Outdated Tech Terms We Still Use

of responses. So on today's episode, I'm going to go through those phrases, where they came from and what they refer to, and we'll all chuckle about how we as humans are slow to change in our ways, which can be a really bad thing in many ways, but I think for most of these examples it's largely harmless or

even silly. And you're probably thinking, huh, Jonathan's really phoning it in on this one, and you're right, because I'm recording this on July three, two nineteen, and our office is closed the rest of the week, and I still have to record another episode after this one before I

can go home. So when I have to do five days of work in three days get a bit desperate for easy topics, al Z. Now, there are a lot of phrases in terms will be going through on here, so I've decided to group them according to subject matter. So let's start off with phrases we still use regarding phones and phone behavior. Now, first of all, some of the phrases I'll say might be dying out simply because millennials and and the younger generations don't tend to make

very many phone calls. Heck I don't either, and I'm a gen xer, so a lot of us are spending time on our phones. In fact, the average amount of time spent on a phone in the United States is a hundred seventy one minutes per day. That's just under three hours of your day spent on your phone, not all at once, obviously, but throughout the day. Brazilians, by the way, spend even more time on their mobile devices. So I don't want to give you guys the impression

that we Americans are the most addicted. But who boy, we're up there anyway. We might not use some of these phrases as much as old fogies do. By old fogies, I also mean me there as we ride off into the sunset. We might see these terms fade away, but for the time being, let's talk about making an ending calls, which brings us to the phrase dialing a number. Dialing refers back to rotary phones, which featured an actual dial

on them. And yes, I know a lot of you listeners out there are old enough to remember rotary phones, but some of you might not be, and so this episode is going to end up bridging some gaps. So the earliest reference I could find of a rotary phone in actual use dated to eighteen ninety two, but there were a lot of inventors who filed for patents as

early as the mid eighteen seventies. Before the rotary phone, you'd simply pick up a phone which would light up a bulb on a phone operator's desk at a telephone exchange. The operator would connect to your line and ask you about whom you wished to call, and you would give the call signal to the operator, who would then use a patch cable to connect your line with the appropriate

phone line to complete the call. And coincidentally, one of the other suggestions I got when I asked about outdated tech phrases was what happens if you ask an operator to connect a call, though I don't know how frequently that happens these days, but it was a suggestion I got.

But as you can imagine, this system of having a human operator manually connect calls together wasn't terribly efficient, and you could quickly overwhelm the telephone exchange once you've got a good number of phones on the service, even if you had multiple operators working at the exchange, eventually you get to a size where it's not sustainable with that approach. Rotary phones would remove the need to have an operator

make that patch connection. Once the system was upgraded to allow for these types of phones, it wasn't like it just magically worked. It all had to be upgraded together. The dial had a disc that measured about three inches across that's about seven point six centimeters, and the disc had ten holes in it along the outer edge, And there were several different numbering systems in place until it was finally standardized so that the numbers under the dial would go from one to nine with a zero at

the very end. Other systems would have the zero come first, or the numbers were listed in descending order, but that would mean that phones using one numbering system could only work on a telephone exchange designed for that numbering system. So as these telephone exchanges grew, As these systems grew, there was a need for standardization because otherwise you couldn't

actually interconnect the systems. Because if I dial a one, but it sends the same signal as a nine would on a different system, then that other system is never gonna know what number I'm calling. It's going to it's going to interpret the wrong numbers as I dial the number. That's because dialing a number would actually cause a series of pulses to go out over the exchange from the original telephone. So each space on the dial was a

pulse or another pulse. So if you dial to one, it would send one pulse out, if you dial to two, then you would get two pulses, and if you dial to zero, it would send out ten pulses to represent that particular character. And you have to wait for that dial to rotate all the way back into the starting position before you could dial the next number. So I can tell you from experience, you're really hated it if the person you were calling had a lot of eights, nines,

and zeros in their phone number. After you dialed a full telephone number, which for a local call in the United States for a long time was seven digits, the pulses would tell the system which lines to engage, in other words, which telephone line corresponds with that telephone number. The rotary phone saw wide adoption, and it became common

parlance to talk about dialing a phone number. Bell Telephone would introduce the first commercial push button phone on November nineteen sixty three, but we would keep using the word dial even with push button phones. Now. Part of that was because the rotary phones remained in service for a really long time. It wasn't really until the nineteen eighties that they started to truly fade away. Another part was that customers were actually a little leery of switching to

push button phones. They used a totally different system called touch tone dialing, even though there were no die else again, but touch tone was how these operated as opposed to the pulsing that the rotary phones used. By the nineteen eighties, those rotary phones, like I said, we're largely phased out, and in some some cases you actually had to opt in for an added service to have rotary dialing supported on your phone line. Oh and here's another fun one.

