nteractive/digital media basics from Bob Cotton
background history personal computing, the net, digital media and interface design
computer media basics – “what every young designer should know about the last 50 years of ‘New’ Media.”
Introduction
Now that all professional media are digital, in a sense we are all software developers – whether we are making graphic design, shooting or editing ‘films’, making programmes for radio or tv, designing web sites or web-applications, we are all software designers – we use computer software in order to edit, manipulate or create film, video or sound sequences, text and graphics that have been digitised or created by a computer or the microprocessor chip in a camera or recorder.
So its important that you understand the central role that computers play in the entire process of the creation, the editing, the distribution and the end-user experience of digital media. This is why the following talks interlace the development of modern digital computers in the 1940s, with the development of electronic media like the radio, and television, with the ‘content development’ of ideas for these media, and finally with the development of telecommunications networks and channels like CableTV, the satellite and phone networks – first hooked together in RADAR air-defence systems (the British Chain-Home System) in the 1940s, then into RADAR and computer networks in the 1950s and 1960s (the US SAGE system).
Now all these different strands have kind of ‘converged’ together to create the modern 21st century media environment that you will be operating in as designers, animators, editors, directors, and developers. Its the richest artist’s palette ever created, so enjoy it!
We start with the essential mathematical theory of computing, illustrated in this sketch of a theoretical Turing Machine – a universal computer.
Alan Turing: Turing machine 1936
Turing machines are basic abstract symbol-manipulating devices which, despite their simplicity, can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. They were described in 1936 by Alan Turing. Turing machines are not intended as a practical computing technology, but a thought experiment about the limits of mechanical computation. Thus they were not actually constructed. Studying their abstract properties yields many insights into computer science and complexity theory.
A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a Universal Turing machine (UTM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically-oriented definition with a similar “universal” nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Turing’s in a formal theory of computation known as the Church-Turing thesis. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in logic and mathematics, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or ‘mechanical procedure’.
1943 Meya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon
A short experimental art-film from the originator of ‘underground’ or counter-culture films (meaning films made on low budgets outside Hollywood studio system). Derren – dancer, choreographer and film-maker – was influenced by the European surrealists (notably Luiz Bunuel – look at Le Chien Andalou.
Deren created a genre of film called ‘trance films’ characterised by self-reflection, psycho-sexual imagery, exploration of inner feelings and emotions. Meshes of the Afternoon kick-started the entire American underground film culture. It is aclassic example of how to tell a deep story with nothing but good cinematography, a few props and a good location, and a few in-camera effects. ~There is no script, no spoken-word, just some mesmerising Japanese string music.
John von Neumann: von Neumann machine c 1944
The von Neumann architecture is a design model for a stored-program digital computer that uses a processing unit and a single separate storage structure to hold both instructions and data. It is named after mathematician and early computer scientist John von Neumann. Such a computer implements a universal Turing machine, and the common “referential model” of specifying sequential architectures, in contrast with parallel architectures.
A stored-program digital computer is one that keeps its program instructions as well as its data in read-write, random access memory. Stored-program computers were an advancement over the program-controlled computers of the 1940s, such as Colossus and ENIAC, which were programmed by setting switches and inserting patch leads to route data and control signals between various functional units. In the majority of modern computers, the same memory is used for both data and program instructions.
The terms “von Neumann architecture” and “stored-program computer” are generally used interchangeably, and that usage is followed in this article. In contrast, the Harvard architecture stores a program in a modifiable form, but without using the same physical storage or format as for general data.
hard-wired (ENIAC)
Bush Memex concept 1945 speech recognition, head-mounted camera
punch-card – the data-storage/programming/interactive tool from early 50s to 1970s
Jacquard 1790, Babbage 1830 Hollerith 1870 IBM 1910
paper-tape
1945 Arthur C. Clarke predicts satellite communications
suggests that 3 geostationery sats could service the whole world
RAND corporation set up 1946 RAND predicts satellite communications
Whirlwind (Jay Forrester 1947- ) – first realtime computer – used magnetic-core storage rather than CRT storage for RAM
The Whirlwind computer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the first computer that operated in real time, used video displays for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. Its development led directly to the United States Air Force’s Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s.
1950 Fred Waller Cinerama
The increasing popularity of television forced Hollywood to introduce numerous technological innovations in order to compete for audiences. The most successful of these innovations were widescreen and 3-D formats based, ironically, on experiments conducted since the 1890s.
