considered primarily valuable because of the books they contained. Although 20 years ago most libraries did have computers, the computers were usually just green-screen terminals that linked the user to a card catalog of the books in the library. By the early 2000s, internet service in libraries was becoming relatively common. Libraries have continued to remain relevant because they are a place where free internet is available. In poorer neighborhoods, as I have seen in Houston and Cleveland, as well as in small towns, the public libraries are full of kids playing online games and checking Facebook, job seekers printing out resumes, and elderly persons acquainting themselves with new technology. In this way, the public library has actually become more valuable to society than ever.

Cooking

• For those without much culinary expertise, it may come as a surprise that the old-fashioned way to obtain a non-stick surface was to season a cast iron pan with a layer of oil which would be baked in at high temperature; continued use over the years would keep up a jet black and silky smooth surface, but a brand new cast iron pan will disintegrate your eggs very easily. The solution came on two fronts: stainless steel in the mid 20th century, and Teflon, first marketed in France in 1954 and the US in 1961. The great majority of cookware surfaces on products sold in the 21st century are nonstick, but cast iron and carbon steel continue to be sold for niche markets.

Name that Car #5: Gimme five!

5 ---(analysis)-----> Car!

I have an unhealthy obsession with automotive badges, hood ornaments, nameplates, and similar. So let's get right into it. What you see here is a single digit: 5. This is not a junkyard find; it was part of road debris. Don't worry, I didn't just steal private property immediately after an accident. This hunk of plastic had been on the side of the road for weeks and was obviously just rubbish to be picked up.

It is quite apparent from the construction and appearance of this 5 that it comes from the exterior bodywork of some kind of motor vehicle. The trouble is, a great many cars might have the number 5 associated with them.

Can we identify what vehicle lost a 5 from its exterior bodywork simply by the shape, size, material, and style of this digit alone? Why not? We've never been stumped on Name that Car before!

If we can't do it, who can? 

I'm sorry, I wrote that wrong. The real motto of this feature is "If we don't do it, who would?"

The following is a non-exhaustive list of vehicles* which had a 5 in their title which probably had it on external badging, in no particular order. Let's start with vehicles that necessarily have a five in their name:

• Mazda 5, CX-5
• Audi A5, S5, RS5
• BMW X5
• Any BMW 5 series (too many to list)
• Nissan 350Z

Vehicles whose name itself contained a 5 if a certain engine was specified:

• BMW x35, x25, x45...
• Mercedes x250, x350, xx55 AMG, xx65 AMG, etc.

Vehicles which had** a separate specific engine badge containing 5:

• Vehicles with a 1.5L I4:
• I know of many, but none of them are particularly proud of an engine so small, so I don't think any have external badging
• Vehicles with a 2.5L I4/I5:
• Volvo S40/S60 2.5T
• Volkswagen Golf/Jetta/Passat 2.5
• Ford Duratec 25:
• Ford Escape
• Ford Fusion
• Mercury Milan
• Ford Transit Connect
• Vehicles with a 3.5L V6:
• Chrysler OHC V6:
• Dodge Intrepid
• Chrysler New Yorker
• Chrysler 300M
• Chrysler 300
• Chrysler Concorde
• Dodge Avenger
• etc.
• Ford Duratec 35:
• Ford Edge
• Lincoln MKZ
• Lincoln MKX
• Ford Taurus
• Ford Flex
• Ford Explorer
• etc.
• Nissan VQ and VG
• Nissan Maxima
• Nissan Altima
• Nissan Frontier
• Ack! GM and Toyota have too many 3.5L V6 engines to list.
• Vehicles with a 5.xL V8:
• 5.0L:
• Ford Mustang
• Ford LTD
• Ford LTD Crown Victoria
• Chevrolet Camaro
• Pontiac Firebird
• Many, many other cars that used the Ford Windsor V8 or Chevy small-block 305
• 5.4L:
• Ford Expedition
• Ford Excursion
• 5.6L:
• Nissan Titan
• 5.7L:
• Chevrolet Corvette
• Chevrolet Chevelle
• Chevrolet Malibu
• Chevrolet Imapala SS
• Dodge Challenger
• Dodge Charger
• Jeep Grand Cherokee
• Chrysler 300C
• Many, many, many, many, many other vehicles with American V8s of near 350 cubic inches
• 5.8L:
• Ford Mustang SVT Cobra
• Ford F-150
• 5.9L:
• The Chrysler LA 360 cubic inch engine worked out to 5.9 L. I have only seen this in metric units on the Jeep Grand Cherokee of the late 90s.
• The very famous Cummins 5.9L I6 diesel that went into heavy duty Dodge pickups never received factory badging that contained the number 5.
• 6.5L V12:
• Lamborghini Murcielago LP650-4.... hahaha. Not in my neighborhood.
• 7.5L V8:
• Ford had a 460 cubic inch engine, which is 7.5L. Not that common to see these anymore, but it's possible. This is one of the largest engines made after WWII, so we won't go any higher.

