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Computer Folklore, Circa 1984
savetz writes "The full text of the classic 1984 computer book Digital Deli, The Comprehensive, User-Lovable Menu of Computer Lore, Culture, Lifestyles and Fancy, is now on the Web. (Autstralian mirror) A wonderful look at technology culture in the golden age of the microcomputer. 20 other old computer books are at the site, too."
De Re Atari.
Holy shit.
That was one of the first "serious" computer books I ever got -- I won a copy as a door prize at an Atari user's group meeting when I was about 12 years old. By the time I was done figuring out what all that crap in the back of Compute's Gazette was doing, my copy of DRA was so dog eared and broken spined that it couldn't sit flat on my desk.
Good memories. Glad to see it's still around somewhere.
--saint
I love how many books are becoming available in their entirety online. It gives an open-source advocate a warm fuzzy feeling.
Love it: this book was published on the same year I graduated in CompSci and went into business as a programmer.
Especially cool, the retro views on technology, I found. Yoda back strikes.
Like the one on computer safety. I mean, how many people actually take a break every 30 minutes to avoid damaging their eyes?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
http://textfiles.com/ is another fantastic, wonderful resource and window into computer-ages long gone. Check out the top 100 - especially the Captain Midnight story. My kids will be getting this read to them before bedtime some day.
I miss all of the old computer magazines. Nothing like having BASIC embedded in your articles. I think Compute was my all time favorite.
The Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter was my personal old computer book favorite, I remember checking it out of the library, it had tons of great info about all different kinds of computers. Great writing sytle, kept your attention and was funny! I recall he had his home phone number in it too...
I wonder if it's still published... off to Google!
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
1984 was also the year that the first edition of "Fire in the Valley" came out. "Fire in the Valley" was the the most popular history of the personal computer in the '80s. What was amusing in retrospect was that in 1984 we thought the history of personal computers was basically over -- personal computers had gone from labs and the garages of hobbyists to the homes and offices of "normal" people. Looking backward, of course, 1984 seems almost as remote as the introduction of the Altair in 1975.
Marble Madness was an awesome game.. and this brought back great memories of it.
Marble Madness was the supreme mid-1980s arcade game. I played that game hundreds of times in high school, and won it at least a dozen times. A couple things set it apart. It had a cool 3D-style isometric viewpoint, which was done infinitely more convincingly than similar presentations like Zaxxon. Plus, given how hard you had to throw that trackball around, you could get a legitimate workout playing Marble Madness.
I think Marble Madness was sort of a smart person's Donkey Kong. It had a great subtle sense of humor, and a Steve Jobsian attention to detail. Like, fr'instance, the marble you controlled had glitter in it that would roll around as the ball rolled. And it could die in several twisted ways, from shattering to getting eaten by acid. The graphics were some of the best yet for 1980s videogames, and the music was likewise sensational.
After Marble Madness' success, a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was, some genius in marketing thought that for people to identify with our beloved marble, it had to assume human qualities. Thus, Marble Man was born.
Unfortunately, Marble Man never quite got out of testing before the crashing arcade scene made Atari withdraw it from market. I'm not sure if anyone knows where the few original ROM's are anymore. But one thing's for sure...there are thousands of Marble Maniacs out there who would buy it in a heartbeat, just to see if the original was surpassed.
The day local subscribers are offered digital phones is not far off. With divestiture, the offspring of AT&T can feel the hot breath of competition on their necks for the first time. These AT&T orphans will be offering a whole gamut of new products and services-lest someone else do it first.
Answering the phone could become a major decision as you struggle to remember whose number is showing on the display and whether this person is owed any money.
Not that there will be any real reason to leave the house. With the right peripherals, shopping will be no problem. Merchants will be able to fax their catalogs over the phone. And you'll be able to use the phone to make the bank transfers to pay for the stuff. Indeed, whole appliance factories could be rigged to "build on order."
... was my favourite. A *really* well designed OS on a 1MHz machine, with the basic having simple interfaces to the OS routines and the built-in assembler. Absolutely fantastic machine for its day, and this book laid it all bare.
:-) Students (who really weren't that computer-savvy back then) would freak out if their computer started to "talk" to them...
[grin] I remember using that and the network guide to load up *SAY across the network ont remote computers at college
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The book contains a short piece by Bill Gates (here: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/soft.php) and reproduced below. It's an interesting read because I still hear him talk about similar themes even today.
------------------
Today's software is too hard. Usually designed to work well for any and all potential buyers, a few years and hundreds of hours of interaction later a software package will still interface with you exactly as it did at the time of purchase. Your special use may make some uncommon program command the one most often employed, but you'll have to punch any number of extra keys every time you invoke it. Today's software fails to remold itself to express a history of use, and this can lead to incredible inefficiency.
There are programs that allow the advanced user to adjust default values, which are those responses the programmer decided would be most typical for users of a specific application when the software was first booted up. There are also programs that can store a series of often invoked keystrokes and can tell the machine to take the sequence you've named and perform it again. These keyboard macros, the most trivial form of softer software, force you to go through a special set of operations to enter and record changes to the program.
Why shouldn't software automatically adapt to your needs, e.g., learn from experience to change the interpretation of a command, when this is done on a human level all the time? In-human-to-human communication, we adapt our terminology and our method of understanding to our previous history of interaction with each individual. There's no reason computer software should not be as flexible.