The first widescreen process of the 1950s, the triptych Cinerama format used for This Is Cinerama (Merian C Cooper, 1952), was directly inspired by the Polyvision system used in the 1920s, though it added a curved screen to provide a feeling of immersive depth. 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope anamorphic widescreen format, based on Henri Chretien’s Hypergonar system, soon replaced the more cumbersome Cinerama. In order to fully demonstrate the panoramic potential of the new widescreen formats, a number of biblical epics of the 1920s were remade in widescreen Technicolor splendour, including Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (William Wyler, 1959; a remake of Fred Niblo’s 1925 original) and Cecil B DeMille’s remake of his own 1923 The Ten Commandments in 1956. (They were dismissed as ‘tits and sand’ films by the industry, for their over-reliance on exoticism.) Since the 1950s, ultra-wide formats have only rarely been utilised for narrative films, relegated instead to novelty attractions such as Imax (Tiger Child by Donald Brittain, 1970). These audience-engulfing, large-screen and multi-screen formats were initially proposed by Stan VanDerBeek in his 1966 manifesto “Culture:Intercom” And Expanded Cinema: A Proposal And Manifesto.
1951 Nimrod Games computer
Festival of Britain -tic tac toe
1953 Gordon Pask Musicolor
Molly Wright Steenson discusses Gordon Pask’s Musicolor (1953) – an interactive piece that has the ability to become bored with its users. In the piece, music and visual feedback interact with each other and the user. A musician plays in response to visual cues (lights and images.) If what the musician plays is to similar to what it has played before, the machine stops responding – it gets bored. The musician must react in a new way and play something different in Gordon Pask (1928-1996) worked in Cybernetics – a broad interdisciplinary study of the structure of complex systems, especially communication processes, control mechanisms and feedback principles. Many fields of study have been influenced by cybernetics including, game theory, system theory, psychology, philosophy and architecture.
Skyway pinball machine 1954 highly interactive entertainment
USAF Cape Cod System 1953 – prototype of SAGE air-defence system
The Cape Cod System was designed to demonstrate a computerized air defence system, covering southern New England. Signals from three long range (AN/FPS-3) radars, eleven gap-filler radars, and three height-finding radars were converted from analog to digital format and transmitted over telephone lines to the Whirlwind I computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1957-1963 SAGE Dewline Early Warning System – network of RADAR and computers (Whirlwinds)
The Cape Cod System verified that the new core-based machine was fast enough for use in SAGE, and an industrial effort was started in order to mass-produce the AN/FSQ-7 (Whirlwind2) computers for this role. RCA was a front-runner, but IBM was eventually selected instead. They started production in 1957, along with a massive construction project to build the buildings, power and communications network needed to feed the SAGE systems with data.
map of SAGE coverage in USA
video of SAGE
CRT screens for SAGE
1963 Kubrick Dr Strangelove poster
Stanley Kubrick: Pentagon War Room
light-pen and CRT (Whirlwind) 1956
The Whirlwind computer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the first computer that operated in real time, used video displays for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. Its development led directly to the United States Air Force’s Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s.
1957 Sputnik
1957 Morton Heilig Sensorama
1958 Jay Forrester System Dynamics – Industrial dynamics – simulating complex systems
Licklider Human-Computer Symbiosis 1960
early computer graphics at Boeing early 1960s
In 1960 William Fetter, a graphic designer for Boeing Aircraft Co., was credited with coining the phrase “Computer Graphics” to describe what he was doing at Boeing at the time. Fetter has said that the terms were actually given to him by Verne Hudson of the Wichita Division of Boeing. In a 1978 interview Fetter stated, that there had been a long-standing need in certain computer graphics applications for human figure simulations, that as descriptions of the human body are both accurate and at the same time adaptable to different user environment. His early work at Boeing was focused on the development of such ergonomic descriptions. One of the most memorable and iconic images of the early history of computer graphics was such a human figure, often referred to as the “Boeing Man”, but referred to by Fetter as the “First Man”.[3]
Sutherland Sketchpad object-oriented computer graphics
In the 1960s, Ivan Sutherland (now of Sun Microsystems) developed Sketchpad as an interactive graphics system. It allowed users to create graphics on the screen with a light pen. The graphics were treated as objects to be manipulated. These object could be joined together to form more complex objects which then can be treated as units. This became the influence for Star’s user interface and graphical applications.
