No, I am not confusing Paillard with Pathe. Berliner's disk record format
was invented in 1895 and Paillard was the first company to market it widely.
The reason Russians knew it as Pathe was probably because that company's
products were the first ones they saw in any quantities. After all, a small
majority of Americans probably think that Henry Ford invented the
automobile, when what he actually did was apply a systematic assembly line
manufacturing technique using standardized interchangeable parts to the
production of the automobile, having invented neither the automobile nor the
assembly line method of production.
Only in the 1970's and especially beginning in the 1980's did the practice
begin of introducing a given model year's cars a full year ahead of the
designated year. Traditionally, before that in the U.S. the 1972 models
would be first shown and go on sale some time in October of 1970, for
example. There were 2000 model cars on sale as early as February, 1999, a
rather stupid practice if you ask me.
The Paillard New Century music box came out in time to be shipped in 1899
for Christmas and they were calling it the New Century. Of course, Mazda
was selling their top-line luxury car called the "Millennia" in 1996 as a
1997 model, so go figure.
Of course, getting the subject in line with computers, with MicroSoft's
delays in getting new versions of their operating environments out, it may
be 2002 before they actually release the MicroSoft Windows Millennium OS,
maybe late in 2001 if they are lucky, so the timing may at least be right,
and they still seem to be sticking to a promised February release of Windows
2000, so, that timng will be right, also, even though they first hoped that
at least three of the four proposed versions of Win 2000 would have already
been up and running on many of the targeted systems by the end of 1999.
Who knows, in another ten to fifteen years Windows in any flavor may be
eclipsed by something different, and maybe or maybe not better, just as
those big disk-playing music boxes were almost history by 1913 or so. I saw
a Columbia thing made in 1912 or 1913, pand made as late as 1916 called the
Columbia Graphophone Grand. This was a large floor-standing phonograph that
had a large tone box which could be flipped to play records with different
sized grooves. It cost $225 in 1913. For an additional $25 you could get a
music box attachment made by Regina of Chicago. You could take off the
record platter, move the phonograph arm out of the way, and reveal a music
box bedplate for mounting the music box disks, and slide a music box arm
across from the back of the machine. That shows how much out of style the
music box was by the early teens of the 20th century. The recofd player was
really good for its day, and the music box was really fine.
If the computer pundits get their way, in ten years or so, a big box on your
desk with big hard disks in it will be an ancient dinosaur. Their idea is
that you will use a tiny box and get everything you need from the Internet
or some similar network. You won't even store or run application software
on your own machine. You will run everything over the net and just have
some space to download whatever you don't want to print out right away, and
just enough memory to parse web pages and maybe run a few small applets to
personalize or customize your particular work station. Hey, it's back to
the '60's; back to the shell server; back to the past. That is not
something that makes me look expectantly to that vision. I prefer to have a
certain amount of control over what goes onto and happens inside my
computer.
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Brent Reynolds, Atlanta, GA USA
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