Vehicles with a separate trim badge containing 5 (not necessarily related to engine).

• Chevy Silverado 1500/2500/3500...
• Ford F-150/250/350...
• GMC Sierra 1500/2500/3500...
• Dodge Ram 1500/2500/3500...
• Toyota Tacoma/4Runner/Tundra SR5

*- Only counting vehicles available in the American market after 1985, let's be serious here.
**- I know this isn't an exhaustive list. I'm going with what I can think of off the top of my head. If you want to tell me all the cars I missed with a certain engine, bear in mind (1) that thinking of every car in the world isn't necessarily helpful to finding the answer; and (2) that not all cars have engine badges. Please direct your comments to my logfile, which is located at /dev/null.

Happily, to whittle down this enormous list, there are five key characteristics of this letter we can examine.

Comparison to 1989 Honda badge

1. It's plastic. Through the 80s and even into the beginning of the 90s, badges were almost all metal or enamel. This would seem to indicate it's from a car within the past 20 years.
2. It's in pretty good shape. Still very shiny. Again, this says that it's probably not on the earlier side of our scale. I would bet already that this badge came from the 21st century.
3. It's physically large. Larger cars generally have larger badges, as do pickup trucks. I put it up against a 1980's Honda badge. The Honda front emblem is bigger singly, but the 5 is just a single digit of what is surely a larger nameplate. If it were three or four digits, that would be quite large.
4. Subjectively, the font is long, thick, simple, aggressive, and modern. That points to pickup truck.
5. It wasn't broken off of any other number clusters. This 5 stood alone, so it's unlikely that it was part of any engine badging (except Mercedes). That's a relief because there are too many options there.

Bearing in mind point #5, and eliminating engines entirely, there are many models which had free-standing 5s as part of their badging, but there are five subtle differences.

BMW: Classy, but not it.

Mercedes: Not even close.

1. Mercedes uses a smooth, traditional font which has been almost unchanged for decades. It's not a good match.
2. BMW's 5-Series always carries a freestanding 5. But it uses more angular numbers and letters in their badging. The 5 you see as part of the 5-Series badge is typical, and it's also not a good match.
3. The Mazda 5 badge uses a script 5. The Mazda CX-5 is different, but it had a pronounced dip roughly near the centroid of the 5. This doesn't match the style of the 5 we are looking at.
4. Audi has a handful of models which use a freestanding 5, but Audi's 5 is extremely thin, feminine, and rather tall, so it's almost exactly the opposite sort of shape.
5. The Nissan 350Z badge is very, very close! They both have a straight edge between the top line of the five and the downward stroke. But the curve of the 5 on the 350Z is a more like a rounded-off square-like shape, while my 5 is a genuine curve. At first glance I really saw them as identical, but the 350Z badge is a little too small to have produced a 5 this large, and the minor stylistic differences become apparent on closer examination.

   

   Nissan 350Z: I thought it was a dead ringer at first.

Bearing in mind point #3, and the fact that this was found in Houston, statistics would suggest a relatively good possibility that this was a pickup truck's badge. Let's look at five possibilities.