One person said, it's only sort of related to tech, but she wondered why she still bothered to say hello on the phone since with caller I D, she already knows who is calling her. And this is an excellent point as it does relate to tech from a social and cultural point of view. And now we get to talk about the origin of the word Hello. Isn't mean you're looking for so the word hello is actually older

than telephones. But you frequently will hear that the word was quote unquote invented, possibly by Thomas Edison for use over the phone. Edison certainly popularized using it for the phone, and she ange the meaning if you if you really want to think about it. But the earliest written example, the published example that the Oxford English Dictionary editors found, dates from eighteen twenty seven. Alexander Graham Bell, whom we often credit as the inventor of the telephone, wouldn't file

a patent for that invention until the eighteen seventies. But even if you were to argue that the real inventor was someone like Antonio Meucci, who many point to as the first person to create what was essentially a telephone. That still puts the earliest date for the telephone at eighteen forty nine. That's still decades after that first published instance of Hello that we know about. And now the plot thickens because the word hello didn't initially indicate a greeting.

It was more like saying, take a look at this thing here, earle as an hello, what's this now? In that instance, which you could just imagine was spoken by someone who was very, very English, the speaker is clearly not greeting anyone. Rather, they are drawing focus towards something in particular, and that was the use for Hello for quite some time, just sort of a get a load

of this thing over here, Hello, this is curious. Now skip ahead to Alexander Graham Bell, who might not have strictly invented the technology of the telephone, but certainly was able to realize it as a business and patent it. He saw the challenge behind identifying someone on the other end of the line, so if you got a call, you had no way of knowing who it was that was calling you. I mean, at first, there weren't that many telephones, so the odds of you guessing who it

was that was calling you were actually pretty good. But obviously that would change over time. So how do you ask for the identity of the person who is calling you? Presumably they know who you are because they called you, but how do you know who they are? There's no caller. I d well, you could ask who are you? Who sent you? But then every phone call would be like one of those Liam Neeson taken films. Alexander Graham Bell thought a more civilized approach would be that you would

pick up the phone and you would say ahoy. That was a tried and true method of hailing someone from a distance, often used by sailors, as the old ahoy there has been used, or ahoy there. Maybe if you really want to get piratical with it, you could even spice it up on the telephone a bit with ahoy hoy. Now. Thomas Edison wasn't putting up with any of that. He preferred the word hello, using that to mean I am greeting you, and I would very much appreciate it if

you would identify yourself over the phone. That didn't please Alexander Graham Bell. In fact, a T and T which grew out of Bell's telephone company tried to suppress the use of the word Hello on the telephone, stating that the word itself was vulgar, but vulgarity one out and A T and T decided to up the game where vulgarity is concerned, eventually referring to the company's phone operators

as Hello girls. Yuck. Anyway, the whole purpose of Hello wasn't just to greet someone, but to initiate the process to find out who the hell they were, and so yes, it doesn't make much sense for us to use it anymore. But then we also use hello outside the realm of the phone call these days, so it's grown beyond its initial purpose. Another Twitter followers suggested the phrase to ring someone up, also meaning to call them on the phone.

And it's true that most folks don't have phones that really ring anymore, though I guess we still call stuff ring tones, even if that description isn't totally apt. But let me tell you what answering the phone was like in the old days. For you young uns out there, way back when when you only have the telephone, maybe you had an answering machine, but many of us didn't have those. They were rare for a very long time. I remember it was a big day when my family

got our first answering machine when I was a kid. Well, anyway, back then, answering the phone was important. When someone called you, you had no way of knowing who they were because there was no color idea, there was no Star sixty nine. There was no way of knowing who it was. So if you missed a call, you missed it. It was gone. And telephones had very loud rings, like their bells would ring quite loudly so that you could hear it from pretty much anywhere in the house, and calls were important.

