The History Of Streaming Music

07/17/19 • 10 min

Severe Tire Damage. Like many things we cover in this podcast, the first streaming rock band on the Interwebs came out of Xerox PARC. 1993 was a great year. Mariah Carey released Dreamlover, Janet Jackson released That’s The Way Love Goes. Boyz II Men released In The Still of the Nite. OK, so it wasn’t that great a year. But Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train. That was some pretty good stuff out of Minnesota. But Severe Tire Damage was named after They Might Be Giants and a much more appropriate salvo into the world of streaming media. The members were from DEC Systems Research Center, Apple, and Xerox PARC. All members at the time and later are pretty notable in their own right and will likely show up here and there on later episodes of this podcast. So they kinda’ deserved to use half the bandwidth of the entire internet at the time.

The first big band to stream was the Rolling Stones, the following year. Severe Tire Damage did an opening stream of their own. Because they’re awesome. The Stones called the stunt a “good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet.” They likely had no clue that the drummer is the father of ubiquitous computing, the third wave of computing. But if they have an Apple Watch, a NEST, use an app to remotely throw treats to their dog, use a phone to buy a plane ticket, or check their Twitter followers 20 times a day, they can probably thank Mark Weiser for his contributions to computing. They can also thank Steve Rubin for his contributions on the 3D engine in the Mac. Or his wife Amy for her bestselling book Impossible Cure.

But back to streaming media. Really, streaming media goes back to George O Squier getting patents for transmitting music over electrical lines in the 1910s and 1920s. This became Muzak. And for decades, people made fun of elevator music. While he originally meant for the technology to compete with radio, he ended up pivoting in the 30s to providing music to commercial clients. The name Muzak was a mashup of music and Kodak, mostly just for a unique trademark. By the end of the 30s Warner Brothers had acquired Muzak and then it went private again when George Benton, the chairman and publisher of the Encyclopædia Britannica pivoted the company into brainwashing for customers, alternating between music and silence in 15 minute intervals and playing soft tones to make people feel more comfortable while waiting for a doctor or standing in an elevator. Makes you wonder what he might have shoved into the Encyclopedia! Especially since he went on to become a senator. At least he led the charge to get rid of McCarthy who referred to him as “Little Willie Benton.” I guess some things never change. Benton passed away in 1973, but you can stream an interview with him from archives.org ( https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95761 ).

Popularity of Muzak waned over the following decades until they went bankrupt in 2009. After reorganization it was acquired in 2011 and is now Mood Media, which has also gone bankrupt. I guess people want a more democratic form of media these days. I blame the 60s. Not much else happened in streaming until the 1990s. A couple of technologies were maturing at this point to allow for streaming media. The first is the Internet. TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 but public commercial use didn’t really kick on until the late 1980s. We’ll reserve that story for another episode. The next is MPEG.

MPEG is short for the Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG is a working group formed specifically to set standards for audio and video compression and the transmission of that audio and video over networks. The first meeting of the group was in 1988. The group defined a standard format for playing media on the Internet, soon to actually be a thing (but not yet). And thus the MPEG format was born. MPEG is now the international standard for encoding and compressing video images. Following the first release they moved quickly. In 1992, the MPEG-1 standard was approved at a meeting in London. This gave us MPEG Layer 3, or MP3 as well as video CDs. At the Porto meeting in 1994, we got MPEG-2 standard, thus DVDs, DVD players and AAC standard a long standard for iTunes and used for both television and audio encoding. MPEG-4 came in 1999, and the changes began to slow as adoption increased. Today, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are under development.

Then came the second wave of media. In 1997, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev built WinAmp. A lot of people had a lot of CDs. Some of those people also had WinAmp or other MP3 players and rippers. By 1999 enough steam bad been built up that Sean Parker, Shawn Fanning, and John Fanning built a tool called Napster that allowed people to trade those MP3s online. At their height, 80 million people were trading music online. People started buying MP3 players, stereos had MP3 capabilities, ...

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The PASCAL Programming Language

PASCAL was designed in 1969 by the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth and released in 1970, the same year Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Patton, and Love Story was released. The Beatles released Let It Be, Three Dog Night was ruling the airwaves with Mama Told Me Not To Come, and you could buy Pong and Simon Says for home. Wirth had been a PhD student at Berkeley in the early 1960s, at the same time Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and author of the Go programming language was in school there. It’s not uncommon for a language to kick around for a decade or more gathering steam, but PASCAL quickly caught on. In 1983, PASCAL got legit and was standardized, in ISO 7185. The next year Wirth would win the 1984 Turing Award. Perhaps he listened to When Doves Cry when he heard. Or maybe he watched Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones, Gremlines, Red Dawn, The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, or Terminator on his flight home. Actually, probably not.

PASCAL is named after Blaise Pascal, the French Philosopher and Mathemetician. As with many programmers, PASCAL built THE WORLD’S FIRST FULLY FUNCTIONAL MECHANICAL CALCULATOR because he was lazy and his dad made him do too many calculations to help pay his bills. 400 years later, we still need calculators here and there, to help us with our bills. As with many natural scientists of the time, Blaise Pascal contributed to science and math in a variety of ways:

PASCAL’S LAW IN HYDROSTATICS
PASCAL’S THEOREM TO THE EMERGING FIELD OF PROJECTIVE GEOMETRY
IMPORTANT WORK on ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AND VACUUM including that REDISCOVERing THAT ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE DECREASES WITH HEIGHT
A pioneer in THE THEORY OF PROBABILITY
While Indian and Chinese mathematicians had been using it for centuries, PASCAL POPULARIZED THE PASCAL’S TRIANGLE and was credited with providing PASCAL’s Identity
As with many in the 1600s he was deeply religious and dedicated the later part of his life to religious writings including Pensees, which helped shape the French Classical Period. Perhaps he wrote it while listening to Bonini or watching The History of Sir Francis Drake

The PASCAL programming language was built to teach students to program, but as with many tools students learn on, it grew in popularity as those students graduated from college throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I learned PASCAL in high school computer science in 1992. Yes, Kris Kross was making you Jump and Billy Ray Cyrus was singing Achy Breaky Heart the same year his daughter was born. I learned my first if, then, else, case, and while statements in PASCAL.