Ford F-150: One-piece only.

1. Toyota used the trim SR5 on lots of its trucks, but the badge always came in one piece, so 5 did not stand alone.
2. The Ford F-150 is the best-selling pickup truck in the US, and its larger siblings the F-250, F-350 and so on generally lead their own classes. But (since at least the 80s) the F-Series badges are one-piece for all the models, so this is a moot point.
3. The Chevrolet Silverado is a strong second-place in this market; its cousin the GMC Sierra is almost identical. They both have the same badging as well. On older GM pickups, the 1500/2500/... badge was one-piece, but for recent models, there are single free-standing digits. It has a lot of similarities that lead me to continue to think pickups are the answer. Despite this, the 5 in the 2500 you see to the right is very angular and squared off, so we're not seeing quite the right style.
4. GMC is largely the same story as Chevy. Although GMC had its own engines in the 1960s and earlier, they have been exactly the same as Chevrolet trucks with only minor trim details for at least 30 years. The badging remains the same. It would be a fool's errand to try to differentiate the 1500 badge between a GMC and a Chevy. They are exactly the same, with no material or apparent differences.



Chevy/GMC badge: Very close indeed!

5. The Dodge Ram generally comes 3rd in the pickup truck market. In 2010, Chrysler created a Ram brand that was separate from Dodge, so they are no longer Dodge trucks. The newest Ram 1500 pickups trucks DO have free-standing letters and they are awfully close in shape to my 5 here. But

   

   Newest Ram is also close, but not correct.

   they're not identical. The older Dodge Rams from the mid-2000s, though, are a perfect match! Prior to 2002, the Rams used single-piece 1500 trim badges like Ford and GM. However, Dodge/Ram also uses a single-piece badge for the 2500 and higher spec; these are "heavy duty" and so contain the trim level (2500, 3500, 4500) in silver surrounded in black with the silver words "Heavy Duty" surrounded in red below. Thus, we can infer it is not a heavy-duty truck.

2002-2008 Dodge Ram 1500. Lone Star trim pictured.

Conclusion: I have high confidence that this 5 came from a 2002-2008 Dodge Ram 1500. If you know better than me and have something to add, please mention it in the comments. I'll give you a high five!

Joke of the Day #23

In the 1860s there was an adventurous, rich, eccentric German computer scientist who decided to lead an expedition into uncharted, harsh territory. Even if it turned out to be a failure, he would enjoy compiling a record of his journey. Maybe he'd even make an entire library of his findings.

Before leaving, he freed his entire collection of animals in a stable release, keeping only his mouse. Having no wife or family, the only regular people in his life he had to inform of his absence were his mailman and garbage collector. He went to an American port in transit, and was excited to see monitors of the US Navy anchored there, and spoke with a Commodore who linked him to an assembler that he would need to build his ship design, and a quartermaster who could load the ship quickly.

The assembler he contracted to build his ship gave warnings about the design he had provided, and also warned that the shipyard scheduler would rather allocate labor for domestic merchant traffic than wealthy foreigners, but he built it nevertheless. As the build was underway, a government representative told him that the codes had changed and it would have to be rebuilt. Some of the ship's chains were brittle and so there could be a problem linking to the anchor. There was a brief row when it was discovered the German's plans were in metric units; the American builders only had standard tools, and they would not acquire new sockets and ratcheting handles just for his sake.

The first post-build event was finding a crew and suitable leadership. He found a mentally unstable Army kernel who had been terminated from his position after issuing an illegal instruction to his troops, but would be useful nevertheless. The journey would be arduous, but his spirits were high.

He noted with gruesome interest the habit of cannibalism among a small tribe he called the Init, especially weak children who would likely not survive. Even parents were known to fork a child. The native peoples said that this kind of ritual killing was necessary to avoid the child coming back to haunt the Earth as a zombie. The German logged his protests, but to the native people they didn't register. The team feared that if they stayed longer they might be executed, so they left the settlement.