It could be anything. It could be an old friend reconnecting. It could be a message from work. It could be an emergency. Maybe it's a wrong number. But once that phone started ringing, you would rush to the phone to pick it up and answer it for no other reason

than to stop the darn ringing noise. These days, I answer maybe one out of every twenty calls I get, since most calls I get tend to be marked as spam or are from an unrecognized number that's popping up on my smartphone, So I just swiped to decline the call, and that brings me to the next phone topic. Ending a phone call is called hanging up, and that also dates to the time when people were using rotary or push button phones, because those would sit in a cradle

when they weren't in use. The rotary phone sort of acted like a pedestal with a little cradle that the handset would rest in, and push buttons usually had a cradle that could either sit flat, horizontally on a table or be mounted vertically on a wall. There'd be a switch on these cradles, and that switch would close the line, ending a call and making your phone line available for future calls to you. You physically have to hang the phone on the cradle or place it in the cradle

for those push button models. And yeah, that phrase is stuck around two for those of us who still talk on the phone now and again, we have been known to hang up on people even though you're not really hanging anything on anything else for most of those situations. Okay, we're done with phones. When we come back, I'll cover a few other shenanigans, but first, let's take a quick break.

All right. Now that we're back, let's talk about the world of the written word and correspondence, and we'll start with the word writing itself. I had one Twitter followers suggest I add in writing simply because all the writing she does these days involves a keyboard. The actual physical process of writing, in the sense of holding a pen or pencil and writing on a piece of paper, has all but disappeared for her, and I can dig it. I rarely write anymore unless it's in a greeting card

of some sort. I do want to get into writing, actually writing letters, like actually taking a pen and writing it out, because I feel the mindfulness it inspires might make the messages I create more special both for me and the recipient. Or maybe no one will be able to read it because my handwriting was already atrocious, and on top of that now I'm out of practice. Alright, fine, so we tend to use electronic devices to write stuff

these days. There are some other outdated phrases we tend to rely upon in that world too, For example, the good old copy and paste function that you'll find in everything from word processing programs to smartphone user interfaces. That term dates back to the days when people would do manuscripts and page layouts with physical pieces of paper and with words that have been cut out, phrases, pictures. The process of making a manuscript or a layout was laborious.

Designers would have to determine how big a layout would need to be. For example, so let's say you're in charge of making a layout for a magazine advertisement. You've got a full page ad in a magazine, and you are a graphic designer and you're an ad executive type, you know, a madman, kind of dude or a woman, and you want to work this out. Well, first you would get an oversight sheet of paper. It would be larger than whatever you were planning on actually creating, but

that's the the canvas you would be using. And then you would draw the borders of that piece of paper to mark out how large the final piece of of advertisement was going to be, because i'd be very important. So you would use tools like a T square and a quick square or speed square. Those are those little right triangles that are made out a flat piece of metal that you use too for drafting purposes, and you would use those to carefully measure out and mark the

boundaries for your layout. Then to place copy or images on the paper, you would physically paste those elements in the right position on your little boundary. So typically you'd use something like rubber cement, which would dry slowly enough to let designers move elements around a bit without having to scrap everything and start over if they decided they

didn't like the placement of an element. So you might put a headline, for example, and you might think, no, I want a little more white space between the top of the page and the headline, so you would actually be able to move it down a little bit before that rubber cement would dry enough so that such a thing would not be practical anymore. So in the old days, you would physically have to make a copy of something and you physically have to paste it on the paper

to create your layout. The manuscript process was similar, though it would typically involve cutting words out of a page and pasting them into a new one. You were laying out a new page of manuscript, so you had cut and copy and paste all in the physical world. You were physically doing these actions. When did those make the move over to the computer age. Well, that was in the early to mid nineteen seventies and a couple of guys named Larry Tesler and Tim Mott, both of whom

worked at Xerox's Park facility. That was that's xerox is research and development facility, also known for creating or at least popularizing things like the computer mouse. Anyway, they created the first cut copy and paste functions for computers as part of a document preparation system, which had the unfortunate name gypsy. Now, I say unfortunate because that term is considered by many to be a slur today. I doubt those working on the system at the time had any

awareness of that. I would like to think that they were just ignorant that that term could be offensive to people, so they were just picking it, uh, for whatever other reason. At least I'd like to think that, I honestly don't know. The function proved to be quite useful and found its way into word processing programs like word Star and word Perfect and all of those kinds of word processing programs in the nineteen seventies and beyond, and it's become a

key feature in numerous programs since. So we're all familiar with copy and paste, even though now it's all digital. We're not physically copying and pasting stuff anymore, at least not most of us. Now, while we're talking about terms related to writing, how about we talk about something that a lot of people get persnickety over, and that's the

difference between typeface and fonts. Now, this is one that drives some folks crazy because we typically use the words interchangeably these days, but once upon a time, they meant separate things, or at least, you know, things that that had a definitive meaning, and we're not interchangeable. And the pedantic folks out there who may have worked in a printer's office might still get their proverbial danders up about it.