1962: Doug Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect – a conceptual framework
http://redstone.sourceforge.net/notes/computing.html
1963 Nam June Paik Zen After Television
1963 Wolf Vostell Do-It-Yourself De-collage
1963 Bernard Lodge/Ron Grainer BBC Radiophonic Workshop Dr Who titles
1963 Elkan Allen Cathie McGowran Ready Steady Go!
1963 Abraham Zapruder: assassination of Kennedy 8mm film
1964: Donald Davies, Paul Barran Packet-switching
1964 Stan van der Beek Breath Death
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=80Jf_p3lHxY
Abstract: Stan VanDer Beek (1927-1983) became known as one of the members of the American Expanded Cinema. He was as well an artist searching for new kinds of enlarged presentations for the Expanded Cinema. In 1964/65 he opened his Movie Drome at Stony Point, New York: a self built space capsule to experience full sensual experience of film projection. His interest was a satellite based Cinema distribution system which he called Culture Intercom. It included a data bank of images distributed via satellites. Stan was an artist-in-residence at NASA from 1979-80. “I gave them no chance to reject my proposals”, he said. “When they refused one project, they had already another proposal on their desk.” Jürgen Claus presents a short Hommage to this poetic visionary artist on occasion of 35 years of Movie Drome.
Death Breath
(Stan van der Beek, US, 1964)
After college, I lived in New York with some people who would watch experimental avant-garde films. We embraced them because they annoyed everybody else, even though they were mostly awful. One night we were enduring some of this stuff when on to the screen came a cut-up image of Richard Nixon trying to talk with his foot in his mouth. It was the simplest animation pun imaginable. Years later, when I had come to England and we were working on a TV programme that was meant to make people laugh, there was a problem with dramatising one of the ideas. So I got a picture of Jimmy Young, cut it in half, moved his mouth around a bit and everybody laughed. That subsequently became a trademark, for which I think van der Beek should take credit. (Terry Gilliam)
“Unconsciously we’re developing memory storage and transfer systems that deal with millions of thoughts simultaneously. Sooner than we think, we’ll be communicating on very high levels of neurological referencing.”
- Stan Van der Beek
Harold Edgerton strobe bullet 1964
Robert Moog: Moog Synthesiser 1964
1965 Dendral Expert System (Feigenbaum)
Dendral was an influential pioneer project in artificial intelligence (AI) of the 1960s, and the computer software expert system that it produced. Its primary aim was to help organic chemists in identifying unknown organic molecules, by analyzing their mass spectra and using knowledge of chemistry.[1] It was done at Stanford University by Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi.[2] It began in 1965 and spans approximately half the history of AI research.[3]
http://datapeak.net/robotics.htm
c1965 Ted Nelson: Hypertext and the Xanadu Project
1965 Andy Warhol Chelsea Girls
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KvOnRdMi4OM
1965 Al Hansen Happenings -semi-scripted interactive (audience participation) multimedia performance. Hansen was a member of Fluxus
1965 hansen published advertisements in the
new yorker daily papers offering ‘happenings’ in your home’.
‘the happening is a curious and unique form of theater in
that one puts its parts together in the manner of making
a collage. the things in a collage might be worked in initially
to fit with the things around them, but in the finished piece,
any or several of these items might be covered over with
black paint and have something imbedded in them.
the same process seems to apply to the happening’
said hansen in 1965.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KvOnRdMi4OM
1965 Warhol Inner and Outer Space Edie Sedgewick
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DHz4yWx9MtE
Outer and Inner Space is a 16mm film of Edie Sedgwick sitting in front of a television monitor on which is playing a prerecorded videotape of herself. On the videotape, Edie is positioned on the left side of the frame, facing right; she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to our right. In the film, the “real” or “live” Edie Sedgwick is seated on the right side of the film frame, with her video image behind her, and she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to our left. The effect of this setup is that it sometimes creates the rather strange illusion that we are watching Edie in conversation with her own video image.
The film is two reels long, each reel is 1,200 feet or 33 minutes long, and the videotapes playing within the film are each 30 minutes long. The two film reels are projected side by side, with reel One on the left and reel Two on the right, and with sound on both reels. So what you see are four heads, alternating video/film, video/film, and sometimes all four heads are talking at once.
