There was a Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago with a large archive of video tape of broadcast TV.[1] For decades, anyone could go there and ask to watch anything in the archive. But they closed over a year ago. They're looking for a new location, but that's been going on for a while now.
Is there anywhere we can get a current status of this effort? At first glance there doesn't seem to be anywhere close to the full archive (there are only 182 items in that collection).
There's also the Paley Center for Media[1], formerly the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York. They are unfortunately not completionist, but they do have good taste in what they do archive.
As one might expect, these tapes eventually began to take up space — a lot of it. By investing in Apple stock, Stokes saved enough money to buy as many as nine additional apartments, which she used as storage units to hold all of her tapes.
Why apartments vs storage units? More secure/humidity/pest controlled?
Also, starting in 1979, I assume the raw price of the tapes was exorbitant.
That detail is actually a little odd. Without making a research project out of it--and possibly not taking into account various splits properly--it looks like it was into the 2000s before AAPL shares really took off. There were way better investments during dot-com--assuming you dumped them in time of course.
When I lived in a 1930s apartment building, there were door frames throughout the floor. I could have expanded my 2b2ba to the entire floor by putting doors on either side of the central elevators.
If she lived in a similar building, all she'd have had to do was move her door to the end of the hall, and all of the apartments around her would have become additional rooms.
I think if she'd been motivated by short term price efficiency, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Given she chose to buy nine apartments, we can at least assume she found the arrangement convenient and affordable, and that she valued fixed expenses. Extending from that, so she could house the televisions, easily access and change the tapes, and not have to transport them to wherever might be cheaper but further for storage, she would have chosen apartments physically near her.
My explanation was how someone could "buy apartments" to expand their floor plan, which is what I thought it likely she did, since people may not be familiar with how that might work.
Philadelphia real estate was very affordable at the time. Storage wasn't commonplace like it is now and would have involved moving things to a warehouse district, while there are some near where she lived that might have been less easy than just acquiring cheep coop apartments.
Not sure where you're from, but in most of the US "apartments" are not assets, but liabilities: tenants don't own them, but rent them. We generally call them "condos" when owned.
> Not sure where you're from, but in most of the US "apartments" are not assets, but liabilities: tenants don't own them, but rent them.
A rented apartment is a liability to the tenant, but an asset to the landlord. And whether a residence is rented or owner-occupied isn't an inherent property of the residence, since it can change over time–it isn't uncommon (for a person of sufficient means) to buy a new house/apartment/etc and then rent out the old one instead of selling it.
> We generally call them "condos" when owned.
Is this a peculiarity of American English? In Australian English, "apartment" is about the type of physical structure, and has nothing to do with the building's legal structure. (What Americans call "condominiums", Australians call "strata title", but it is essentially the same thing–newer apartment buildings are almost all strata title, but older buildings sometimes have other ownership structures, for example company title.)
Thought it was pretty obvious we were talking about the tenant, not the landlord. This is such weird nitpicking. When people in the US talk about apartments, they're almost always rented. The only place I've ever heard someone say "I bought my apartment" is New York, but even that is just vernacular, because the governing body is some sort of association or condo board.
I tell you this as an American who's spent enough decades on this earth hearing English, American apartments are rented 99.9% of the time.
> The only place I've ever heard someone say "I bought my apartment" is New York, but even that is just vernacular, because the governing body is some sort of association or condo board.
It's not "just vernacular", it is perfectly proper formal English. For many non-Americans – and even it seems many Americans too – calling something an "apartment" says nothing about the legal structure of building ownership.
I can find heaps of American news stories about people in the US buying apartments. Random example, this 2007 story from Fox News about the disappearance of a college student in Madison, Wisconsin [0]. It says regarding the victim that "Nolan, originally from Waunakee, had recently bought an apartment and moved to Madison from Whitewater, where she went to school". If Fox News is talking about people buying apartments in Madison, Wisconsin, then it is perfectly normal American English. Much more convincing than random Americans on HN telling me it isn't.
I guess this is the .1% then, as the article refers to her "9 apartments", which I presume were not tenanted.
For the record - to non Americans (both the majority of the world and the majority of the english speaking world) - "apartment" refers to the type of dwelling, not the ownership status. For many readers this localised hidden meaning in a common term is not obvious.
In the US, "apartment" at least strongly implies rented. You'd normally say condo (or co-op) if you own. (ADDED: Or just "my place" or something like that generically.)
The terminology is a bit loose but it would probably be more customary to write "buy as many as nine additional units." If I invite you to "my apartment" the implication is that I'm renting although that's not an absolute.
Nothing. It's just that, in the US, when you're renting a unit that isn't a whole house, you tend to call it an apartment as opposed to something else. It's just conventional word usage at least today.
Does choosing a word that implies something not imply some kind of intent in wanting to have the receiver take something from what was implied?
Perhaps there is some kind of social embarrassment in renting and thus apartment owners have come to try and differentiate themselves by using what originated as a legal term?
Homes and condos are an asset, but for a variable portion of their ownership history, they are assets with a matching liability.
If you don't pay rent for the next month, basically you're out, but other than the time you lived without paying, some penalties and interest on the owed amounts, you're free, albeit potentially homeless.
If you don't pay your mortgaged, you'll be mortgaged, thus, potentially homeless, but depending on how much you market is valued on the market at the time it happens, and the balance of your mortgage, you can still end up homeless but still owing money to the bank.
Purchasing real state assets that appreciate in value significantly over time is better than paying for rent expense every month if you don't indent those tapes to go anywhere else
Rent only really makes sense if you can't afford to buy, generally
Archiving television programs was not Stokes’ only fascination. In fact, the tech-savvy hoarder also took an early interest in Apple computers — and amassed 192 Macintosh computers before she died.
