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The Early Days of TV Science Fiction
mcse_knowthyenemy writes: "The very first TV sci-fi shows are covered in detail here. The author, a professor of physics, approaches the topic with academic rigorousness. If you think the original Star Trek was low-budget, consider the $5 per episode these studios could spend."
Yeah, but back in my day, we didn't need these fancy "computers" with their "render farms". We just had a guy named Ted, and he drew pictures, on toliet paper, with chalk, and held it up to the camera, and we LIKED it!
5 dollars would buy the whole crew food for a month, and we'd still have enough left over to put our kids through college. We didn't have trailers, and props, and sets, and we LIKED it!
Props, yeah, we didn't have all these fancy props, your "phasers" and your "pulse pistols". We just stuck out hands out, painted them silver, and went "pew, pew, pow" with out mouths. And the silver paint made you impotent, and no one would talk to you because someone started a rumour that Communists had silver hands, but we LIKED it.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
This story is worth reading in only one aspect; It gives you a pretty good glimpse at how things have changed for kids since 1950.
Back then, kids had almost nothing but their imagination, the special effects were not very special, and space was still a very real part of their future.
Kids today get to watch movies that are entirely computer generated, like Final Fantasy, and if the newest games graphics aren't the best, it must suck. And space, well, I guess it's going to take a little longer than we expected, eh?
-- Dan
By the time I was 12 or 13 I discovered high-voltage (having mistaken a potted transformer for a relay and getting a zap off the secondary as I tried to energize the primary "relay coil" with a battery). I quickly built all sorts of high-voltage circuits. I knew enough about AC, DC, and step-up transformers to be dangerous, though it would still be a while before I'd think to charge up old capacitors salvaged from TV sets via half-wave rectifiers (I was too cheap to get 4 diodes for a full-wave bridge). About this time I got an TI SR-52 calculator to help with practical calculations related to my other interests: calculus, physics (espescially general relativity, which, though I had saved up to buy a college level text, was at the limit of my ability to comprehend), and programming. In 1974, I finally had access to a timesharing computer: an HP 2000, accessed via a teletype and acoustic coupled modem in the "terminal room" in my high school. This was heady stuff.
In those days, building anything electrical, or electronic was "something". Oh sure, you could get kits, but I wanted to design my own stuff, and the hand-me-down parts I scrounged from my father proved handy. The fact was that anything technical was rare. LCDs didn't exist and LEDs were a novelty.
We graduated from a black and white TV to colour around 1967, and cable TV shortly thereafter. I remember the first UHF stations, and the difficulty to receive them. My father had a "Super-8" movie camera, and projector for making home movies. I remember him having to send 35mm and movie film away for processing and waiting a couple of weeks to get it back. There were no VCRs, walkmans, or answering machines in the late 1960s. Eight track tape decks were a big thing.
Things started changing slowly in the early to mid-1970s. "We" had been to the moon, and it was clear that change was afoot. I got a mono cassette deck for Christmas, 1972, though I still coveted my father's open real 2 track 7-1/2 ips reel to reel deck. Open reel decks were to be prefered for "serious" recording for some time after that, though 15ips and stereo. During high school, I had progressed to designing radio-controlled devices and anoying the heck out of neighbours by remote control (remotely-exploded firecrackers in the flower beds, anyone?). Getting time on the HP2000 was a major priority, especially when we got an upgrade to a 300 baud modem and a DECwriter. The big thing for geeks to do then was design multi-terminal spacewar games (text-based)... in BASIC... with files for inter-process communication. Then, in 1975, something big happened: The MITS Altair.
I never got an Altair, but my father "worked with someone who knew someone who knew someone who worked for someone who got one for his business", seriously. By this time, I had progressed to logic circuits (designing my own state-machine based gizmos, and had multi-channel remote control down to a tee. I got a chance to see the Altair and play with it. I ended up writing much of the initial code for an "invoice" program for the owner of the machine. And what a beauty it was! 16K RAM, and a CRT terminal (about $3000), glowing nicely with blue lettering. BASIC took 8 minutes to load from cassette tape (one of my first projects was to build a second cassette interface), and the invoicing program about 30 seconds. And the printer! Sure, it was upper case only, but it printed at 1200 Baud! (well, it accepted data that fast, most of the time). During lunch, when I didn't have school, I got to play with that computer.
This brings us to about 1979, when I started on my B.Comp.Sc. degree program. Notice anything? From 1965 to 1979 there were very few innovative things! Colour TV, calculators, bulky video cameras, and finally the first VHS and Beta VCRs. Computers were a real expensive hobby item, only for garage tinkerers, though the Apple ][ was starting to make an impact, as well as this thing called CP/M, which brought order to hardware abstraction. I turned 18 in 1979, the legal start of adulthood where I lived. So, during the course of my childhood, very little change occured. And I thought, at the time, what modern times and things are being invented! After all, the big things for my parents' generation were cars, planes, electricity (with it, phones, radio, and TV) -- I had seen as many new and cool things during my childhood as they had seen during their whole lives.
My daughter is now 8-1/2 years old. Since 1993 she has seen the advent of the internet (email, www, on-line shopping and payment), cell phones becoming ubiquitous, DVDs, hand-held electronic games, satellite TV. Most importantly, I grew up in an analog world and her's is most certainly digital. My son probably won't even remember the time of the dial-up ISP: we dropped it in favour of DSL when he was 14 months old -- a whole connectivity paradigm shift in half his sister's childhood.
When people lament that their kids' lives are on some kind of techno-amphetamine induced fast-forward, with little time for imaginative play, I wonder if its just that their world changes so much faster than that of their parents', that keeping up and absorbing all of it results in a short span of attention to any one thing, lest something else be missed. There is no time to imagine: when you return to reality, it will have changed so much, you won't recognize it.
I do not expect this trend to continue indefinately. Moore's Law and Quantum Physics will collide at some point. Until that is reached however, we will progress at breakneck speed through a socio-economic upheaval that can probably be compared to the industrial revolution. Entire industries will disappear, though not without resistance. New companies will fight to dominate in a digital, information-rich world. Our kids will be caught up in this turmoil, and the usual effects that social upheaval causes, fighting for rights that were impossible to curtail a decade ago, that the point in their lives where they barely realize that such rights are important.
The world is in the middle of a technological transformation that will result in a new one, without breakneck change, or at least a change of an implementative and not architectural nature. Once that happens, kids will once again be able to take a breather and let their imagination run wild in that frontier of new possibilities.
You could've hired me.