Saturday 13 April 2019

basicode

Previously we’ve explored how computer games and software applications were in the early 1980s broadcast over the airwaves for recording and executing with Bristol’s Radio West’s Datarama, and now thanks to Amusing Planet we learn that there was a parallel effort underway in the Netherlands with the state public service radio NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting) transmitting code as well. Hobbyscoop was one popular programme for early computer enthusiasts and while the first few episodes were for specific models of computers, the Apple-2 or the Exidy Sorcerer, the producers had the idea to make the content offered more universal by standardising the format, broadcasting BASIC language programmes and installing each computer with a translation programme to interpret the ASCII representation into its native machine language. Radio stations across Europe were quick to start doing the same. Much more to explore at the links above.

Wednesday 26 December 2018

cga

In the Christmas package from my parents, they included a picture of a young master Johan at seated at the helm of one of my first personal computers—though not the first foray into programming but possibly the first home model that came as a package with floppy disk drives and monitor and not cassette-tape memory that one hooked up to a television set. I don’t recall if the display just didn’t show up on film or if in a fit of intense privacy, I was driven to shut the screen off, but in either case, I still give the same look (according to H) if I’m bothered or feel someone’s looking over my shoulder.

Friday 30 November 2018

pirate radio

Digging through the archives (always an advisable course of action) Waxy finds and shares this monograph from Kotaku recalling how listeners in Bristol within the sound of the broadcasted squelch of data could “download” computer programmes to the cassette drive from the Radio West’s show Datarama during the early 1980s.
Can anyone remember doing this?  I certainly recall running a programme from a cassette tape but never one captured on the airwaves.  This and similarly transmissions became a forum for sharing programmes, games, MIDI music and even digitised images before the development of modems and more advanced storage formats for home computing.  Relatedly, I came across another neologism that came a bit after this phenomenon in the form of prosumer—a term that sounds at least to my ears as a more disdainful way of describing an enthusiastic early-adopted.  Carrying some negative connotations of being amateurish and readily surrendering money on something untested, expect through test-marketing, I am kind of glad glad it fell out of use.


Monday 8 October 2018

linkrot

Via Messy Nessy Chic’s peripatetic exploration, we are treated to a fascinating tour of the physical campus—a former Christian Science church—of the Internet Archive, a project which has curated what’s approaching four hundred billion websites in the past twenty-two years.
With bots scouring the web at all times and collecting presently a half a billion new pages weekly, this operation as well as choosing what to conserve for future generations given limited space and resources is not for the meek and is a good reminder to appreciate your local librarians, especially given that much like in real life, those for profit industries flush with cash and influence lean too heavily on foundations like the Internet Archive and Wikipedia who count on the work of countless volunteers and the donations of those who believe that their pursuits are worthwhile and worth preserving. PfRC apparently made the grade the first time back in 2015. See where your contribution to the on-line world resides on the shelves and stacks and consider making a financial contribution. For all the justified angst over the panopticon of the internet committing everything to one’s permanent record, the fact is that websites and connections wither away and require a substantial amount of upkeep and intervention to conserve the past, particularly when the present acquires a selective memory.

Wednesday 14 February 2018

ux

Tip of the hat to The Awesomer for directing our attention to a group of retronauts at Squirrel Monkey who imagine how the user-experience would be for contemporary social media platforms (see other nostalgic examples here), applications and personal assistants had they had their debut in the early to mid 1990s.
How would interacting with Siri (which isn’t the backronym Speech Interpretation & Recognition Interface incidentally but rather the namesake of the Menlo Park Stanford Research Institute founded in 1946 under the auspices of the university to attract computation talent to the area and more directly as a spin-off from a DARPA programme) for instance be if it required switching out floppy discs and operating at a low baud rate?