I'd really like to know more about why she collected 192 Macs. What did she think/know?
It’s not as if you get n shares priced at $x if you owned one share prices at $x. When a stock splits you get n shares each worth $x/n. The purpose is to lower the trading price for an individual share.
It's more like a recognition that the sales price probably has gone up a lot and that management likely has some level of confidence that it will continue to increase--though that is of course not a guarantee that NVIDIA is a good investment today.
As a kid, I'd videotape movies off broadcast TV onto VHS tapes. Only as an adult did I realize that the longer-term value of those recordings wasn't in the movies, but more in the ads I didn't always pause out, and -- most of all -- in the brief teasers of local news in the commercial breaks, which are probably lost to time.
I’ve noticed this phenomena all over. Same with our old home movies: they usually are of something like a high school graduation ceremony, but the really good parts are the times when the camera catches people talking normally, discussing plans for dinner that night or whatever.
It's going to happen again with digital. You just won't know which parts you'll miss. It won't be street walking, it won't be selfies, it might be your home with boring videos of you cooking or looking in the fridge. No one records that anymore, but we used to with video tapes.
I have a feeling we will really miss supermarket and retail interior footage with people actually shopping.
I’ve inherited a bunch of VHS tapes from around 2003-2008, mostly recordings of live broadcast football matches, including the commercial breaks. Who would I contact to work out if there’s any archival value to them? Part of me thinks they’re just not old enough and surely the stations had their own archives by that point, but part of me thinks they probably didn’t keep material in context with the ad breaks and possibly someone might find that interesting.
Take a peak on Reddit's /r/datahoarders or /r/datacurator. There's also https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ who may point you in a direction.
Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes.
As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.
If you want copies of old TV shows that had bad DVD/BD copies, and can get through the VCR snow, then maybe... uploading that stuff anywhere would probably still incur the wrath of DMCA takedowns though, so personal use only.
Back in the early 00s, I had a DVR and for the life of me, I couldn't get a clean copy of some shows. Stations would always throw junk on the screen, and some repeats of repeats would also have them (and sometimes weird cropping angles to boot)
Maybe you know this, but incredibly and amusingly (to me at least) it's sometimes the answer to post a comment here like yours, and someone appears saying [X] archival group will be happy to take them, email blah to arrange shipping.
Of course, absence of that doesn't mean there's no value to anyone.
71k tapes, 400k hours. 480p H.264 (already better quality than VHS) can be encoded at around 300MB/h, so the whole collection would take approximately 120TB, or less than 10 LTO-9 tapes. It's always amazing to see the massive increase in storage density over time, although reliability is a different story; nonetheless, tape is an established good choice for long-term archival.
This is misleading statement. If the recording format is better than the source format, it does not mean that the recording of the source will be better than the source. So I'm not really sure why this was added to all of the stats you've mentioned. Why not say that the LTO-9 tapes are better quality than VHS?
You then go on to say that "can" be encoded at around 300MB/h, yet that is also very misleading. Nobody encoding VHS tape sources at 480p will be using that kind of bit rate. You have to be using some very strange settings to even be able to convince an encoder to allow that value, and even then the encoder is so efficient I doubt it would ever use that bandwidth.
A media professor of mine had a huge collection of political commercials (and other politically-oriented media) in pre-VHS video. He passed away quite young and I assume that material was lost to the sands of time at some point. A lot of pre-digital media sort of depended on someone making a really serious effort to preserve it in some manner.
I wonder what stations were recorded. It'd be pretty cool to go back and relive the Saturday morning cartoons of childhood, complete with commercials. Or see old news broadcasts that you remember watching during dinner.
This is pretty impressive and all, and I'm glad this was actually archived and didn't just end up in a landfill, but at the risk of being that weird nerd... Why did she get one TV per recorder? I know very early models didn't have a tuner but it sounds she got them over time, so just hook them all up to one or two TVs, tune them to the appropriate channel and start recording!?
I guess she also wanted to be able to conveniently see what all the VCRs were recording, at any time? Ok, several TV sets were expensive, but compared to the cost of all the tapes (not to mention the apartments she bought to store the tapes) I guess it was just a rounding error...
Most VCRs were preset to output to UHF channel 36 (at least that's the UK numbering, it may be slightly different in the US), and so while recording different channels would be fine with multiple VCRs without a TV, watching the output from multiple VCRs wouldn't have been as easy. Maybe she wanted to be easily able to check what a particular VCR was recording without having to swap wires at the back of the TV. You could probably have made a giant coax switch box too, but it's unlikely they'd have been available commercially with more than just an A/B switch.
There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture.
Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!
UK stopped using VHF for TV in the early 1980s, at 405 lines. In the late 1960s the 625 standard started, and went from UHF channel 21 to about 69. TVs didn't support VHF frequencies.
Ch 36 was (is) about 590-600MHz, and wasn't used by any transmitters (neither was 35 or 37, at least until the 1990s when Channel 5 came out)
I’m not sure if she has any type of cataloguing in place, but she almost certainly has some programs that never were published outside of broadcast and who I’ve had a hard time talking to anyone about licensing.
If anyone has experience with any of this, please reach out, I’d be interest in learning more.
The article says she wanted to record the news as an important record of events. It's a contrast to these days, when news broadcasters are seen as sensationalists and at times politically motivated (by me anyway).
I find it intriguing that she went all in on AAPL stock, but was also an avowed communist in life. I'd have to wonder how she managed to reconcile her political views with the fierce capitalist landscape of the stock market, and ultimately benefiting from her good fortune?
Regardless, her contributions to archiving TV of the era is nothing short of impressive.
Culture isn't culture anymore, it's content to put ads around. People aren't artists, they are content creators. And now the final form, content is only useful past its ad serving ability if it can be used to train models.
[1] https://www.museum.tv/