graphics

Computers, Tron & Clifford StollI’m not sure how many of you have fond memories of the movie Tron, but I do. I recall going with my uncle to some office to play “Adventure”—an early (1983) text adventure game. My uncle was friends with various folks in electronics manufacturing in the early 1980s in San Diego. So I remember one of the guys pointing out a computer—something running PDP-10—they they said “was the computer they used to make Tron.” I was highly impressed. I think I thought it was the computer, but I think they meant that it was running the same software as the creators had used. The Tron wikipedia page indicates that the machine they used was the Super Foonly F-1.

I had used computers already. In Grade 8 at School of the Madeleine in San Diego we had an Apple II Plus. I think mostly we were allowed to play Oregon Trail as a reward for finishing something early. This is indeed how I know what it means when someone has a t-shirt that says “You have died of dysentery.” I also remember writing the most basic of Apple Basic programs. GOTO and PRINT and maybe some basic LOOPS and IFs. Nothing I remember terribly well.

It was also in about 8th grade that (thanks mom and dad!) my parents bought me a TI-99/4A computer, which I loved and was I wrote about ten years ago. I had a lot of fun with that machine and it was when I first started programming.

I even drew that machine for a drawing class in 9th grade. It’s a study in perspective, but really, the subject is that computer. All the details are devoted to the computer. I could care less about the rest of the room:

Back to Tron, On Drawn! Cartooning and Illustration Blog I saw an excellent stop-motion animated short film of a short sequence from Tron. It’s super!

Link: Tron by freres-hueon

Aside: Super Foonly F-1 is the coolest computer name I can think of.

So here’s how funny memory is. I titled this post before I started writing it. In my memory Clifford Stoll is linked tightly to my early experiences with computers. I imagine myself having read his exciting book The Cuckoo’s Egg when I was perhaps 15 years old. In truth, the book did not come out until 1990, so I was twenty. Funny, memory. Stoll was and is a hero of mine. It was his writing about telnetting from machine to machine that I really understood how the internet worked. Granted, I had had experience going on BBSes when I was 15 on my Amiga, and that helped. But Stoll was adept at describing this nowhere space—of having accounts on different systems, and of pretending to be other users—it was every vivid in my mind. Of course, I had Gibson’s “matrix” in my mind too, but that was fictional and quite fanciful, and clearly impossible with the tools we had at that time (1984, when I read Neuromancer).

I was delighted to see this video: Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind show up in my podcasts:

I remember Clifford Stoll appearing on some PBS show in the early 1990s and he would not sit down and sit still. Unless I’m making this up, he sat in the chair by not sitting—he was crouching, feet on the seat, on the chair. I disagree with most of his thoughts about computers and kids, but I’m also aware he’s a wise man with smarts like crazy.

As with all my childhood heroes who are still alive, he has a home page. I dig the simplicity and the priorities that shows.

That’s a piece of my story of being inspired to use computers. What’s your story?

I have some backlog stuff, as per usual. This weekend to catch up? I hope so.

Last night I went to the SIGGRAPH Los Angeles event held at the EA facility in Marina del Rey. Devon was supposed to attend with me but he ended up distracted by girlfriend. The Electronic Arts building, or rather set of buildings, was very nice—they had a little arcade, and a gym, basketball courts, and security all around. It actually reminded me a bit of the franchulates from Snow Crash, how hermetically sealed up from the rest of the community the place was.

The topic was digital acting. In brief, it examined the challenges of creating digital, directable animated charaters, in both linear media and in games. The emphasis on artificial intelligence was a bit of a surprise, I hadn’t thought about how much behavior gives a sense of “reality” to the world. And behavior is inevitably complex and hard to model. It was fascinating stuff and had me thinking about the challenges of making NPC (non-player characters) in a game.

I’ve been attending SIGGRAPH events in various places since the 1990s. In the presentations folks would indicate when their “first SIGGRAPH” was. Not that you’re interested, but mine was in 1995. On the nametag (which I still have) I wrote my occupation as “FILM/COMPUTER GRAPHICS STUDENT.” Mind you I was only toying with the web at the time as a consumer. I was learning PhotoShop and taking classes at UCLA Extension at the time. Out of all that curiosity about how computer graphics were done in movies, science fiction, computers, programming—I ended up in the web. And the rest, is history.

Even though my day to day life has gone more toward code and less toward graphics, I’ve kept up with local chapters of SIGGRAPH ever since that first SIGGRAPH.

Next month the topic is Automobile Visualization, and I wonder if my buddy Chris might want to attend that one.

The drive home was nice. I drove PCH. The big wide ocean is so large and so dark at night. The crescent moon shone down on it. I listened to danah boyd on an audio podcast from Harvard which had my mind racing over many topics.

There is an interesting intersection between games and social media and I’m not sure what that ends up looking like.