A few days ago I discovered Tangible Media Collection, a website that has resonated deeply with me. It’s a collection of some 1700 objects related to information storage: from vinyl records and magnetic tapes to punch cards and optical discs. But it’s not just a collection of technological objects; it’s a testament to human curiosity.
The Collection Born from a Lost Tape
The story of how this collection started is fascinating. In 2001, John Wallace (the collector) found a computer tape from the late 80s in a desk drawer. He knew what it contained: an archive of computer-generated images from his grad school days, the product of late nights and weekends in the computer lab. But the tape drive that could read it was long gone.
He held the data representing those images literally in his hand, but it was locked away in metal and plastic. That disconnect between having the information and being able to access it became an obsession that gave rise to this collection.
Forty Years of Change
Looking at this collection, I can’t help but reflect on what I’ve seen in my 40 years of tech career. I’ve lived through the transition from tangible media to the complete abstraction of information.
I started when software came on floppy disks, when music was bought on cassette tapes and later on CDs, when movies were VHS and then DVD. Each of these media had a physicality, a presence. You could hold them in your hand, read the liner notes, feel the weight of the knowledge they contained.
The Evolution of Storage
The collection is organized by the physical mechanism used to store information:
- GEOMETRIC: Pins in organ barrels
- HOLES: Punch cards, paper tape
- GROOVES: Vinyl records, cylinders
- PITS: CDs, DVDs, Laserdiscs, Blu-Ray
- PROFILE: Cams, phototypesetting discs
- RELIEF: Typeballs from typewriters
- MECHANISM: Mechanical magic lantern slides
- CHEMICAL: Photographic film, microfilm
- ELECTROMAGNETIC: Magnetic tape, hard disks
- CHARGE: EPROM, flash memory
- FRAMES: Motion picture film
- CHANNELS: Stereoscopy, 3D movies
It’s a taxonomy of human ingenuity. Each method is an ingenious solution to the problem of how to capture and preserve information.
What We’ve Lost and Gained
The collection documents a fundamental change in how we interact with information. For thousands of years, we stored information in physical objects: notched bones, parchment, books. In the 10th century came the innovation of removable media that required a device to recover its content.
Now the trend is toward complete abstraction. Information lives in the cloud, on remote servers, in distributed networks. We no longer hold our data; we access it through interfaces and abstractions.
Have we lost something in this process? The collection suggests we have. Tangible media acquired personal and cultural significance in themselves. Vinyl hasn’t died; there’s a growing market for the physical experience of owning music. But the future is clearly digital and ethereal.
Curiosity as an Engine
What I love most about this collection is not the objects themselves, but what they represent: an insatiable curiosity. John Wallace doesn’t collect to fill shelves; he collects to understand technological and cultural history.
Each object tells a story of innovation, failure, and success. It expresses the great themes of history: work, religion, art, war, sex, gender, race, business, entertainment. Some are beautiful, some clever, some simply perplexing.
Together, they reveal connections and the process of innovation begins to emerge. You see how one technology leads to another, how problems are solved in unexpected ways, how the failure of one idea becomes the success of another.
My Own Story
Exploring this collection, I’ve encountered objects that I myself used. Flexi discs from computers that no longer exist. Cassette tapes with programs that loaded with a characteristic beep. 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy disks. Software CDs. Movie DVDs.
Each brings memories of an era. The satisfaction of inserting a floppy disk and hearing the mechanism click. The impatience while a tape loaded. The fascination of seeing how technology made possible things that were once impossible.
The Value of Preservation
In a world where everything is ephemeral and in the cloud, collections like Tangible Media remind us of the importance of preserving. Not just preserving the objects, but preserving the history of how we got here.
Each storage medium is a snapshot of its time. It reflects the technological limitations, economic needs, and cultural priorities of the era in which it was created. They are archaeological artifacts of the digital revolution.
Curiosity Keeps Us Alive
What John Wallace has achieved with this collection is to capture the essence of what it means to be curious. It’s not just accumulating things; it’s understanding the context, the connections, the stories behind each object.
Curiosity is what keeps us intellectually alive. It’s what makes us ask “how does this work?” and “why did they do it this way?” and “what happened next?”. It’s the engine of all learning and discovery.
Forty years of tech career have taught me that change is the only constant. But they’ve also taught me that there’s value in looking back, in understanding where we come from, in appreciating the ingenuity of those who preceded us.
Tangible Media Collection is more than a collection of technological objects. It’s a monument to human curiosity, to our innate need to capture and preserve information, to our capacity to innovate again and again.
And that, at the end of the day, is what matters most to me: curiosity as a way of life. The need to understand, to explore, to learn. Forty years later, I’m still as curious as day one. And that, I believe, is the best lesson I can learn from this wonderful collection.
Website: Tangible Media Collection License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
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