PASCAL is a procedural programming language that supports structured data structures and structured programming.At the time I would write programs on notebook paper and type them in next time I had a chance to play with a computer. I also learned enumerations, pointers, type definitions, and sets. PASCAL also gave me my first exposure to integers, real numbers, chars, and booleans. I can still remember writing the word program at the top of a piece of paper, followed by a word to describe the program I was about to write. Then writing begin and end. Never forgetting the period after the end of course. The structures were simple. Instead of echo you would simply use the word write to write text to the screen, followed by hello world in parenthesis wrapped in single quotes. After all, there are special characters if you use a comma and an exclamation point in hello word.

I also clearly remember wrapping my comments in {} because if you didn’t comment what you did it was assumed you stole your code from Byte managize. I also remember making my first procedure and how there was a difference between procedures and functions. The code was simple and readable. Later I would use AmigaPascal and hate life.

PASCAL eventually branched out into a number of versions including Visual PASCAL, Instant PASCAL, and Turbo PASCAL. There are still live variants including the freepascal compiler available at freepascal.org. PASCAL was the dominant language used in the early days of both Apple and Microsoft. So much so that most of the original Apple software was written in PASCAL, including Desk Accessories, which would later become Extensions. Perhaps the first awesome computer was the Apple II, where PASCAL was all over the place. Because developers knew PASCAL, it ended up being the main high-level language for the Lisa and then the Mac. In fact, some of the original Mac OS was hand-translated to assembly language from PASCAL. PASCAL wasn’t just for parts of the operating system. It was also used for a number of popular early programs, including Photoshop 1.

PASCAL became object-oriented first with Lisa Pascal, Classcal then with Object PASCAL in 1985. That year Apple released MacApp, which was an object oriented API for the classic Mac Operating...

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Grace Hopper

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Today’s episode is on one of the finest minds in the history of computing: Grace Brewster Murray Hopper. Rear Admiral Hopper was born on December 9th, 1906 in New York City. She would go on to graduate from Vassar College in 1928, earn a master’s degree at Yale in 1930, and then a PhD from Yale in 1933, teaching at Vassar from 1931 until 1941. And her story might have ended there.

But then World War Two happened. Her great-grandfather was an admiral in the US Navy during the Civil War, and so Grace Hopper would try to enlist. But she was too old and a little too skinny. And she was, well, a she. So instead she went on to join the women’s branch of the United States Naval Reserve called WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, at the time. She graduated first in her class and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships project at Harvard as a Lieutenant where she was one of the original programmers of the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, better known as the Mark I.

The Mark I did what the analytical engine tried to do but using electromechanical components. Approved by the original IBM CEO Thomas Watson Sr, the project had begun in 1937 and was shipped to Harvard in 1944. If you can imagine, Hopper and the other programmers did conditional branching manually. Computers played a key role in the war effort and Hopper played a key role in the development of those computers. She co-authored three papers on the Mark I during those early days. She also found a moth in the Mark II in 1947, creating a term everyone in software uses today: debugging.

When peace came, she was offered a professorship at Vassar. But she had a much bigger destiny to fulfill. Hopper stayed on at Harvard working on Navy contracts because the Navy didn’t want her yet. Yet. She would leave Harvard to go into the private sector for a bit. At this point she could have ended up with Remington Rand designing electric razors (yes, that Remington), or working on the battery division, which would be sold to Rayovac decades later. But she ended up there as a package deal with the UNIVAC. And her destiny began to unfold.

You see, writing machine code sucks. She wanted to write software, not machine language. She wanted to write code in English that would then run as machine code. This was highly controversial at the time because programmers didn’t see the value in allow what was mainly mathematical notation for data processing to be available in a higher level language, which she proposed would be English statements. She published her first paper on what she called compilers in 1952.

There’s a lot to unpack about what compilers brought to computing. For starters, they opened up programming to people that would otherwise have seen a bunch of mathematical notations and run away. In her words: “I could say "Subtract income tax from pay" instead of trying to write that in octal code or using all kinds of symbols.” This opened the field up to the next generation of programmers. It also had a second consequence: the computer was no longer just there to do math. Because the Mark I had been based on the Analytical Engine, it was considered a huge and amazing calculator. But putting actual English words out there and then compiling (you can’t really call it converting because that’s an oversimplification) those into machine code meant the blinders started to come off and that next generation of programmers started to think of computers as... more.

The detractors had a couple of valid points. This was the early days of processing. The compiler created code that wasn’t as efficient as machine code developed by hand. Especially as there were more and more instructions you could compile. There’s really no way around that. But the detractors might not have realized how much faster processors would get. After all they were computing with gears just a few decades earlier. The compiler also opened up the industry to non-mathematicians. I’m pretty sure an objection was that some day someone would write a fart app. And they did. But Grace Hopper was right, the compiler transformed computing into the industry it is today. We still compile code and without the compiler we wouldn’t be close to having the industry we have today. In 1954 she basically became the first director of software development when she was promoted to the Director of Automatic Programming.

Feeling like an underachiever yet? She was still in the Navy Reserve and in 1957 was promoted to Commander. But she was hard at work at her day job as she and her team at Remington Rand developed a language called FLOW-MATIC the first natural language programming language. In 1959, a bunch of computer nerds were assembled in a conference c...