Another interesting project that Edie was involved in during the summer of 1965 was Outer and Inner Space. During the filming, Warhol used an early version of a portable video camera loaned to him by the Norelco company for promotional purposes. The footage of Edie shot on video was shown on television sets during a long monologue by Edie which was filmed by Warhol in August 1965. from http://www.warholstars.org/warholfilm/andywarhol7.html
1965 Yoko Ono Cut piece
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CvQ36yHGfzE
1965 Gordon Moore Moore’s Law
1966 Bob Taylor: the idea of the internet
Taylor, Bob; director of ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office from 1966 to 1969; had the idea for building ARPA experimental computer network and obtained funding ($1 million) to start it; recruited Larry Roberts from Lincoln Lab to be head of the project; had studied psychoacoustics and mathematics at The University of Texas in the 1950s; was a research administrator at NASA before joining ARPA; later founded the computer science lab at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center; built digital equipment corporation Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. Roberts, Larry; engineer; director and principal architect of the ARPA network experiment; often referred to as “the father of the ARPANET”; designed and wrote the network specification, drafted the Request For Proposals, and oversaw all work on the project from 1966 to 1973; became director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office in 1969; had conducted groundbreaking proof-of-principle TX-2 networking experiment with Tom Marill at Lincoln Lab in early 1966 before moving to ARPA; wrote the first electronic mail manager software (called RD) in 1973; left ARPA in 1973 to direct TELENET.
1966 Warhol Exploding Plastic Inevitable light show
1967 Raduz Cincera: Kino Automat Expo67
Billed as “the world’s first interactive movie,” Kino-Automat was shown in a specially-built theater in the Czech Pavillion at Expo ‘67 in Montreal. Each of the 127 seats in the theater had a pushbutton panel with one red and one green button. Five times during the movie, the show stops and a live performer appears on stage and asks the audience to vote on which of two possible scenes should play next. Everyone’s vote is visible around the perimeter of the film screen. As if by magic, the voted scene is played.
It’s not magic but clever design: rather than creating an exponential branching structure requiring many possible scenes, Cincera wrote the script such that each scene ends back at the same next option, regardless of which was chosen.In fact, the “magic” was really a projectionist switching the lens cap between two sychronized projectors based on the voting results.
1967 DA Pennebaker: Subterranean Homesick Blues from Don’t Look Back
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=srgi2DkDbPU
1967 Michael Snow: Wavelength
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lzPwuP6AmCk
Wavelength, Michael Snow’s meditation on cinematic practice, takes the form of a zoom that moves from the end of an 80-foot urban loft to a photograph of waves on the wall at the opposite end of the room. The zoom is accompanied by a sine wave as it gradually progresses from its lowest note (50 cycles per second) to its highest (12,000 cycles per second).
At the beginning of the shot, most of the room is visible. Eventually, the zoom excludes the rest of the room as it focuses on four vertical double windows, three intervening sections of wall space, and a desk, radiator and chairs by the opposite wall. As the zoom progresses, it goes through a series of jerks and jolts between occasional shot changes. Meanwhile, the image passes through a variety of colour filters, film stocks, degrees of processing (positive and negative) and light exposures.
At different points in the film, four events occur involving people, during which the sine wave is combined with synchronous sound. Prior to the third event, there are sounds of glass breaking, wood splintering and footsteps on the stairs a man staggers in and drops to the floor just before the zoom eliminates him from view. In the last event, a woman makes a telephone call, explaining that a man appears to be dead on the floor. After she leaves, superimposed images of her conversation and earlier stages of the zoom’s progress appear over the principal image. As the zoom moves onto the lowest of three small photographs on the central wall, a police siren is heard, gradually merging with the sine wave. The zoom continues beyond the borders of the photograph, then retreats a little and the image blurs out.
Michael Snow’s first major film was described by the critic Jonathon Rosenbaum as “the most consequential zoom shot in the history of cinema.” It has been variously analyzed for its modernist-materialist form as a definitive answer to Bazin’s question Quest?ce que c’est le cinma? (Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 1970); as an exploration of the problems of narrative and the viewer?film relationship; as a meditative experience; and as an epistemological inquiry. This rich and rigorous film is all of these, and more; Wavelength stands as one of the most important works of modern cinema. —Canadian Film Encyclopedia
1967 Jeffrey Shaw Corpocinema
1967 Peter Blake: Sgt Pepper sleeve
1967 NASA whole earth from space
Douglas Engelbart: Mouse
Engelbart 1968 Online System demo
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=X4kp9Ciy1nE
December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.
During the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues created the On-Line System (NLS) that was implemented with what was to be called hypertext. NLS provided key tools such as teleconferencing, e-mail, word processing, hypertext linking, idea development editors and user controlled configuration and programming. However, in order for the NLS to work, tools had to be developed. Among these were the mouse, a chord keyboard, a full windowing software environment, on-line help and consistency of the user interface.