And I'm not being dismissive. I am a pedantic individual, so goodness knows if I had that background, I would be one of these people. I have to do a full episode about the history of typography one day because it is fascinating and it's a complicated story. But today we're going to focus on type face versus fonts for

this part of the episode. So back in the very old printing press days, to print on a piece of paper, you first would have to arrange metal blocks on the press with the letters set out in relief on one face of the blocks. The type face each block was a single letter in a particular style. Size and weight. Weight refers to the thickness of the line, and the

weights could be bold, light, or medium. The side of the metal block with the letter on it that was the type face, and that face of the block would be inked and then pressed onto a sheet of paper to create the print. So really you would have a whole series of these blocks with the type face out, you'd think all of them, and you would then press it against a sheet of paper to get a printed sheet. So a typeface came to mean the style of this lettering.

So Garamond, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Ariel are all type faces. Those are all type faces, and the word typeface really refers to that actual stylistic design of each collection of characters. It's what makes Garamond look different from Times New Roman, which looks different from Helvetica, etcetera, etcetera. But that just denotes which stylistic family each set of characters belongs to. You can also describe those characters by how large each character is. We measure characters by units

called points. Now, I would love to tell you that the unit we call a point has had a specific value since the dawn of typography. I would love to tell you that, but it would be a lie. The value of a point has changed many times over the centuries since the invention of the printing press, but today the standard is essentially a point equals one seventy second of an inch. That's point three five millimeters or so. So does that mean a character at seventy two points

is a full inch tall? No, But that's because there's an invisible square around each character. It's a little bit above and a little bit below the tallest and lowest points on a or the ascension and decension if you prefer, of the upper case largest character. So the seventy two points really refers to the size of this invisible square,

not the actual character that's printed. So if you were to think of it as the old printing days, you could say it's a larger block the actual physical block that has that letter out in relief on the type face. Your characters would have to have larger blocks. You couldn't fit a huge t uppercase t on a tiny little block. You would have to have a bigger one anyway. That's why we described those characters in terms of points, such

as twelve point Times New Roman. So each type face would have its own huge collection of blocks with each of the sizes and each of the weights in the printing house. So these these weights and sizes were the fonts. So let's say you're printing a page in Times New Roman at twelve point size with a medium weight. The type faces Times New Roman. The font is Times New Roman at twelve point size and medium weight. So you could argue that fonts are really specific instances of type faces.

But if you were to switch that up, maybe you have a section that's italicized or at fourteen point or at a heavy weight, but it's still Times New Roman, then you would still have to change out the font for that section. It would still be Times New Roman all the way through the document, but now you're dealing with a different font from the twelve point medium weight font you used earlier. So you could have a page with multiple fonts on it, but they're all the same

type face. You would have Times New Roman from top to bottom, but the different sizes and the different weights would denote specific fonts of that Times New Roman. Now enter the era of desktop publishing, when any goof is such as yours truly can create a virtual page in the digital realm and then send it whisking off to a printer. At this stage, fonts aren't physical blocks. Fonts are really files that could scale to whatever requirement you

happen to have. So the Times New Roman font can scale to whatever point size I need or wait, for that matter, I'm technically choosing a font because I'm choosing a specific instance of this type face style. But now we typically use the word font to refer to type face in general. We say the Times New Roman font as opposed to the Times New Roman type face at

twelve point medium weight font. And while this is technically incorrect to refer to them both as a font from a typographical standpoint, anyway, the fluidity of language doesn't really give a crap about that, because language means what people say it means, and meanings change over time. This is something I've had to come to terms with myself, because, as anyone close to me can tell you, Pedantic might as well be my middle name. But it's not because

I'm pedantic, but I'm not Jonathan Pedantic Strickland. Before I get away from the written word, let's talk about c C as into CC someone in an email the letter C and the letter C. You probably know that c C stands for carbon copy. And I'm sure more than a few of you out there have created carbon copies, actual real ones. But for the rest of us, what the heck is a carbon copy? All right? So let's turn the clocks back to the turn of the nineteenth century.

