Posted on 01/21/2018 12:08:06 PM PST by mairdie
Alan Norton's groundbreaking graphics work from 1989 done at IBM Research on physically based animation. Basically, you mathematically created a world, put a mathematical object into it, and turned on the world to see what happened. The Utah Teapot was the common object used within graphics research. Alan's notion was to tease the community by breaking their common object. This is my video of Alan describing his research.
For those interested in the fundamental figures in computer science, here is the raw footage of two 1990 interviews with John Cocke, the inventor of RISC architecture. An amazing and wonderful man. John Cocke: Part 1 John Cocke: Part 2
I was in a similar situation with Amiga. Commodore had hours and hours of research and people who are no longer with us.
One such person who was charged not only with media but with prototype hardware passed away. His estate threw everything out.
Oh, I am so deeply sorry, Celerity. That hurts deep. An entire estate! So terribly sad for history.
RISC was a true breakthrough!
I code for micro-controllers that have a very tiny instruction set.
Computer History Museum
https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory
Thank you so very much for the John Cocke videos!
My specialty has always been pattern recognition, I seem to have a knack for it.
I’d be very interested in your personal history in compsci.
Your youtube channel has interesting videos :-)
You might enjoy this short computer animation clip, from my youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTO5mFIuPs
CGI was off and running when this movie came out.
Best part of Jurassic Park in first part of clip.
https://vimeo.com/64815871
Nice video!
Thanks for the link :-)
I’m not a fan of video games as I find them too violent for my taste. But I love to look at the marvelous graphics! The raw power of the cpu in game consoles is amazing.
Now the 100mhz, 32bit cpu that controls a simple SD card is far more powerful than the system 360 I started out on.
Things have progressed so far since my early days in computers...and those tiny processors only add 20 cents to the cost of an SD card...amazing!
Wanted to go into astronomy, but left my physics major halfway thru senior year. Schrodinger Equations. Sigh. Took an extra year and graduated in Art History, mostly ancient. First took my dream job - Adler Planetarium. Even checked out on the Zeiss for the main auditorium, but they wouldn’t let a woman speak then because her voice wouldn’t be authoratative in the dark. Besides, they caught me the day after the election. I’d been a Chicago Republican election judge holding down a Democratic patronage job. Amazing how fast they figured it out.
Ended up in the U of Chicago comp center - operating systems. The head left and our group left as a whole. Ended up at National Cash Register for a year in LA, still OS. Then married one of the group and followed him to NY where he worked for IBM Research. He really needed his PhD, so we went to Boston so he could go to MIT. Actually, by that time, he had a competing data flow language to his advisor.
He had to go back to NY, but I couldn’t bear to leave the Boston area so I ended up working for a small company in Fresh Pond that did language design (basically Harvard school of language design). Poor husband commuted to NY. My group ended up in the DoD-I contest and came in 2nd. Better language. My books were getting good reactions. Made govt standard for excellence and so on. Exciting times. I was a consultant to Time/Life on their Programming Languages book. Went to another company for a while after we lost. Not as exciting.
Eventually husband couldn’t handle the stress of commuting, so I hired into IBM Research, too, so that we could commute together. Had to get a NY apt but went back every week. By then, I headed our professional society in programming language and was running conferences and had started 1 magazine.
I joined the Lisp group and started another magazine, as the IBM arrangement gave 1/4 of my time to professional activities. A few years in I was getting bored and stopped the head of Research telling him I gave my video hobbies everything and him what I had to. Could he change that. He did and gave me an international multimedia magazine. Had NO idea what that was, but what the heck. Husband came over at night and dragged 1” broadcast machines into a closet for my first videos. I had to have great posture working off the consoles - no edit controller - or the camera would get me in my back.
Eventually they let him come over from the other building and he built a half million dollar studio around my project. I did the NY, CA and Switzerland videos. Tokyo sent me theirs. It was absolutely wild. I could do basically anything I wanted and learn anything I wanted. So I hired a steadicam op for the John Cocke shoot, went to a digital studio in CA for one of the videos. Wrote a white paper at the NAB and SMPTE conventions on non-linear editors and got an invite to various places in Hollywood. It was all learning and high and fun.
Then my project was over and I consulted to all the research projects on how to be sexy by adding video to your project. That wasn’t as much fun. Took early retirement and started making computer videos for BBN and MIT using the edit controller my husband finally wrote. And used some of the early retirement money to learn how to write movie scripts and had a couple repped by John Grisham’s NYC book agent, who subbed them out to Writers & Artists in Hollywood for 2 years. They didn’t sell, but it was such a wild time.
Now I spend my research efforts working with academics to prove 5th great grandfather wrote Night Before Christmas. Still wild and still high, and still having fun.
When my husband left my project, he hired into the Digital Video project at IBM Research. Not a pleasant place but doing exciting work then. But the physically based animation was different - this idea of building a world with mathematical laws governing it and turning it on. That was a project in its own right. And Alan Norton was the most amazingly nice person.
That WAS fun. Added an uparrow.
Somehow the sort of thing you’d start seeing in your head as you’d be falling asleep, but then the music would start and the colors would begin changing from light watercolors to richer oils, and then they’d collapse into a puddle of oil colors and the music would fade away and you’d be asleep.
WoW!
You are a very interesting person :-)
I have that exhilarating feeling that you get when meeting a friend for the first time.
I enjoy creating language compilers and small OS’s.
I used to create small operating systems for the old PC that fit on a single floppy. It’s a simple thing since you have access to all the subroutines in the BIOS chip. I also used to modify the BIOS chips. I had a lot of fun with people by burning a new BIOS on an eprom and swapping it for the original on their PC...lol Strange goings on and much hilarity would ensue.