Alan Kay Dynabook concept 1968 object-oriented language Smalltalk
1969 first ARPANET connection
1969 Ted Codd relational database
1970 ihnatowicz Senster
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDt5unArNk
1970 John Conway Life – the invention of cellular atomata ‘game’
1971 Nolan Bushnell Pong
1971 Ray Tomlinson – invents email address format @
1972 Landsat remote sensing images
1973 Alan Kay Smalltalk OOPs
1974 Bob Metcalfe Xerox PARC Alto workstation with Ethernet
1974 Ted Nelson Computer Lib/Dream Machines
1974 ARPANET becomes Internet: Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn: TCP/IP creates internet
The term “Internet” was adopted in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675[13]: Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974). It was around the time when ARPANET was interlinked with NSFNet, that the term Internet came into more general use,[14] with “an internet” meaning any network using TCP/IP. “The Internet” came to mean a global and large network using TCP/IP. Previously “internet” and “internetwork” had been used interchangeably, and “internet protocol” had been used to refer to other networking systems such as Xerox Network Services.[15]
1974 The idea of the desktop Tim Mott Xerox PARC – the ‘office idea’ – users could view the screen as their own desk in an office – they could lay documents on the desktop, open them up to read or edit them, drop them into a wastebasket or into a printer – the computer screen would become a ‘user illusion’ or interface metaphor for the users real desk in a real office.
1974 Devo
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMn3tGCVFa0
1974 Harold Cohen: Aaron artist-robot
http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/hi_interview.html
1975 John Brunner The Shockwave Rider
The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975, notable for its hero’s use of computer cracking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word “worm” to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool [1], perhaps derived from the RAND Corporations’ Delphi Method – a futures market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA’s controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.
1976 Xerox STAR
The Star displayed such technologies as bitmapped screens, windows, a mouse-driven interface, and icons that distinguished it from other systems. The Star and its predecessor, the Alto, influenced people such as Steve Jobs of Apple (who would soon release the Apple Lisa and its more successful descendant the Apple Macintosh).
1976 Apple Apple1
Going to work for Atari after leaving Reed College, Jobs renewed his friendship with Steve Wozniak. The two designed computer games for Atari and a telephone “blue box”, getting much of their impetus from the Homebrew Computer Club. Beginning work in the Job’s family garage they managed to make their first “killing” when the Byte Shop in Mountain View bought their first fifty fully assembled computers. On this basis the Apple Corporation was founded, the name based on Job’s favorite fruit and the logo (initially used as the unregistered logo of the ACM APL Conference in San Francisco) chosen to play on both the company name and the word byte. Through the early 1980’s Jobs controlled the business side of the corporation, successively hiring presidents who would take the organization to a higher level. With the layoffs of 1985 Jobs lost a power struggle with John Sculley, and after a short hiatus reappeared with new funding to create the NeXT corporation.
1977 Archmac Group MIT Put That There!
This was part of the Spatial-data management system developed to prototype at MIT in the late 1970s and early 1980s – either by The Media Lab or The Architecture Machine Group (Archmac) that preceded it. It was a ‘gesture-recognition’ and voice-recognition interface that enabled the user to make voice commands and gestural commands (pointing and moving the finger) and control the computer this way. It hints at what modern modular programming tools like eyes-web, VVVV and Puredata can do – taking input from video motion-tracking or pattern-recognition sensors/cameras and out-putting visuals accordingly.
http://www.media.mit.edu/speech/sig_videos.html
1977 Joseph Novak Concept Maps
1978 Richard Bartle/Roy Trubshaw Essex MUD
The very first MUD was written by Roy Trubshaw in MACRO-10 (the machine code for DECsystem-10’s). Date-wise, it was Spring 1979. The game was originally little more than a series of inter-connected locations where you
could move and chat. I don’t think it was called MUD at that stage, but I’d have to ask Roy to be sure. Roy rewrote it almost immediately, and the next version, also in MACRO-10, was much more sophisticated. This one was definitely called MUD (I still have a printout of it). The database (ie. the
rooms, objects, commands etc.) was defined in a separate file, but it could also be added to during play. However, the result was that people added new rooms that were completely out of keeping with the rest of the environment, and, worse, added new commands that removed any spirit of exploration and
adventure that the game may have had.