The early eight hundreds, A couple of different people, such as Pellegreen not Toury in Italy and Ralph Wedgewood in England, invented what we would call carbon paper. Both Torry and Wedgwood were trying to create a way for blind people to more easily right. Torrey was working on an early typewriter device, and his carbon paper invention would be used sort of like a typewriter ribbon. Wedgewood created what he

called a stylographic manifold writer. The carbon paper, or carbonated paper, as Wedgewood called it, was paper that had been soaked in pigment and oil and then allowed to dry. To use the paper, you would make a little bit of a sandwich. On the bottom layer would be a fresh piece of clean paper. Then you would lay a piece of carbon paper on top of that. Then on top of the carbon paper, you would lay a transparent sheet of paper, something that was thin but fairly strong. With

Wedgewood's device, you'd use a stylus. They had no ink or graphit or anything. Essentially just a pointed stick, you know, there's no inked tip or anything like that. You would put pressure on the top sheet as you would go through the motions of writing. The ink on the middle layer would actually transfer to the back of the translucent sheet and also on top of the clean sheet underneath, so you would get sort of a negative on the

top sheet. But since the paper was translucent, you could read the ink through the paper and you would get a just a regular copy on the sheet underneath. The ink on the paper in the middle layer would transfer, and it made it really easy to make copies. So Wedgewood's manifold writer had these metal wires that were meant to help guide blind people as they wrote across the page. But later people began to adopt this method to make copies of documents, seeing its application beyond a writing tool

for people who had visual impairment. Thomas Jefferson was known to have used such an approach to make copies of some of his works, but the adoption wasn't exactly lightning fast. For one thing, the mixture of oil and pigment was said to be a bit odoriferous. It stunk like the blazes,

in other words. So it wasn't until the eighteen seventies, when people began to introduce typewriter inc. That was less offensive to the old factory system, that we started seeing a more widespread use of carbon paper for making copies. And it was a quick, portable and easy way to produce a copy, much faster than going to a printing house. And you could conceivably produce more than one copy if

you're using enough pressure to sandwich multiple layers together. So you have transparent paper, you have carbon paper, you've got a solid piece of paper. You've got maybe a another barrier there, another piece of carbon paper, another solid piece of paper, etcetera. If you did enough pressure, you could make multiple copies, but you would run the risk of having lower copies be extremely light and faded and possibly tearing through the top page because you're using so much pressure.

So it wasn't exactly a reliable way to make lots of different copies at once. Carbon copies were used and in some cases still are used for lots of stuff, like taking credit card transactions quickly before the digital transaction process days, you'd have that that machine where you'd lay the the card down, you have some carbon paper on it, you run this, uh, this roller across really quickly and it ends up capturing the credit card information through this

carbon copy process. But you might have seen it also from someone taking orders at a restaurant or in any other number of applications. And it became a way to produce a copy of a letter if you wanted to send it to more than one person. And so the term transferred over to the desktop publishing world in the form of c C. While no carbon or carbonated paper is used in that process, everybody already knew that it meant the letter was being sent out and it was

going to people besides just the primary recipient. It was going to other people as well, and so we still use that phrase today. Now, when we come back, I'll switch over to the world of entertainment, which also relies heavily on some antiquated terminology. But before we do that, let's take another quick break. All right, Let's pop on over to television for a second. One of the derogatory phrases to describe television, and more importantly, the content available

to watch on television is the boob tube. Now, in this case, boob is meant to be a gullible person or someone who is the brunt of a joke or just a goofus in other words. But tube, well, that comes from the old cathode ray tube style of television, the big bulky TVs of yesteryear. Some of you may have one. I certainly do have one that's sitting in on a shelf in a garage. I need to actually find a place where I can recycle it. But I've talked a lot about CRT technology a few times. Here's

just a quick summary. Older televisions have a cathode ray tube inside them, which looks a bit like a super weird lightbulb. The cathode ray tube generates a stream of electrons, and it does this by using electricity to heat up a filament inside a vacuum tube, and the heat transfers enough energy to electrons in that filament to have them break free of their atomic orbits and fly out in a stream. Those electron stream through what is called an electron gun. And are shot towards the back side of

the television screen, which has a coding of phosphor. Foster's an organic material that gives off light after being struck by electrons. So the old televisions literally had tubes inside of them. Now these days, that's not how modern television's work. They might be L C D, L E ED or maybe even a plasma based screen or an O led screen. But calling the television the tube is still something that

occasionally happens, even though no tubes are involved. It's like the Internet being a series of tubes that was never right anyway. Now, pop over the film for a second. So first of all, the word film is already nearly obsolete. Now film is not completely done. There are some directors who still insist on working with film. Quentin Tarantino is one of those directors. He views film as in the

physical medium of film with reverence. The film is made of plastic, as a plastic strip essentially coated with a federal reactive chemical that could preserve images after that has been exposed to light, and classic film is exposed at a rate of twenty four frames or photographs if you like, per second. So when we played that back at the same speed of twenty four frames per second and a projector.