Saturday 8 July 2017

buffer memory

One archivist and curator of endangered and at risk television programming is discovering that there is a palimpsest of preserved historical data to be retrieved from VHS and Betamax tapes that might seem otherwise without much merit from a conservationist point of view in the form of teletext pages that were collaterally recorded along with the surface shows.
Before the internet and home-computers became ubiquitous, the Ceefax service furnished a wealth of information, as with these captured feeds from June of 1983—plus resources to be found at the link up top that have compiled whole days’ worth of behind the screen programming.  Most broadcasters ceased their teletext operations in the early- to mid- 2000s once the internet (especially news websites) became robust enough to handle high-traffic volumes but the service still continues for some in TV Land.

Sunday 2 July 2017

random-walk or playable character

Via Waxy, we are introduced to a text-based, pixel art choose one’s own adventure game based around Wikipedia’s Application Programming Interface (API) that allows one to explore, interact with objects, talk to characters associated with each location and enter direct commands at the prompt—like go to 1889.  This is really nostalgic and fun for those of us who remember the original King’s Quest computer games and similar series and how one would try to test the parameters of language and direction, especially when stuck in a seemingly inextricable dead-end.  I wonder, if in the Wikipedia platform, one can simply walk into Daventry.

Wednesday 19 April 2017

chocolate-covered broccoli

Though I can’t claim to have had any direct experience with Oregon Trail (“You have died of dysentery”) and was quite fond of Carmen Sandiego (albeit mostly due to the later television game show adaptation with catchy musical interludes by Rockapella but I don’t think the edutainment software was terribly sustaining), I did enjoy this reminiscence and appreciation of the fusion of entertainment and education—described as chocolate-covered broccoli as that’s the resulting palate in most cases.
In elementary school, moreover, I do remember weekly visits to the computer lab to sit before terminals connected to a mainframe that cycled through some human-interest stories of made-up newspaper that I supposed tested for reading comprehension but none of it was particularly engaging. Once we matriculated to Computer Literacy class, outfitted with Macintosh IIe models that one could program and communicate with rival middle schools with a modem, things did rather grow interesting and our attention was rapt. I think people take for granted that conversation that they have with themselves once they resolve to allow technology into their lives and homes. The novelty, entertainment value of technology was a poor decoy for the recalcitrant learner, but its capacity as a vehicle for education comes out in the tinkering—like with the ownership that comes from working on a jalopy—and to find oneself confined within a world of bounded possibilities that makes risk-taking paradoxically less risky.  Fortune still favours the bold and awards those able to step outside themselves.

Friday 3 March 2017

silver surfers

The eighty-one year old life-long learner Masako Wakamiya is not only constantly improving her own computer literacy and encouraging other senior citizens to embrace technology rather than shun it, she also managed to teach herself how to write code and produced an application that instructs on the arrangement of the traditional dolls that represent the emperor and his court displayed during Hinamatsuri (้››็ฅญใ‚Š, Girls’ Day) celebrations. These elaborate displays consist of multiple figures in a hierarchy of seven tiers according to very specific protocol—like the royal court itself, and the programme teaches the order and orientation with a game. I’d like to hope I could retain my savvy like that in the future.

Sunday 20 November 2016

ios

On this day back in 1985, the Microsoft corporation introduced the graphical interface, DOS-overlay known as Windows 1.0 in order to complete with the popular Macintosh released a year prior—think of that seminal Big Brother, Nineteen Eighty-Four advertisement whose revolt promised to free us from the tyranny of the PC.
I wonder when cultural the geneology of version n-point-o of something became idiomatic. Back then the battle for dominance between Microsoft and Apple struck me as something not very much different than the Cola Wars—one has to wonder if innovation comes because or despite the branding, and it doesn’t strike me as very much different nowadays, excepting who’s Tab and who’s Royal Crown may have flipped.

Sunday 23 October 2016

legacy software

Corroborated with the US Government Accounting Office’s (GAO) annual report, the Simpsons have been vilified in accusing the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS, the tax authority) of operating the “slowest, punch-cardiest” computer in the government—at least, in one sense.
Those who work for the government have enjoyed heretofore some measure of job-security in knowing that their position is justified because different, entrenched systems cannot communicate with one another and need human translators—or at least water-bearers, but often it’s not the equipment, the hardware that’s wholly off life-cycle. Those laurels can be awarded to the nuclear defence platforms running on the same mainframes since inception and cannot be taken offline for updates and payroll systems. They may not be the most sophisticated but that does not necessarily mean that a system that goes on working for decades, with proper maintenance, ought to be overhauled for the sake of efficiency or intelligibility—since they are impervious to attack (at least the lazy, automated kind) and there might be an element of self-preservation in the programming, like the Voyager space probes exploring the Cosmos as our competent ombudsmen.