1979 Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9sfwrXpIIF8
Benoit Mandelbrot was a mathematician who explored generative or recursive algorithms – simple formulae that yielded very complex patterns when reiterated many times through a computer – these are a class of imagery called Fractals – images with ‘self-similar’ properties – the more you ‘zoomed into one of these images, the more of the same kind of imagery you discovered. Several remarkable ‘fractal zooms were created in the 1980s, and this imagery became popular with the Clubs and Rave scenes at that time – they were very psychedlic or ‘mind expanding’ and went well with Discos, clubs and Rave parties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
1978-1983 Apple Lisa
The Lisa project was started at Apple in 1978 and evolved into a project to design a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that would be targeted toward business customers.
Around 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project [1], so he joined the Macintosh project instead. Contrary to popular belief, the Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between the systems and the final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.
The Lisa was a more advanced (and far more expensive) system than the Macintosh of that time in many respects, such as its inclusion of protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2 megabytes of RAM, expansion slots, and a larger higher resolution display. It would be many years before many of those features were implemented on the Macintosh platform. Protected memory, for instance, did not arrive until the Mac OS X operating system was released in 2001. The Macintosh, however, featured a faster 68000 processor (7.89 MHz) and sound. The complexity of the Lisa operating system and its programs taxed the 5 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor so that the system felt sluggish, particularly when scrolling in documents.
1979-1984 Apple Macintosh
Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a brand name which covers several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The Macintosh 128K was released on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI) rather than a command line interface.
1986 DTP
Desktop publishing began in 1984 with the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout program, which ran on the original 128K Macintosh computer. The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the Apple LaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software.
The ability to create WYSIWYG page layouts on screen and then print pages at crisp 300 dpi resolution was revolutionary for both the typesetting industry as well as the personal computer industry. Newspapers and other print publications made the move to DTP-based programs from older layout systems like Atex and other such programs in the early 1980s.
1980 Zbigniew Rybcinkski: Tango
Visionary, ahead of its time, short art film where Zbig composites together multiple film loops of people moving in a room to create an iconic glimpse of how a room might be used by different people in one day. Working in the early 1980s with analogue technology (film and hand-painted frame-mattes) Rybcinski imagines the future of digital film technology (layers, loops, compositing) a decade or so before these techniques became digital in software like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut and After Effects.
1980 Stephen Lisberger Tron
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ODe9mqoDE
Don Bluth Dragon’s Lair – 1983 laserdisc videogame
This was the first laserdisc video game. Don Bluth was a Disney cel-animator, and Dragon’s Lair is an animated games consisting of interleaved animated sequences on laserdisc controlled by a graphical user interface superimposed on the video images. The user controls his or her direction through a narrative made up of animated linear sequences. The advanjtage of this kind of game in 1983 was that computers couldn’t do full-motion full-screen video (FMV), whereas the laserdisc player could. Games arcade machines often set the standards for FMV, colour graphics and stereo sound in the days before these became commonplace on consumer PCs (ie before about 2000).
1982 Godfrey Reggio: Koyaanisqatsi
this is a remarkable art-documentary (Koyaansiqatsi means Life Out of Balance) about mankind and our environment. It is the first in a trilogy of films – including Powaskatsi (1988) and Naqoysqatsi (2002), that feature the brilliant music of Philip Glass, together with archive and specially shot film making extensive use of elapsed time and fast motion/slomo techniques. Elapsed-time shots are created by locking the camera in one position and automatically creating a one-frame exposure every once a minute or once every 2 or 3 minutes, then playing the footage back at the normals speed. Reggio creates shots that show crowd movements in Grand Central Station, cars on motorways, clouds flying through the sky etc. Slomo is fasdt-cranking the camera (speeding up the frame rate to speeds of 70 or more frames per second, then replaying at 25 fps), fast or speeded-up motion is created in the opposite way – by shooting footage at very low frame-rates (1 or 2 frames per second) before replaying at 25 fps. These techniques are ‘in-camera’ special effects, that can now be partially simulated in software like After Effects.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ
1984 James Cameron: The Terminator
1984 Bill Atkinson: MacPaint
1984 Richard Stallman: Open Source Software (GNU Project)
1985 Bob Geldof: Live Aid concerts, live telecast, world broadcast
1985 Annabelle Jankel/Rocky Morton: Max Headroom
1985 Godley and Creme: Cry
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QYbr7IUNIJQ
1986 Richard Dawkins: Biomorphs
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0EjZw7A3ii8
1987 Adobe Illustrator
April Greiman: self portrait 1987
1987 Nintendo Gameboy
1987 Bill Atkinson Apple Hypercard
1989 Knowledge Navigator
1989-1991 Time Berners Lee: World Wide Web
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eztAgNQIZGQ&feature=related
1991 Apple Quicktime
1992 MPEG1
QuickTime is a multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music, and several types of interactive panoramic images. Available for Classic Mac OS, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems, it provides essential support for software packages including iTunes, QuickTime Player (which can also serve as a helper application for web browsers to play media files that might otherwise fail to open) and Safari.