The expedition ventured into an almost deserted region, where they could hardly find a nibble to eat. Their maps were out-of-date and the food containers were empty. The kernel panicked and took his men back to civilization. The German pressed on alone; he avoided resource starvation by catching birds. One chubby, round robin caught in his snare made for a hearty meal. Throughout the journey, he found himself covered in insects despite his best efforts to de-bug his body and clothes.

After an additional week of no significant findings, the German happened upon a mountain which did not exist on his map.  Unfortunately it turned out to be a volcano, and it erupted in a shower of molten #pragma. Due to a heap of falling volanic rock, he suffered a severe head crash and knew that he would not survive much longer. Trapped in a cave-in while trying to ESC, he wanted an ALT method of dying rather than resource starvation. Using his own bootstraps and some scrounged threads, he made enough rope to end his life. He scrawled an abbreviation of his own name in the side of the cave: "SIGABRT". Because the volcanic embers entombed him in the cave, explorers agreed his body could never be recovered, and will remain hanging indefinitely.

Name that Car #4: Unnamed wagon in Target Facebook ad

Posted by Target on Facebook August 20, 2013

What we have here is a classic scene from American late 20th century culture: a station wagon filled with stuff that a college student will need to live on his or her own for the next four glorious years.

As you can see, I "like" Target. The main reason I shop at Target is because the service, quality and (surprisingly) prices of my local Walmart are very poor indeed. Yet one of the reasons I "like" Target is that they don't have ridiculous "edgy" advertising. This is just lighthearted, feel-good stuff. This particular picture kinda reminds me of 1980's commercials with their warm tones and happy jingles.

Wait! Look at the wagon! No wonder it reminds me of the 80's... that wagon looks like it's from about 1980. I perfectly understand the need of non-automotive companies to use completely nondescript, unidentifiable vehicles in their advertising, since they don't want to alienate buyers of other car brands or peg their company to the image of the brand you see on the screen. Generally this effect is silly, since they resort to debadging a 1980s BMW or similar, and just assume we'll write it off as a boxy old car with no known provenance. This does much of the same thing. Target doesn't sell cars and they don't really want you to know or care what wagon this is. But too bad for them, because I do care, and I will figure it out.

They did a good job making it look nondescript. The tailgate is up and out of the way, preventing us from seeing the badge itself. The design language of the rear end is neither very distinctive nor very recent...  this looks like a car I have probably not seen on the roads in a long time.

1985 Mercedes W123 looks great, but it's not the one.

My first impression when I saw it was Mercedes-Benz. Compare it to a W123 or W201 wagon, though, and you see that the Mercs always had a certain texture to the glass that this wagon doesn't share. It's obviously not a Merc, or an Audi, which had decidedly square taillights.

The triangular amber indicators that you see at the top of the taillight cluster flummoxed me for a bit. Almost all of the period wagons that would be known to North Americans had proud upright rectangles for taillights. All of my earliest guesses for American makes were badly wrong: Ford Fairmont (no resemblence), Ford LTD (none here either), or even ugly Japanese wagons like the Nissan Prairie. All were highly angular and had none of that comparatively interesting shape of the rear that we see on this example.

So I did a few more Google image searches of early-80s wagons that I could remember. I stuck with the German idea and it hit me that it might be a Volkswagen, simply because they were the most likely to have this kind of obscure, never-used-again design language for a station wagon rear end.

VW sold lots of popular world cars in the United States, but generally only after giving them silly NA-specific names. None of them did very well except the Beetle. The Volkswagen Golf was sold here as the Rabbit, the Volkswagen Type 181 was sold as the Thing, and the first-gen VW Passat made it to the States as the Volkswagen Dasher. I am not sure if the names made them especially memorable, because they have almost totally faded from the American consciousness.  Though the Mk 1 Golf was beloved in Europe, even assembling the car in the US did not help its appeal very much in the States, and the Golf never recaptured the appeal of the old Beetle on our shores.