Then it creates the illusion of motion, even though if you were to take the film out of the projector and look at it as a scene by scene sort of thing, you would just see a series of photographs, one after the other. But of course, these days, most movies are shot using digital cameras, which record not to film but to digital files, digital video files that live quote unquote on hard drives. Digital video gives filmmakers a

lot more access to the footage they shoot. It's easy to review a shot even right after you've completed it, so it gives directors more options. They can see if they really captured what they wanted in a scene. And you're not limited by the physical amount of film you have available on hand. Like in the old days. Film is a limited resource. You only have so much of it on hand on an a given day, and it gets expensive. And once you shoot on film, that's it.

You can't delete it and then shoot something else on it. You have to live with whatever it was you shot. You're stuck with it. That's why we call it footage. It actually refers to the physical amount of film that you've exposed to light during a film shoot. So how many film feet of film did you shoot? How many feet of film do you have left? If you're running out, you got to go out and buy more, which adds

more to the production costs of a movie. Digital video remove a lot of those barriers, so you wouldn't have to worry about running up the production costs simply because you want another take, because you weren't eating through more

physical film. For a while, there was a risk that the move to digital cinema would actually kill the actual film industry entirely, as in the physical medium of film, because there wouldn't be enough demand for that physical stuff to keep the businesses involved in producing and processing film afloat. And ever since the studio days of the movie industry, those businesses had to be separate because the US government said, you can't have a movie studio that owns the entire

process from beginning to end. That's anti competitive. But in two thousand fifteen, Kodak secured agreements with several film studios to stay in business in that industry. Each studio promised to order an undisclosed amount of film at minimum for several years and many prominent movies in the recent past were in fact shot on film. It's not like it's unheard of. Kodak, by the way, is essentially the only game intenseiltown as far as film goes, because Fujifilm got

out of that business way back in. There are other film related phrases and terms in the movie making business that have stuck around, even for productions that use digital video and not film cameras. For example, the phrase role camera to describe a camera actively recording. It's still pretty common, even though that originally referred to rolling film, and again

because the film represented money. Hearing a director's assistant call out roll camera meant shut the heck up and let the cast and crew do their thing, because any wasted film was money down the drain. There's also roll sound, which technically you would say before you would say roll camera.

It's a similar concept, except it's a signal to the production sound mixer to start the sound recording equipment, and both the camera operator and the sound mixer would respond with speed, indicating that they are recording at the appropriate speed, which also is a largely antiquated notion these days. On the editing side, of filmmaking, you have the term splicing, the definition for splices to unite. Usually it would refer to something like splicing two ropes together by interweaving them.

So with film, traditionally, splicing would refer to taking two different physical pieces of film and joining them together using a splicer. Of that they become a sequence. You're essentially gluing two pieces of film together. So imagine you're shooting a conversation between two characters and you decide to do three different camera angles for this scene. You've got a

wide shot has both characters in it. Then you do a couple of over the shoulder shots so that you're looking at both of the characters head on, with them looking off as if they're looking at their scene partner. So you've shot all three of these separately, because setting up all three cameras to shoot them all at once rarely works. You usually can't get the camera angles for it.

And you've set up each shot so it looks just right, and in the editing room you want to take that footage and you want to combine it to make a compelling scene so that the conversation is actually interesting and dramatic. You do that by physically cutting links of film and using the splicer to join them together into a finished sequence. Now with digital movies, you don't have to do all

that physical stuff, but the concept is still valid. So now you can digitally splice together clips to get the same effect you would with physical film. The term splicing has also sometimes been used to describe a process that's more appropriately called compositing. This is a different notion. It's when you take images or visuals from separate sources and

you combine them together to make a new image. So a very common example would be shooting actors against a green screen, and then you would chromakey in a different background behind them in the finished shot. Some people refer to that process as splicing, referring to the fact that you're actually combining these different elements together into a new, unified hole, though again compositing is really the more appropriate phrase for that. Now let's pop on over to audio entertainment.

