On August 19, 1839, the Palace of the Institute in Paris was completely
full with curious Parisians who came to hear the formal description of
the new reproduction process invented by Louis Daguerre. Daguerre,
already well-known for his Diorama, called the new process
daguerreotype. According to a contemporary, "a few days later,
opticians' shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype
apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone
wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first
trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky."[<A name="1t" href="#1b">1</a>] The media
frenzy has begun. Within five months more than thirty different
descriptions of the techniques were published all around the world:
Barcelona, Edinburg, Halle, Naples, Philadelphia, Saint Petersburg,
Stockholm. At first, daguerreotypes of architecture and landscapes
dominated the public's imagination; two years later, after various
technical improvements to the process, portrait galleries were opened
everywhere - and everybody rushed in to have their picture taken by a
new media machine.[<A name="2t" href="#2b">2</a>]

In 1833 Charles Babbage started the design for a device he called the
Analytical Engine. The Engine contained most of the key features of the
modern digital computer. The punch cards were used to enter both data
and instructions. This information was stored in the Engine's memory. A
processing unit, which Babbage referred to as a "mill," performed
operations on the data and wrote the results to memory; final results
were to be printed out on a printer. The Engine was designed to be
capable of doing any mathematical operation; not only would it follow
the program fed into it by cards, but it would also decide which
instructions to execute next, based upon intermediate results. However,
in contrast to the daguerreotype, not even a single copy of the Engine
was completed. So while the invention of this modern media tool for the
reproduction of reality impacted society right away, the impact of the
computer was yet to be measured.

Interestingly, Babbage borrowed the idea of using punch cards to store
information from an earlier programmed machine. Around 1800, J.M.
Jacquard invented a loom which was automatically controlled by punched
paper cards. The loom was used to weave intricate figurative images,
including Jacquard's portrait. This specialized graphics computer, so to
speak, inspired Babbage in his work on the Analytical Engine, a general
computer for numerical calculations. As Ada Augusta, Babbage's supporter
and the first computer programmer, put it, "the Analytical Engine weaves
algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and
leaves."[<A name="3t" href="#3b">3</a>] Thus, a programmed machine was already synthesizing images
even before it was put to process numbers. The connection between the
Jacquard loom and the Analytical Engine is not something historians of
computers make much of, since for them computer image synthesis
represents just one application of the modern digital computer among
thousands of others; but for a historian of new media it is full of
significance.

We should not be surprised that both trajectories - the development of
modern media, and the development of computers - begin around the same
time. Both media machines and computing machines were absolutely
necessary for the functioning of modern mass societies. The ability to
disseminate the same texts, images and sounds to millions of citizens
thus assuring that they will have the same ideological beliefs was as
essential as the ability to keep track of their birth records,
employment records, medical records, and police records. Photography,
film, the offset printing press, radio and television made the former
possible while computers made possible the latter. Mass media and data
processing are the complimentary technologies of a modern mass society;
they appear together and develop side by side, making this society
possible.

For a long time the two trajectories run in parallel without ever
crossing paths. Throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth
century, numerous mechanical and electrical tabulators and calculators
were developed; they were gradually getting faster and their use was
became more wide spread. In parallel, we witness the rise of modern
media which allows the storage of images, image sequences, sounds and
text in different material forms: a photographic plate, film stock, a
gramophone record, etc.

Let us continue tracing this joint history. In the 1890s modern media
took another step forward as still photographs were put in motion. In
January of 1893, the first movie studio - Edison's "Black Maria" -
started producing twenty seconds shorts which were shown in special
Kinetoscope parlors. Two years later the Lumi