The Dasher was even more of an odd fellow. As American cars of the 1970s go, it was quite small, but it was the biggest Volkswagen you could buy, and it was not especially cheap. Original MSRP (according to NADA) on a 1978 Volkswagen Dasher wagon was a hefty $6,375. Bearing in mind that 1970s dollars were worth quite a lot of modern dollars, you could have saved almost two grand buying a Chevy Nova of comparable size (although gas mileage and refinement would be much worse) and saved a bit by buying yourself a fancy Buick or a titillating Pontiac Firebird Formula with the top 180-hp V8. I actually still do see Firebirds and Novas of the 1970s on the road today, while I have certainly not seen a Dasher in at least the 15 years since I've been paying attention to all the cars I see. Is the German quality really worth that huge premium, if they don't seem to last any longer overall?

1980 Volkswagen Dasher Diesel

But this is indeed a Volkswagen Dasher, which was sold in the US from 1974 to 1981. I can't possibly determine what year this car is based on the rear end alone. Maybe I had a fortunate guess in the first place, since the taillights of the wagon share no styling resemblance with those of the sedan.

I'll credit the excellent Consumer Guide car book of the 1970s (the entire collection spans the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s as well) for jogging my memory. The whole collection is amazing, but the 1940s book is hard to find, and the 1930s book is downright rare (and correspondingly expensive). Buy all those books if you can find them, as they rank among the best resources for car aficionados in the US.

Joke of the Day #22

Sal: Why did you flee to Canada after you escaped from prison?

Hal: Because I had nowhere else Toronto.

Priebe's analogy

The memory hierarchy is one of the abstractions in computer architecture that has withstood the test of time for at least the past 30 years. It was a lot simpler in the '80s, since computers did not have caches and while mainframes had access to tape storage, most microcomputers did not have hard disk drives.

There are many figures of merit to memory. The most important consideration is the distinction between size and speed: you can have one or the other. There are frontiers to what is possible with memory using today's technology. There is no memory that has the capacity of a modern hard disk with the access time of an CPU register, even for all the money in the world. However, since a computer needs to be able to execute programs using instruction and data memory very quickly, and it needs to store large files for future use, there need to be present multiple levels of memory in all digital systems except for the most very basic embedded systems. Other considerations exist: cost per gigabyte, reliability, physical size, and expandability.

Volatility

An unmentioned characteristic of the fastest memory is that it is invariably short-term. It is possible to execute code that rewrites the entire register file a million times in the blink of an eye. The SRAM on the processor, known as the cache, is short-term memory for the processor and it is constantly updated to whatever is most likely to be used by the processor, possibly changing every entry in the table every time a new process is completed. DRAM modules, historically and still known as "main memory," need to be constantly refreshed and they vanish when the power is out. Flash memory is persistent semiconductor memory, but compared to a disk it cannot be written as frequently; the mean longevity of flash-based memory as of this writing is about 10,000 writes; nevertheless, manufacturers as of 2013 are capable of warrantying SSDs (solid-state drives, or hard drives based on flash) to the same length as conventional disk drives. Nevertheless, the cost per gigabyte of semiconductors is much more than magnetic disk platters, so HDDs remain dominant for persistent storage at this time.

The bad old days

In the beginning, there was obviously no defined hierarchy. However, even the earliest machines had registers, even if it was only an accumulator for intermediate arithmetic results. The computer programs of the 1940s to 1960s were mostly arithmetical, designed to provide mathematical solutions to artillery trajectories, business solutions, and bookkeeping batch processing. Instructions and data still had to be entered into the machine's memory from punched cards or tape, and the "main memory" went through some ugly experimentation (UNIVAC used mercury delay line memory) until in 1954 it settled on magnetic core memory. This had a great run, but by the end of the 1970s it had been totally superseded by semiconductor-based DRAM.

