[TUHS] Re: forgotten versions

[Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com>]

the early versions of the audio compression stuff were not quite is good as
the later versions (which became apples stuff) but compressed to substantially
smaller size. ken compressed 2-3 hrs or so of music for my wedding and that
was rather less than a CD.

> On Jun 21, 2022, at 7:14 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> 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