22 Jun
2022
22 Jun
'22
8:14 a.m.
George Michaelson writes:
There was this persisting story that Ken got
permission from somebody
like CBS or Sony to have a very large amount of classical music on a
400MB drive, for research purposes. No, really: he was doing some
psycho-acoustic thing comparing compressed to uncompressed for
somebody, or improving on the fraunhoffer algorithms which became MP3.
The point was, the rest of us had to listen to CDs and Ken had the
complete works of Bach (or something) on a hard drive, which we were
told he kept in the office, and played at home over a landline of some
horrendously high bandwidth, un-imaginable speeds like a megabit,
imagine, a MILLION of those suckers. How dare he. Thats more than the
whole of queensland. I imagine the truth is much less interesting, and
there was no major IPR fraud going on at the labs coding stuff as MP3
like we imagined, under the table.
I imagine this would also have been a Datakit T-1. But surely that was
a 1.44mbit carrier? T1 was smaller than E1 because europeans and
asians learned to count to 32 not 24.
-G
This reminds me of a Ken story from the late '90s. I was at a conference
that I won't name where Ken gave a talk about his compression work; if I
remember correctly his goal was to fit all of the Billboard Top 100 songs
of all time onto a single CD. He showed us the big stack of disks that he
made to give to us, but then said that to his surprise the the lawyers
refused to give permission. At that point he became very focused on messing
with his slides while everyone got up, got in line, and took a disc. After
the pile was gone Ken looked up and nonchalantly continued his talk.
That might also have been the conference at which Ken showed us videos of
him in a MIG.
Jon