All of these memories were slow (DRAM is still very slow compared to CPUs today and it will never catch up), but the main performance bottleneck has almost always been getting data into memory. It took far longer to enter the punched cards and read them into the machine than it did to execute the instructions. Although memories became larger and could store ever more complex programs, they were always outpaced by the demands of programs. Efficient memory usage was especially critical on the small-scale microcomputers that were the vanguard of the PC revolution in the early 1980s. These had a small amount of ROM that was always loaded when the computer was powered on to run the BIOS; the cheaper 8-bit home computers like the VIC-20 and Apple IIe did not have hard disk drives and this untouchable ROM was the only persistent memory on the machine, save for external floppy disks. The IBM PC started shipping with a hard drive in 1983, and eventually everybody else got the idea.

Does anyone miss reading programs into memory on microcomputers using floppy disks, or, even worse, compact cassettes? Neither do I. Computers sucked back then. I can be nostalgic about some aspects of old technology, but we should be infinitely grateful for what the past 20 years has brought us in terms of computing.

In the 1980s, the processor rarely had access to any on-chip memory aside from the register file, and coders in assembly (or compilers, for that matter) routinely used as many of the registers as they could, so it was impossible to use them for any kind of storage. DRAM was universally used to load programs, but, as previously stated, was just as slow relative to the CPU then as it is now. To get around this problem, Intel started putting L1 cache memory on-chip for the 486 processor, and with the Pentium Pro they finally had L1 and L2 caches. Cache memory stands alongside pipelining and multiple cores as one of the most important breakthroughs in microprocessors. Since then we've added L3 cache as well, since the roles of each cache level have changed a bit with multiple cores on the same die, but the memory hierarchy has remained in the same form since c. 1995.

Priebe's analogy*

All of the various types of memory have different roles to play. They are all needed in some way. All general purpose computers built nowadays will have a CPU with a register file, onboard cache, and will need RAM on the motherboard, and will probably also need an SSD or HDD. For truly massive data storage, tertiary storage sits below the disk.

To understand the role they each play, and the timeliness versus capacity tradeoff, I'll share with you Priebe's analogy. Suppose you are watching a football game at home. You are responsible for providing access to beer whenever one of your friends runs empty.

1. All beer enters your mouth from a bottle in your hand. Think of a beer in your hand as a register (and when everyone present in the party has a beer in their hand, you may be said to be fully utilizing the register file). It is so quickly available that it is practically no latency. However, just as you can only hold one beer in your hand, the register file can't hold much data, perhaps on the order of hundreds of bytes.
2. You could go to the fridge each time someone wants a beer (perhaps like you once did in the olden days) but you have yourself a fancy cooler onsite. Think of the cooler as the cache. This cooler also provides a short access time, although not as quite as short as bringing the bottle to your lips, you can still lean over, flip the lid, and grab a cold one in a few seconds. It takes maybe ten times longer to do this than to drink from a beer that is already in your hand, but this can't be helped. If you use an operand in the register for as long as you can and consistently find what you need in the cache, it's the best possible outcome.
3. The fridge is the lowest level of access that could be described as readily available. Think of the fridge as main memory. You're going to take a couple minutes to get what you need and load the cooler back up, making it much less convenient. However, it is still basically present. If someone had beer in their fridge, they would treat it like it was on the premises. Going into memory is a distinct penalty from using the cache, but it is only thousands of times slower. I guess if we wanted to make it realistic, the main memory access should take hours compared to the cache access! Still, as we're going to see, it could be a lot worse.
4. You have a large party and they consume all the beer in the fridge! If the fridge is empty, this is a very bad thing. You can't cancel all the festivities, but everyone is in for a long wait. You have to go to the store to get more beer. Think of the supermarket as the disk drive, or secondary storage. The difference between walking to the fridge to retrieve even one beer compared to driving through heavy traffic and standing in an enormous checkout line to purchase a new supply of beer, which you had to get at the rearmost aisle, is somewhat analogous to the difference between a memory access and a disk access. Except that a disk access is on the scale of milliseconds, which amounts to millions of cycles. It's massively slower than main memory, so it's truly a tragedy for performance whenever a disk access occurs (sometimes through a page fault), but its size is practically unlimited for most purposes.
5. For desktops, the disk is as far down as the hierarchy goes and it is where the example ended in class. However, I personally wanted to carry it further! If an organization had implausibly high demands for beer and denuded an entire store of its supply, they would just go to another one, and another until their demands were met. Likewise, a user who needed more storage space than a single disk would simply have to buy more disks until the demand was satisfied. However, there are businesses whose sole role is to deal in beer and provide it to people, and for them, their own supply might exceed that of any supermarket's supply, so it makes sense that they would incorporate a layer of supply that went above and beyond going to the store and buying some. Likewise, there are archives and databases of tertiary storage which store petabytes of data, far more than any individual would normally acquire, and stores them on magnetic tape libraries, swapping between sections of the library as needed. Accessing data on a tape archive amounts to billions of cycles.  It's so slow that, using the same time scale as the previous examples, you could think of tertiary storage as founding a brewery and building it from the ground up to be one of the world's largest breweries. It's incredibly, agonizingly slow, but archives do need to exist to back up data in huge quantities, just like someone had to spend the time to make a successful brewing company, or else we wouldn't have beer available to us in the first place.