Monday 10 October 2016

tron/troff or pitch-perfect

Recently an archivist made a fascinating discovery in the form of the first programme, score of digital music from 1948. Cryptologist and polymath Alan Turing wrote the instructions to have his building-sized computer at a laboratory in Manchester perform God Save the King followed by a few other melodies.
While we do have some insight into the pragmatic drive for Turing to modify the mainframe to produce sound—wanting to untether himself from monitoring gauges and screens to check the status of a running programme, a B- of an F-note indicating whether the programme had concluded or ran into a logical glitch (the beep, bop, boop of vintage super-computers), so he could check for bugs elsewhere or attend to the engineering requirements of the hardware, we are sadly not privy to what Turing thought about electronic music or its potential, since for years Mister Turing was blacklisted and his contributions to computer science went unacknowledged.

Monday 19 September 2016

megabit, metabit

To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.

Corresponding with contemporaries that included Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush, Shannon was able to appropriate rather vague and generic terms, as had Isaac Newton in his mission to redefine physics in a disciplined and predictive manner, and furnish the world with Information Theory complete with a grammar that’s intelligible to both the mediator and the immediate. The bit is a metric, a measure of state (coined by Shannon as a portmanteau of binary digit) conveying either true or false, yes or no, but scalable out to any degree and precipitated the limning of communication and experience into a digital analogue that is accessible and exploitable by computer systems. Although we think of programmes as limited to the confines of simple logic, Information Theory also provides brute computing somewhat of a reprieve, showing that rather unique data-sets that encode unique and familiar data can be elided over, somewhat like the End-User Agreements that computers ply us with as instructive (although mathematical in nature, it is pretty human to skim), aiding in speed and compression. Moreover, as apparently as discreet and incompatible as Nature chooses to impart information, there is always a measurable threshold that computers can harness, from bar-codes and magnetic-strips to more custom parameters.

Saturday 5 September 2015

your princess is in another castle

Via that other intrepid adventuress, Nag on the Lake, we are invited on field-trip with the team of explorers of Atlas Obscura to Saint Petersburg to see the conservation efforts of a group of nostalgic and impassioned group of college students, which has produced a vintage arcade experience.
Visitors are immersed in an ensemble of loving restored and playable games and refreshments that capture the ethos of the Soviet Union during the ‘70s and ‘80s. This unique installation (which is presenting some major maintenance challenges) consists of gaming machines that were not only about fun and fantasy—commissioned in accordance with the wishes of the state, there was little time or tolerance for anthropomorphic mushrooms and damsels in distress and these games rather emphasised hand-eye coordination, strategy and team-work over competition. Although no one can say for certain as the provenance of the games is a classified matter, they were probably designed and programmed in the same facilities and by the same computer scientists that were charged with the maintenance of the Soviets’ nuclear weapons arsenal.

Thursday 7 January 2010

these kids today with their y2k...


The millenial bug after dire predictions a decade ago has reared itself again in some 30 million automatic teller machines, bank cards and point-of-sales registers all across Germany, leaving vacation-goers without access to cash and causing undue embarassment and worry in checkout lines.  A mistake in programming causes an error when the card or device processes the 2010 date.  YYMMDD--100101, DDMMYY--010110.  Computers don't make mistakes; people do.  I wonder if all the focus and patchwork that went into preventing the crash in the year 2000 contributed to this.  Technicians are being deployed to fix the problem and replacement ATM cards being issued, but it makes me wonder what else might not be Y2KX compliant--I don't think I've turned on TomTom since New Years, and who can say what other surprises might be in store when one finally gets around to one project or another after the holidays.