"Softer software" is the term I invented to avoid using the poorly understood term "artificial intelligence." In fact, it is a form of artificial intelligence, though not like speech recognition or the expert data base systems that are based on specific algorithms and do not really learn dynamically. Softer software is capable of getting better and better because it has advanced pattern recognition capabilities and can change its performance accordingly.
In general, making software softer requires storing information about a user's history of program commands and analyzing its patterns. This is a form of learning, since the software can build expectations of what the user may do later. Individual characteristics of users, what they're good at and what they're not good at, can be used to establish a reasonably unique dialogue with the computer.
A data management program, for example, could recognize that you always query its files by employee name rather than by an individual's address or hair color. Taking advantage of this pattern and predicting what will be your most common operations on data, the program could customize its query file structure to put information within easier reach. Or maybe it could learn to be forgiving of your most common keyboard mistakes by ignoring misspellings.
Software softness becomes very difficult when recognizing semantics rather than specific operations is required. Say you go into a document, move the mouse to bring the cursor to a certain position and make a word boldface, then go to another position and do it again. Instead of storing up the exact positions where this takes place and trying to match them to later entries pixel by pixel, you may want your software to draw the general conclusion that you boldface the first word in a paragraph and to position the cursor appropriately. Matching things, recording and playing them back at the semantic level: this is the hard part of softening software.
It is possible to say that we have certain types of softness built into software today and that over time we will see a clear progression as programs record a greater number of user events, recognizing more general patterns and building up the dialogue throughout the computer's history. Truly softer software is still some years away, but we are on an evolutionary path where at som
Mr. Veit was the original editor of Computer Shopper, which in the age before the Web was widespread was a moderately thick newsprint tabloid which covered a wonderful variety of computer hardware and software. By the time it was sucked up into the infamous Ziff-Davis machine, the PClone had largely won, but the Shopper still had several columnists in a "Classic Computers" section. Z-D put an end to that, making it a PClone-only rag that, while it was still useful for finding good deals and even, for a while, ran columns by Mr. Veit, had lost its soul.
CS grew fat--I think I've saved one of the astonishingly heavy issues from the era of its maximum thickness--but the Web is finally killing it off, as it is now a vastly better and more up-to-date source of deals and prices than a dead-tree magazine can possibly be. The stray pontificators that write for it suffer from the same lag problems, and one is better off reading hardware sites, tech-related blogs, and sites like Slashdot. (Goodness knows that "The Hard Edge" suffers from the terminal self-indulgence that Strunk and White decry and that crowds out space that the column should devote to useful information.) CS is now a pale shadow of its former deforesting self, and I wonder how much time it has left as a dead-tree magazine.
Talking of 1984, and Mac, I was in a Bank Of America in downtown Seattle this morning and the customer service booth had a Macintosh Plus as its main console. I remarked on how cool it was to be using such a classic computer in such a modern banking environment to which the employee said "nah, we'll be getting rid of these old things next month".
I asked if a new Mac would be replacing the old Mac they've been using every day for the past fifteen years, alas no. A Dell will be there for the next fifteen years, not a Mac.
I still have it and the original loose leaf owners manual. It isn't 'stock' since in addition to the Osborne approved upgrades, I added a 8088 daughter board with a meg of memory to run MS DOS 2.0 programs. The 8088 and DOS were worthless but the 1 meg of RAM used as a RAM disk made it faster than DOS machines until 8Mhz AT clase machines came out with a 286 processor.
I should go out to the garage and fetch it. I have not booted it up in a long time. It is responsible for starting me in my present occupation.
Here's another prediction for the future that came true:
From Computer Animation Primer (published 1984):
By David Fox and Mitchell Waite
Some of today's most sophisticated special effects utilize shading techniques. The use of transparency, surface detail, shadows, texture and reflections are more of an art than a science. Although it is difficult to imagine how these techniques will one day be simplified, it is almost certain that they will. Perhaps LSI chips (large scale integration -- the technique used to make microprocessors) will be developed that apply shading algorithms to user-generated scenes.
With all due respect, Wayne Green is one fucked up dude. Yes, that is the URL to the website of *the* Wayne Green.. the guy who started Byte magazine. The last I looked he was promoting collodal silver as a cure all for whatever ails you. A total whacko. Zen zen kurutteru.
Anybody have a copy of this in a better format? I'd like to print it out so I don't have to read it on-line, but it looks like someone typed in the whole book and converted it to HTML (in about 8 billion chapters). What a HUGE pain in the ass, and extremely un-accessable to people.
Anybody got this in PDF or OpenOffice format?
You know, I saw the same thing at BofA branch on Capitol Hill (Seattle). Macintosh SE's, circa 1988. But they were actually using the Mac's only as terminal emulators -- the screen was filled with a TN3270 or something similar. No vintage Mac graphical banking program, I'm afraid.
As an aside, it was interesting to see the introduction to this book making note of the variants of BASIC out there, and how to adapt the programs to each one. I was an Atari bigot back then (at the righteous age of 12), and remember ignoring articles that primarily targeted other, inferior, machines.
This is not my sandwich.
I'm wondering which of today's slammed-on technology waves will actually take hold ten years from now. If I could figure it out, I'd be rich enough to pay somebody to waste time here for me.
This is not my sandwich.