*- This analogy was mentioned in a lecture of my introductory computer architecture class as taught by Dr. Apan Qasem in Spring 2013. Dr. Roger Priebe is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Texas State University, my alma mater. Dr. Qasem is an Assistant Professor at the same institution.

There were two Murderers' Rows in 1927

There's the one we know best....

1927 New York Yankees

...and the one which actually changed the world forever.

Solvay Conference, 1927

Name that Car #3: Ice Station Zebra (1968)

This is a very underrated action movie. The scenes in the sub are rather terrifying. I really like Rock Hudson in this role. I think Patrick McGoohan also did a fantastic job. I also like the cars.

The Marines arrive

The first tenth of the movie takes place in the United Kingdom, at a US submarine base. US Marines are quickly mustered as part of a very hush-hush rescue operation in the Arctic. They are carried to the base in trucks that are obviously not of local manufacture.

1965 Ford F-100

It's clearly visible that these are Ford trucks with the spaced-out F O R D lettering across the grill. The general shape of the truck leads us into the 1961-1966 fourth generation. The fact that the amber turn signals are mounted co-linearly with the Ford lettering means that it must be 1965-1966, and the fact that it uses the simple eggcrate grill rather than the more overwrought later grill makes it pretty definitively a 1965 Ford F-100. If this movie were not made in 1968, leaving no doubt that the trucks can be identified by grill trim, then it would be a lot harder to establish the provenance of these trucks. On older trucks (even moreso than cars), grills are often swapped for adjacent model years by the restorers to fit with their own tastes or what parts are available. The military versions obviously use painted trim rather than chrome on the grill, but the details are all still there to find out.

Jones's escort vehicle

Right after the convoy pulls away, a poncy British luxury car pops up. Keen eyes will notice that it's an obviously Bentley grill, but identifying it from the front-end only is very difficult. If there were any questions that it's a Bentley, the winged B logo can be seen clearly in an earlier scene.

Even in the 1960s, Rolls-Royce and Bentley still often allowed customers to purchase rolling chassis whose bodywork would be built up by outside coachbuilders. However, by the late 1940s RR-Bentley were also employing John Polwhele Blatchley to design in-house bodywork designs. With a separate chassis, the coachbuilders had a free hand in where to make the door hinges, and Blatchley's "standard steel sports saloon" design for the Bentley Mark VI chose to have suicide front doors (with hinges at the rear) and conventional rear doors (hinges at the front). So too does the car in this movie. But the same could also be said about the R Type, its successor.

From the rear...

The rear shots of the car while driving through the countryside are what shows that it must be a Mark VI and not the later R Type: the rather stubby boot. The distinguishing feature between the R Type and earlier Mark VI was that the former had a much longer boot. The fact that the Mark VI was over twice as common on British roads also makes it a more obvious choice to put in the film.