A few people suggested I mentioned records or albums, but I do so with a few caveats. First, the vinyl record album has made a little bit of a comeback in recent years, so it's not quite as antiquated as it once was when it first went out of fashion. Second, I think the word record, which many associate with a physical vinyl disc like a forty five or thirty three long playing album, the kind of thing you would put

on a turntable. You think of that as a record, but I think it could easily refer to any recording, as in it's a record of what has happened. But let's talk about albums. Where did that name come from? Well, I talked about this a little bit when I did my series on turntables. But the word album comes from the old days of seventy eight RPM records. These were typically made of stuff like shellac back in the old days,

and they predated the vinyl era. The RPM means revolutions per minute, so one of these discs would actually rotate seventy eight times every sixty seconds, as assuming it's running at the right speed on a turntable. And these discs would come in a couple of different sizes. They usually ranged between ten inches which is about twenty five centimeters to twelve inches or thirty centimeters, and they could only

hold a few minutes of audio on each side. Now, because of that limited capacity to record a longer piece of music or audio would require several discs. Music publishers would sell these collections in large bound books, with each disc in slipped into a page of these books, and they looked kind of like an old fashioned photo album.

There's another antiquated phrase for you. So you might purchase a single performance of a classical music piece that would span multiple discs, and thus you'd have to buy a record album of that performance. Later on, when vinyl became a practical alternative, and after micro grooves made it possible to record more audio on a single side of a disc, the word album stuck, and it was meant to describe a collection of related music, like an artist's album of music.

It's several songs that are all related in some way, or maybe it was thematically related. But there was no physical album anymore. We just used the word to describe a collection of songs or pieces, and we still use that word today even to describe collections of digital music files to get by an artist's new album, even though it may just be a bunch of MP three's or some other music file, or really, I guess I should

say compression file. Now. I know a lot of people who still use the term mix tape to refer to music playlists. And in the good old days, and I'm being a bit facetious here, you would take a blank audio cassette tape that is a medium for audio storage that relied on a plastic film codd with a magnetic material, and then you would transfer songs over to that mixtape. Giving someone a mix tape was often seen as a

big power move as far as friendship is concerned. It's saying I think I know what you're gonna dig, and I curated this group of songs for you, and I put them in this specific order, and that's the order you would have to listen to the songs in because they were all recorded onto a physical length of tape.

You could fast forward or rewind, but there was no guarantee you would stop at the right spot to skip over a song or go back to the very beginning of a specific song, unless it was the very first one on the tape. It's much easier today when you can create a digital playlist on one of any number of apps or services out there, and it's very easy to share those with as many people as you like.

Although a lot of those services will allow people to rearrange playlists, so maybe they won't have the experience you intended for them to have. But yeah, some folks still call it a mix tape, and I think stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy really brought that back a little bit.

If anyone were actually giving a physical mixtape now, I would be thrilled right up until the point where I realized I had to go out and buy a tape player because I don't have one anymore, and if I wanted to listen to it, I would have to go out and buy one. Oh and related to that is the concept of rewinding, which literally just meant to rewind the tape in an audio or video cassette, either so that you could go back to the beginning of the recorded media, or just to run it back a little

bit so you could experience a specific moment. Again, we still use the word rewinding to describe this process, but you're no longer actually winding anything around anything else. You're just going back to an earlier moment in a timeline hack. Lots of people still use the word taping to mean recording, as in, did you watch Game of Thrones last night? No, but I taped it, so I'll watch it soon. No one really tapes anything anymore, or at the very least

very few people tape anything anymore. The companies that once made VCRs all got out of that industry years ago. So if you do still have a VCR a working one, use it gently because it's not likely that you're going to find a replacement out there if something goes wrong. But most of us just record something, or rather we copy it digitally, and no tape is actually involved. And there are many other examples I could have included in this episode. You guys really responded with a lot of

fun ones. But it's time for me to head out and start my holiday after a record one more episode, so I promise the next episode is going to be more substantial, because I've got the notes ready to go. To be honest, this episode involved a lot more research than I had originally intended because it covered a fairly wide range of topics, but it seemed like a good

idea at the time. If any of you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a message the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle, there is text stuff h s W. Head on over to tech stuff podcast dot com for our website that has an archive of all of our past episodes.

You'll also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a action of I heart Radio's How stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.