1992 Steven Levy Artificial Life
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most publicly-discussed fields of computing. Artificial life (A-Life), on the other hand, is a field of computing much less known to the general public, even though it has some very interesting aspects. For example, while very few philosophers will claim that any glimpse of true intelligence exists in any program written so far, there are quite a few biologists that refer to already-existing programs as “life forms”.
True, biologists have no unanimous agreement on the definition of life (just as philosophers have no agreement on the definition of intelligence). But as Chris Langton, one of the pioneers of A-Life, once said, “any definition or list of criteria broad enough to include all known biological life will also include certain classes of computer processes, which, therefore, will have to be considered ‘actually’ alive.”
Steven Levy’s book on artificial life provides a nice introduction to the field. It begins with a review of the field’s history, from the early suggestions made by John von Neumann and John Conway’s “Game of Life” all the way to current efforts.
http://www.echonyc.com/~steven/alife.html
2007 Chris Pirillo: (difference between internet and web)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WMaOFbzWxh0&NR=1
1992 NCSA Mosaic
Mosaic is the browser which popularized the World Wide Web. It was also a browser for earlier concepts such as Ftp, Usenet, and Gopher. Its clean, easily understood, user interface; reliability; availability for the Windows platform; and ease of installation all contributed to make it the application which opened up the Web to the general public.[2] In addition, Mosaic was the first browser to implement images embedded in the text, rather than displayed in a separate window.
Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the browser in 1993, and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997.[3] However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA.
Mosaic was the final link in the chain of technologies (TCP, IP, ftp | nntp | gopher | http, URL, HTML, etc.)[4] [5] which Tim Berners-Lee had earlier brought together to invent the World Wide Web. After the appearance of Mosaic the concept of the World Wide Web took off globally at an explosive rate.
Mosaic was born very mature. Fifteen years later the most popular browsers, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, retain many of the characteristics of the original Mosaic graphical user interface (GUI) and interaction experience.
Mosaic’s direct descendant on the coder line, via Marc Andreessen, was Netscape Navigator. Netscape Navigator’s code descendant was Mozilla Firefox.
browser history:
http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm
1990 Thomas Knoll Photoshop
1990 Ray Kurzweill: The Age of Intelligent Machines
1991 Randy Ubillos: Adobe Premiere
1992 Jeff Hawkins Palm computer
http://www.slcentral.com/dell-axim-x50v-pda/
1992 MPEG1
1992 Steven Levy: Artificial Life
1993 Nam June Paik: Electronic Superhighway ‘videowall’ installation
1993 Tony Buzan” Mind Map Book
1993 Robyn and Rand Miller: Myst
Ivan Getting/USDoD: GPS 1993
John Carmack Doom 1993
1993 Nancy Burson: The New Face of America
1993 Future Publishing: Edge Magazine
1993 Louis Rosotto_ Wired Magazine
1994 MPEG2
1994: Mark Pesce: VRML
1994 Apple QuicktimeVR
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/qtvr/gallery/trees.html
1994 Loren Carpenter: Cinematric audience interaction
1994 Kevin Kelly Out of Control
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html
1994 Dayton Taylor: Time Track time-slice multiplexing
http://www.timetrack.com/ttsw_orange.html
1994 Blizzard Entertainment: World of Warcraft MMORPG
1995 Pierre Omidyar: e-bay
1995 SoftQuod: HoTMetal
1995 Jim Bumgardner: The Palace
The Palace was created by Jim Bumgardner(Jbum), an employee of Time Warner Interactive, in 1994. Bumgardner incorporated many features of Idaho, an in-house authoring tool he had previously developed for making multimedia CD-ROMs. One of the latter features of Idaho was iptScrae, a Forth-like programming language. The name is a play on the word “script”, in Pig Latin. One of the unique features of the Palace for its time, was that the server software was given away for free, and ran on consumer PCs, rather than being housed in a central location. This is one of the reasons why Palace servers are still running today.
