What is the sound of no cookie crumbling?

18 Replies

Tom Priddy, former colleague at The State and the man who introduced me to Internet porn*, encountered a terrible omen last night:

Uh, oh. Not only did my fortune cookie not have a fortune in it tonight, but it didn’t even have a cookie. Yep. It was a package of air. Never opened. Just a bubble. I think maybe I’d better just stay home tomorrow . . .

The only explanation I could offer him was that maybe it was a Zen cookie. What is the sound of no cookie crumbling?

* Perhaps that calls for an explanation. Tom was an early computer guru at the paper, and by the late 80s or very early 90s had taken a job with Knight Ridder corporate doing something technical and mysterious, although his office was still at the paper in Columbia (he was maybe the first person I knew to have such a long-distance job enabled by technology). He was helping me on a project one day in his office, and somehow it came up that people were using computers and modems — not the Web, this was before common access to the Internet — to share dirty pictures. I said “Really? Show me.” Several minutes later — it took some time to identify a relevant server, dial up and establish a connection — a picture started gradually revealing itself on his screen, very slowly, one line of pixels at a time. We continued with the task I had come there for while it unfolded. It turned out to be a fairly unremarkable picture of a nude woman lying on a bed, with her head tilted back looking at the camera. Not really X-rated, more hard R or NC-17 at most. I made a note, and promptly assigned a reporter to do a story on this new form of high-tech porn, which ended up running on our features front.

18 thoughts on “What is the sound of no cookie crumbling?”

  1. Brad

    I said he took a job with KR corporate. Actually, it may have been KRT, a joint news service of Knight Ridder and the (Chicago) Tribune company, based in Washington. His job had to do with providing subscribers with a database of news photos and graphics — which is why Tom knew something about the kinds of images out there. Previously, I had known KRT — and computers overall — as being about text. I was still sort of amazed that you could get high-res pictures, of any kind, from those machines.

    The funny thing about this story to me is that Tom is such a solid, all-business kind of guy that the idea that he knew about something like that was incongruous…

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  5. Tom Priddy

    As you said, Brad, this would have been well before the Internet and Web became popular. I left Columbia in April of 1993, and I believe I saw my first website (the Louvre in Paris) around 1994, perhaps. At the time of your anecdote I was working for PressLink, and we were attempting to test out the transmission of digital images electronically through dial-up.

    We were working with a California company that was trying to compress images enough to make it practical to send a photo from one location to another. People forget now, but prior to the establishment of JPEG compression, the only digital images possible were scanned from negatives into TIFF files, which were huge by 1990 standards. They would have taken an hour and lots of online charges to transfer.

    By 1991 we (PressLink, a Knight-Ridder company headed by Roger Fidler) was able to transmit digital images from the Super Bowl to newspapers around the world.

    Seems like a simple thing now, with all of us being able to send a photo of our kids anywhere in the world from our phones, but it was huge back then.

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  6. Silence

    As a teenager in the late 80’s and early 90’s I recall the old BBS & modem days. Porn was a popular pastime for my friends and I in those days, if we found anything good we’d save it to 5 1/4 disk and bring it to school to trade with our friends.

    First, we’d have to make sure that everyone in the house was done using the telephone. Then it was time to crank up the PC and try to dial in to one of the local BBS numbers. Once we’d get through we’d queue up a bunch of files to download. In the morning we’d see if we’d gotten anything worthwhile.

    Kids today have it too easy. I remember my 1200 baud modem, and upgrading to a new internal 2400 baud modem. When I went off to college we had 9600 baud modems in built into our campus phone system. Nowadays it’s all about broadband and instant gratification.

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  9. bud

    What was the name of the Jimmy Stewart movie where he wired a photo somehow and blew up the image to reveal the date of a newspaper in the distance? That movie was made in the 40s or 50s. Was it possible to do that back then?

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  10. bud

    The movie is Northside 777 made in 1948. Here’s a brief synopsis from Wiki:

    In Chicago in 1932, during Prohibition, a policeman is murdered inside a speakeasy. Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) and another man are quickly arrested, and are later sentenced to serve 99 years’ imprisonment each for the killing. Eleven years later, Wiecek’s mother puts an ad in the newspaper offering a $5,000 reward for information about the true killers of the police officer. This leads the city editor of the Chicago Times Brian Kelly (Lee J. Cobb) to assign reporter P.J. McNeal (James Stewart) to look more closely into the case. McNeal is skeptical at first, believing Wiecek to be guilty. But he starts to change his mind, and meets increased resistance from the police and the state attorney’s office, who are unwilling to be proved wrong. This is quickly followed by political pressure from the state capital, where politicians are anxious to end a story that might prove embarrassing to the administration. Eventually, Wiecek is proved innocent by, among other things, the enlarging of a photograph showing the date on a newspaper that proves that a key witness’s statement was false.

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  11. Doug Ross

    @Silence

    Why, back in my day (1978), sonny, I was using a terminal with thermal paper output, a 150 baud modem with acoustic coupler and our pictures were ASCII art.

    Here’s a photo of me back in those days working on a teletype. I was a beast at BASIC programming.

    http://i.imgur.com/SytBu.jpg

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  13. Brad

    And Bud, I thought you were confused with “Blow-Up.”

    You said something about “wired a photo”…

    Back in the 40s and 50s, you wouldn’t have been able to blow up a wirephoto very much and still have good resolution. It would have been tough with the wirephotos I worked with in the 70s, and I doubt they were better earlier on — unless it was a special transmission.

    The blow-ups in “Blow-Up,” which just involved an enlargement from a negative, then a photo taken of the enlargement, then THAT negative blown up, and so on — very low-tech — were fairly believable. The grain got bigger, and resolution was lost, at each step, as I recall.

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  14. Brad

    By the way, as I just backhandedly acknowledged, I was accustomed to getting pictures over the wire from distant places. We’d had that my whole career (and for decades before that). In fact, when I was the news editor in Wichita in the mid-80s, I was the only person in the newsroom who knew how to fix the UPI photo machine when it jammed. (That was the only place I ever worked that had a UPI machine — usually it was just AP. The UPI photos, which included images from Reuters, were superior to AP. They’d shoot the same event, but just frame it better and get a better-looking, more interesting image. Too bad UPI was fading away as my career began.)

    But the first high-res, full-color pictures I saw showing up on a bright computer screen just beat that all hollow. Big difference.

    Here’s what a typical wirephoto looked like. And here’s another one, which on my screen comes up almost actual size.

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  15. Doug Ross

    “Everyone note, there’s no screen on which to view pornographic pictures.”

    Back in my day, we had imaginations. And there was always this:

    (.) (.)

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  17. Silence

    Doug, those are sagging a bit, might need a lift.

    (oXo)

    There, that’s better. Of course, after you’ve been looking at boobies for a while, sometimes you want to go “full frontal ASCII”…

    @@@
    @. .@
    @\=/@
    .- -.
    /(o|o)\
    \ ).( /
    ‘( v )`
    \|/
    (|)
    ‘-`

    Hope the formatting holds, cause that’s a hot one!

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  18. Nick Nielsen

    In 1973, the ASCII art version of the Marilyn Monroe centerfold was hanging on the wall in the staff workroom at my local college…in two different formats: 11×17 and 17×44.

    The locals all thought that was totally cool!

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