How rust saved America...

Rust, iron oxide, is all around us, giving rocks a pumpkin hue, infusing crossing a cast iron bridge an element of danger or allowing the outside world to permeate the floorboards of old VWs.

But this morning I am neither on a country road, a rock quarry or a VW, though my Scion is getting a bit old, I think the floor is still in good shape.  Instead I'm cleaning up the living room, and have just come across a box of VHS VCR tapes.  I snagged them from my neighbor's trash when he was moving out, maybe 9 years ago, and they have just been sitting there. 

My neighbor had cable TV, and I didn't, so I thought I would find a treasure trove of old movies recorded on them.  No such luck.  He worked nights and slept days, and seemed to enjoy auto racing, so I now own about 30 recordings of various NASCAR and perhaps other races... I haven't watched them all, or even one of them all the way through.  I am not sure what I could learn watching the Daytona 500 from 1991.. wow, has it been that long since everyone had a VCR?  Maybe I can discover something important, but I won't, 'cause I am not interested at all.

But sure enough, the iron oxide on Mylar holds traces of the signal from that day.  Wipeouts, missed pitstops and lots of commentator speculation all kept in the magnetic fields never to be sensed again.

The age of iron oxide began sixty or so years ago with the development of magnetic tape audio recording.  An audio recorder was featured at the beginning of Mission Impossible each week.  I was aghast when the tape (and tape player, presumably) self-destructed after the message was delivered.  I remember feeling it was a waste of a perfectly good miniature tape player!  All in the name of some spy mission.

In the 1960s my father was given a reel of digital tape from a gigantic Honeywell computer tape drive... the type you see in 1950 movies with vacuum columns on either side of the tape head to keep the speed exactly right.  The type with huge plexiglass doors so if the foot-wide reel of tape flew off it wouldn't kill anyone.  My father was leaving his computer job, and the reel had signatures of the team who designed computers all through that era.  My uncle Dick Lawrance, another engineer, had DECtapes, made for Digital Equipment Corporation's mini-Computer, the PDP-8, which he helped design. I guess my family was an iron oxide early adopter.

Iron oxide had its part at the Watergate, with the Beatles at Abbey Road Studios, in the Nixon White House.  Video tape made football understandable, and the eleven o'clock news interesting.  And iron oxides on floppy disks built Microsoft and Apple.  Its ability to store information in its magnetic alignment "saved" America, and the world.

Today we find it on the backs of credit and debit cards... "can you swipe it again? It didn't work."   It is still hiding on the surface of hard drives.  It spins past high speed heads keeping the past forever.  Huge disk farms spin at Google, Yahoo, AOL and Facebook. 

But other than a small splotch on your plastic money, it has mostly left our lives.  No more 8-tracks of cassette tapes.  No reel-to-reel, VHS or Beta.  Floppies and Micro Diskettes by the billions are now in landfills, returning their rust to the earth in a glacially slow descent.

Today most HDTV is recorded on hard disks -- TIVO and its descendents, or, more likely, lives at some corporate head-end-- a climate controlled clean room that would remind you of a 1950's Computer Room, with servers instead of tape drives humming through the night, serving thousands to video streams. As densities increased, hard drives moved from iron oxide to cobalt and other specialized materials.  Iron oxide disk drives went into the corporate scrap heap.

Back in the late '90s I went to a small invitation-only conference on magnetics to give a talk about High Definition VCRs... not a very good talk, but the lack of inspiration was an indication that iron oxide tape and digital TV were not going to be friends. 

Perhaps the best take-away from that conference was a "Magnetics Magic Show" item performed by one of the experts from a disk drive company..  He took a magnet and wrote a word on a dollar bill, then used a small sealed petri dish filled with iron filings to show that the dollar bill's ink had retained the word. 

Yes, as the Moody Blues sang, we are all magnetic ink, or at least our money is. 

Monday the memories of NASCAR racing will go out in the trash, and I will return to the present, and the future, and worry about that area of rust on my back porch railing.