These days I mostly just play with micro-controllers in C and asm. I love building low-cost hardware that serves a useful purpose. I enjoy making joke hardware...I love practical jokes. I made a small device using an 8bit controller that you Velcro to the inside of your front door.
When someone knocks, it knocks back with the exact same pattern...it was a hoot.
Since you have an interest in compilers you should have a look at the free open-source pascal compiler called Lazarus.
It is most impressive!
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
I am considering the creation of an open-source P2P version of FreeRepublic. It might be useful during an outage and as a simple adjunct with added tools like an EDIT button....my kingdom for an edit button!
It would not be too hard to base it on cheap Android phones...everyone has an old one around and they could run the software and connect it to the web with wifi.
You could access it using a browser plugin.
Now that TOR has gotten speedy you could feed everything through TOR and have anonymity.
I’m also an encryption nut...I just love encryption!
You really should send those John Cocke videos to the Computer History Museum...I’m certain they would like to put them up on their very popular youtube channel...they would get a lot of exposure there.
I watched a few of your music videos, I enjoyed them.
I should make some videos of people falling prey to some of my gag hardware..lol
My husband is the techie. My professional tool was the xerox machine, other than the 1” broadcast video machines. And boy did I make the mistakes when I produced the page proofs for my magazines! Every mistake known to man, I’ve made.
Your gags sound hysterical. I was cleaning out one of our curio cabinets of antiques when husband walked up and handed me a circuit board. He explained it was an antique and wanted it in with the others. So it is.
I remember one of our multimedia people moving to the Computer History Museum. Don’t know if she’s still there. Eventually I’ll get videos there but, for now, I’m enjoying the small family that communicates with me about the videos. The BBNer that contracted me to make their videos wants her originals to go there. Those videos are proposals for massive data searching for BIG government organizations. Hmmmm.
Open source sounds very reasonable. It’s a prepper point of view for conservative voices that is quite sensible.
The music videos came first. The IBM Research videos came after. And when the head of research was desperate and I didn’t have time to make him a video for a keynote speech, he’d go out with one of my music videos on computers. That was fun! And one of my friends had a song in the top 10 in Ireland and would let me sit with him while he combed out small pieces I could use in my videos. I’d actually watch him shape the notes on his computer. Wonderfully fun.
Languages was my love. We were chosen as one of 4 languages out of 15 for the first phase of DoD-I. Then we got into the 2nd phase, but our language was too disjointed. Beautiful, but not integrated. Our main language designer came back from Germany and took over. Threw out our 2nd phase language and built an integrated language from scratch. A thing of beauty. I wrote the book.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/toc.htm
Unfortunately, they’d already decided the French would win the American defense language and the voters were already writing books on Green and course syllabi on Green. We were Red. It had to be unanimous, and the AF sent a LT who knew nothing about the contest, was told not to answer questions and to vote Green. DCA was physically shaking in the audience. We had our language AND our compiler in on time. Green couldn’t get their compiler done so it was dropped from the evaluation. People were reading our book on the plane to the meeting and got on the plane planning to vote for Green and changing to Red. But the AF LT changed everything for us and unanimous meant Green. Jean won the French legion of honor for designing the American defense language. Then my company got the contract to spend the next year fixing his language.
> One such person who was charged not only with media but with prototype hardware passed away.
You wouldn’t be talking about Jay Miner, would you? It sounds like you actually worked on the Amiga team. So many questions, no more time tonight (this morning) Owner of two A1000s and three A2000s that became A2500s, Techmar 1.5 meg memory expansion and their giant 20 meg Winchester drive on one of the 1000s.
You have that stuff, Or Jay Miner took that stuff ?
>You have that stuff, Or Jay Miner
No, it’s mine. When you mentioned one of the Amiga designers who passed, the two main characters that I associate with the Amiga were Jay Minor and David Haynie and I was pretty sure Dave was still alive. I met Jay Minor at one of the Amiga Expos and bought a copy of Ultracard from him.
The reason I have all that stuff is that I figured out that a lot of people were giving away all their software when they sold the hardware. I also rescued one of the 1000s and two of the 2000s from Amiga friends who were going to trash them.
Oh, my friend is Scott Drysdale, who would have celebrated his birthday 2 days ago - RIP.
He had a 5000HD in his collection. When he passed, it was just tossed against my every wish.
Here is something you might like to see.
“Tiny Programming Language in 25 Lines of Code”
https://hackaday.com/2018/01/22/tiny-programming-langauge-in-25-lines-of-code/
I used to love bumming code down this far...smaller is better!
Joy is a minuscule OS on a cheap RISC cpu :-)
You said your hubby was brilliant and did hardware...does he play with Linux on the cheap Raspberry Pi computers>
There are many people writing small OS’s for the Pi.
I turned one into a simple software defined radio transmitter and used a simple resistor divider network to drive multiple old VGA monitors. It’s a fun toy at just 30 dollars.
My friend Jeff Duntemman writes computer books and has a Pi book in the works with Eben Upton....should be excellent.
I am considering writing a tech book or two, but my writing skills are pretty crude....I’m OK with instruction pamphlets for medical devices.
I’m a hard editor. Take out masses and try to pare sentences down to essentials. I find it emotionally hard to destroy sentences I’ve worked at creating, so I keep an open delete file and never delete, only move into the other file. That fools me into taking a hatchet to my writing.
When I’m doing tech writing, the other thing I look for is NOT being a creative writer. If two things work the same way, I use the same language. if there’s a difference in language, I assume there should be a difference in underlying semantics.
I’m also rabid on making my own non-automated index. It’s a good place to see if your patterning is staying symmetric.
If you have time, would you expand on that?
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