Bentley didn't do distinct model years (far too American and vulgar) so it's not straightforward to distinguish between the earliest 1946 Mark VIs and the latest from 1952; this car, by my estimation, could come from anywhere in that timeframe.

...the difference is clear. Bentley Mark VI for sure.

Name that Car #2: The Big Sleep (1946)

Marlowe's car in the film

Ah, this is a great film. One of the exemplars of the film noir genre. This is one of several high-quality Bogart/Bacall pictures by Warner Bros. in the 1940s. Bogie is at his smoothest and cleverest. I loved the character of Philip Marlowe and the fact that he drove around in the same car throughout the movie meant that it was begging to be named. The car itself was not called upon to do any dangerous chases, and towards the end of the movie he lets air out of one of his own tires as an excuse to request help from the auto shop which is a front for more sinister operations.

Marlowe doesn't ask for any money from the General above his "$25 a day plus expenses". A working man's car suits a working man's wage. It's clearly a 1938 Plymouth coupe. In 1946, most Americans still had prewar cars, and the last ones had been built in very early 1942. By 1949, most of these had been replaced with new cars. Still, the expansion of the market was inexhaustible, and demand kept outpacing supply until about 1954, when the Ford-Chevy price war resulted in record sales for both, and started pushing the independents out of business.

A beautifully preserved '38 Plymouth

An additional fun fact- the car wasn't the only old thing about the movie when it was released. Filming on The Big Sleep was actually completed early in 1945, but it lay on a shelf until Warner Bros. finished releasing its backlog of war-related films, since these were assumed to have a dwindling shelf life, while The Big Sleep was not time-sensitive. The wartime scenery includes a "B" fuel ration window sticker on Marlowe's Plymouth. This entitled him to a whopping eight gallons of gasoline per week!

Spot the sticker

Name that Car #1: Driver (PS1, 1999)

Welcome to the "Name that Car" feature, where I attempt to provide a solid identification of an interesting or well-known car in film, video games, or other visual media.

It's 1999. If you're a cool kid, you have a PlayStation. I wasn't a cool kid and I had a Nintendo 64. Just between Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, I probably had more fun than the cool kids. But that's a subject left for another article.

Driver was a very popular PS-1 game released in 1999. I got to play just a bit of it on my brother's PlayStation. The general idea is that you were a getaway driver for various criminals and you had to start off by proving your driving skills. The rest of the game seemed to involve escaping from cops, keeping your "felony level" down, not wrecking your ride too much, meeting time deadlines, and blah blah blah... Grand Theft Auto III would become so enormously popular two years later that we already fully know how this kind of game operates.

But unlike in GTA, you couldn't pick your ride. Oh no, that would be too easy. It's not about the car, it's about the driver! So to show how awesome you are, you get to tool around in what looks like a lousy Malaise-mobile. Let's take a few looks at it.

Based on the general order of the back end I'm going to start with 70s Buick. If the front end didn't have dual headlights, I would say it's a perfect 1975-1979 Buick Skylark coupe. The side profile is simple, just a straight line running across with a curved roofline going backwards to a fairly stubby trunk. This points me in the direction of the GM X-body from the mid-to-late 1970s, something shared with the Chevy Nova, Pontiac Ventura, and Oldsmobile Omega. Only the Buick has that characteristic slatted grill treatment. Still, the dual headlights are quite clearly present, which disqualifies that prediction. We have to find a closest match!

The Buick Regals from 1973-1977 also have the grill treatment we're looking for, while they do have the vestigial inside lights that match the square shape of the Driver car. From the front it's a dead ringer. The back end is not quite as pinched with the bumper not quite as high, but let's chalk it up to artistic exaggeration on the part of the game designers. From the side, it looks like the Driver car is too stubby to be a longer pre-1977 Buick, but this isn't carried over to other views of the car which incorporate a partial angle. With few polygons to play with, the swoopy profile of the Regal might have been mashed a bit for that side view. I'm going with a 1975 Buick Regal black coupe, final answer.

It really helps to see these two images, for comparison. Got a better idea than me? Feel free to mention it in the comments.