Palace chat rooms’ popularity peaked around 1999-2000 when metal band Korn had their own palace chat room that fans could download from korn.com. But it did bring a more anti-social element to the community that in the end made it impossible to police. Communities.com decided not to spend anymore resources on this and tried to develop a new more secure client.[citation needed]
1996 Satoshi Taijiri Pokemon
Pokémon (ポケモン Pokemon?, IPA: /ˈpoʊkeɪmɒn, ˈpɒkimɒn/) is a media franchise owned by the video game company Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri around 1995. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games, Pokémon has since become the second most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo’s own Mario series.[1] Pokémon properties have since been merchandised into anime, manga, trading cards, toys, books, and other media. The franchise celebrated its tenth anniversary on February 27, 2006, and as of April 23, 2008, cumulative sales of the video games (including home console versions, such as the “Pikachu” Nintendo 64) have reached more than 180 million copies.[2]
Jonathon Gay: Flash 1996
Canal Plus_ Deuxieme Monde 1996
Aki Maita Tamagotchi 1997
http://www.snibbe.com/scott/ – artificial life programming in a toy
Larry Page Sergei Brin Google Search Engine 1998
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
Neil Gershenfeld_When Things Start to Think 1999
Chris Cunningham/Bjork: All is Full of Love 1999
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA
1999 MIT AI Lab Humanoid Robotics Group Kismet
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/kismet/Kismet.QT3-T1-10f.mov
Richard Wallace: ALISON chatterbot 1999
http://www.blivion.com/alison/
Scott McCloud: Reinventing Comics 2000
Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlicht 2001
Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous «Haus des Lehrers» (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world’s biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).
Jay David Bolter Ghost Movies 2001
Golan Levin Telesymphony for mobiles 2001
Bram Cohen Bit Torrent 2001
Apple Computer iPod 2001
Lucien King Game On 2002
Bob Cotton Futurecasting Digital Media 2002
Anthony Rowe/Squid Soup 2002
Stephen Speilberg_ Minority Report 2002
2003 Rafael Lorzano-Hemmer_ Amodal Suspension
Belleville Studio Fotobot 2002
Hiroshi Ishii MIT Tangible Media Group Sensetable 2002
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/sensetable/
MikoMikona_ Fourier Tranzformation 1-11 2003
Paul Friedlander Wave Equations 2003
http://www.paulfriedlander.com/#
Linden Labs Second Life 2003
Logitec_ Digital Pen 2003
The Logitech io2 looks and feels like a luxury pen with its sleek and stylish design. But unlike a standard office pen, it digitally captures everything you write or draw on smart digital paper.
• Writes like a pen.
• Captures your notes and sketches with its advanced optical sensor.
• Up to 40 pages of notes between downloads.
• Up to 8 hours battery power per charge.
Chris Briscoe/Primal Pictures Complete Human Anatomy CDROMs 2003
http://www.primalpictures.com/
Golan Levin Hidden Worlds of Noise and Voice 2003
Niklas-Jennstrom+Janus Friis_Skype_2003
Thomas Anderson Christopher de Wolfe: Myspace 2003
Lego Lego Mindstorms 2004
Ludicorp: Flickr 2004
PicoPeta computers: Amida Simputer
The device was designed by the Simputer Trust, a non-profit organization formed in November 1999 by seven indian scientists and engineers led by Dr. Swami Manohar. The word “Simputer” is an acronym for “simple, inexpensive and multilingual people’s computer”, and is a trademark of the Simputer Trust. It includes text-to-speech software and runs the GNU/Linux operating system. Similar in appearance to the Palm Pilot class of handheld computers, the touch sensitive screen is operated on with a stylus; simple handwriting recognition software is provided by the program Tapatap. ▪ Touch panel overlay on liquid-crystal display.
▪ Speaker and microphone jacks
▪ Smart-card connector.
▪ USB connector (to function as host or device)
▪ Serial port
▪ Infrared Data Association (IrDA) port
▪ Greyscale/Super-twisted nematic display (STN)/Thin-film transistor (TFT) (depends on model and manufacturer).
▪ Multi-I/O connector (in Encore’s Simputer) giving additional (slave) USB, and optional modem/VGA interfaces
£150 – but not selling well at this price. Why?
2004 Mark Zuckerburg: Facebook
David Hansson_ Ruby on Rails (Web Apps) 2004
Augmented Media-Augmented Fantasy 2005
2005 Nicholas Negroponte One Laptop per Child project
2005 Tim O’Reilly Web 2.0
more to come later!
nteractive/digital media basics from Bob Cotton
