Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

I have just finished Luisa Passerini‘s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, an extraordinary history of the half generation before me. Born in 59 I, like others who grew up in the late 70s, inherited, but didn’t participate in the political and cultural events of the 60s. We were the (half) generation after the movement of the counter culture. Reading Passerini has me thinking about what it was like following – how I benefited from the freedoms moved without experiencing what it was to be part of a movement. She follows those involved in 68 in Italy and the “diaspora” of directions they took from joining mainstream unions to the violence of terrorism. It seems the only real movements (as opposed to factions) to follow 68 were the feminist movement (and the US the gay/lesbian movement) – both movements that men could only support not move within.

Is it surprising that many of my generation of me would turn to computing? Computing had … still has, the transcendent rhetoric of a liberation movement along with the occaisional indulgence of drug culture. Computing offered a movement – a being part of something unique in history (or out of history). In addition it offered a certainty – things work or not, code runs or not – that the critical and ironic politics after 68 could not. Passerini comments on how many of the movers in 68 ended up in media criticism – their training in resisting traditional media and pamphleting prepared them to be critical and creative. I think a similar phenomenon happended over here – the experience of being pilloried in the press led many to become aware of mediation and to then become interested in the possibilities of computer mediation.
Continue reading Passerini: Autobiography of a Generation

The founders of Mackarel, David Groff and Kevin Steele, have created A Biased History of Interactive Media which has a great chapter on When multimedia was black and white which reminds me (an old HyperCard programmer) of the “good old days.” The chapter is a great little intro to early multimedia on the Mac. They mention a number of then new HyperCard stacks like Robert Winter’s CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony leading up to their Mackarel Stack, which I remember. The interface to the chapter is deliberately HyperCard-like.

Chapter 2 is about “When bevelled edges were cool” … remember those days? Shudder?

The NEW MLAgazine: About Computers and the People Who Made Them is a strange magazine with long interesting articles on the historyof Netscape and a lot of stories about Macintosh history – including a good one on the history of the Mac OS. Looks to be the work mostly of one fan. I’m not sure what the title stands for or how it is a magazine, but the content is interesting.

The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was one of the first modern cellular phones. It was a brick, but consumers lined up for them in 1984. See the story at CNN.com – First modern cell phone was a true ‘brick’ – Apr 27, 2005.

Apparently there has been a search for a mint copy of the original 1965 Electronics magazine in which Moore’s article proposing Moore’s Law appeared. Well, now a copy has been found, see BBC NEWS | Technology | Moore’s Law original issue found. It was under the floorboards of a hoarder. (Why under the floorboards and how was it found? Because his wife complained about the mess!) Double thanks to Judith Altreuter for alerting me to this and then pointing out a typo.

I’m reading around the history of programming in Go To and was intrigued by the connection between Unix and time-sharing.
This connection is made explicitly in the title of a paper by one of the developers of Unix, Dennis M. Ritchie,
The Evolution of Unix Time-sharing System (PDF). As an interesting aside, the key proposal by the development group that got them a PDP-11 to work on proposed to develop a text editing system and their system ended up supporting the word processing of the patent group. Unix and Electronic Textuality! I knew it.

In early 1970 we proposed acquisition of a PDP-11, which had just been introduced by Digital. In some sense, this proposal was merely the latest in the series of attempts that had been made throughout the preceding year. It differed in two important ways. First, the amount of money (about $65,000) was an order of magnitude less than what we had previously asked; second, the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified) operating system, but instead to create a system specifically designed for editing and formatting text, what might today be called a `word-processing system.’ The impetus for the proposal came mainly from J. F. Ossanna, who was then and until the end of his life interested in text processing.

For more on Ossanna and the history of troff see The GNU Troff Manual – 2 Introduction.
Continue reading Ritchie: Evolution of Unix Time-sharing system

Thanks to StÈfan’s blog I discovered Gary L. Gray’s Some Cool QuickTime Movies page which has a number of historic clips like the original “1984” Macintosh commercial and Steve Jobs talking about the history of computing when introducing the Mac. (He makes it a question of freedom – freedom from the domination of IBM.)

I’ve been dipping into Japanese manga and anime culture. Japanese science fiction animated movies like Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Metropolis (2001) have a visual grammar that has influenced computer game design and cyberpunk movies like the Matrix. They also have a willingness to tackle interesting philosophical issues like the nature of the soul or “ghost” in a cybernetic world (Ghost in the Shell).

In effect, boys anime and manga, like the fumetti I read as a kid in Italy (see uBC – Enciclopedia), combine smart speculative fiction plots with soft porn and tech-heavy violence. This mix can be seen in the Fraco-Belgian adult Bande DessinÈe like Moebius.

Whether we approve of this mix, and, of course, we don’t, there is an energy to boy culture and it is the source for much of the style of online culture.
Continue reading 3 Classic Anime

Just discovered! Humour for history of computing geeks, Watley Classified Advertorial: Babbage Machine. And they also sell “Difference Engine Manipulator Pads” (mouse-pads).

Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

I noticed this intriguing image and caption up in a display in our labs and thanks to St?©fan Sinclair traced it to Matt Kirschenbaum’s blog where a comment then took me to Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Does Not Compute). Pity it’s a hoax – why wasn’t Rand thinking about the home computer back then? If you look closely the teleprinter is distorted and the suit is too short for the display, but the caption is so good it should be true.