Different Keystrokes for Different Keyfolks

As you may have guessed, I'm not going to let the lack of a new, over-arching theme for this blog stop me from posting about random stuff that I find interesting.  So, let me take this opportunity for a picture post in which I convince you that keyboards are cool.

The above is a close-up of part of the Commodore 64 keyboard.  I spent much of the 1980s figuring out the innards of that beastie.  It served me well.  Note that even back then, there was a superfluous "operating system brand" key -- I remember the "Commodore key" giving access to the weird emoji-like symbols you can see printed on the fronts of the letter keys.  Each of those symbols also served as shorthand commands for various things.  I remember that printing the heart symbol was obligatory at the beginning of most programs, since it was equivalent to a "clear screen" command.

But if you want even more keys for symbols, non-standard shift-key sequences, and overall high weirdness, you can't go wrong with the Space Cadet Keyboard:

Click to zoom... you won't be disappointed

Roman numerals!  Thumbs-up and thumbs-down keys!  Hyper, Super, and Meta?!?  I especially like the keys for set theory, partial differentiation, and infinity.  Hat tip to the great Ron Hale-Evans for introducing me to this one.

However, if you're really into the state of the art, I suggest you find an Optimus Maximus... in which each key contains a fully programmable little screen that you can change to any image you want...

This one made me think of the esoteric, customized keyboard (with a similar tactile look to it) that someone spent a lot of time in crafting for just one brief scene in the 1979 sci-fi movie Alien:

Another one to click on and be amazed

Note all the quasi-Buddhist Theosophical terms... Aum, Padme, and Hum all make an appearance.  Also Lingha and Yoni... as well as "Agaric Fly" next to "Trip."  (If you don't know, I ain't sayin.)  But what exactly is a "Druze Pile," and how does one get rid of "Shakti Excess?"  These keys might come in handy if you encounter Ascended Master Koot Hoomi on the seventh etheric plane, but I'm not sure how they helped Ripley blast a xenomorph out of the airlock.  See here for some additional exegesis of the fonts, buttons, and keyboards from Alien.

But anyway, now that we're firmly transported into the future, I can't help but also remember some other buttons and keypads out of my nostalgic sci-fi dreams...

Don't do it, Scotty!

Putting aside the obvious question (i.e., how would anyone remember what each button does if they're not labeled?), let me just point you to an amazing web page that tracks down the origins of every gol-dang button on the bridge of the original starship Enterprise.  Some were repurposed from existing electronic equipment, and some were made from pouring colored resin into ice trays.  Don't believe me on the latter, do you?  See some recent fan attempts to make some!

This image speaks to me in a language I don't understand, but must follow. :-)

Another sci-fi TV show with interesting background graphical elements was 1978's Battlestar Galactica.  I loved all the quasi-Egyptoid and pseudo-Mormon symbolism, but in a post about buttons and keyboards, the closest thing I can think of is the joystick of the Colonial Viper ship...

The image on the left is the one seen most often... "fire" and "turbo" are obvious, and "IM" (inverse maneuver) was only used once: a rapid stop and reverse.  The image on the right was shown rarely -- possibly accidentally -- since it was the unaltered version. This prop really came from the cockpit of a Vietnam-era surveillance plane; it must have controlled the remote cameras on the outside of the aircraft.

Anyway, that's all for now.  If you're hungry for more stuff like this, there's a lot out there for the astute searcher.  There's also a surprising amount of interest in deconstructing the methods and meanings of sci-fi TV and movie "interfaces," too.  The blog that explored the Alien buttons and fonts also delved deeply into Kubrick's 2001 and a few other movies.  This blog had fascinating multi-post musings about the interfaces of Logan's Run, The Fifth Element, and quite a few others.

Lastly, I thought I'd show you the most sophisticated keyboard of all.  For the budding pirates in the audience, I give you the Corsair!

 

H is for Hacktivism

Over the last few decades, computers have changed the world.  Later in this challenge I'll have at least one more post about how they might continue to change our lives in the fuuuuuture, but for now I'd just like to look back.

The highly individualistic "hacker ethic" is something that's attracted manifesto writers since the early 1980s.  Combine a love of sharing and openness with pie-in-the-sky dreams about changing the world, and you've got a perfect storm of virtual optimism.  Back in 2013, I discovered some early manifestos that took the form of magazine ads.  Another early codification of this ethic was set down in writing in Steven Levy's 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution:

1. Access to computers -- and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works -- should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative.
2. All information should be free.
3. Mistrust authority -- promote decentralization.
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position.
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Right about the same time, Richard Stallman (sometimes called the last of the old-school hackers) began the GNU project...

...which of course came along with its own honest to goodness manifesto.  Stallman's purpose was to use grass-roots collaboration to create quality free software that wasn't beholden to corporate interests:

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.

It becomes more manifesto-ish when the ultimate societal goal is revealed: increasing everybody's leisure time!  :-)

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. [...] We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. Free software will greatly reduce these drains in the area of software production. We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.

In subsequent years, Stallman came to realize that people came to have different expectations of the word "free," so some clarifications had to be made to the manifesto.

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

See more details here.  I'm not sure I understand all the nuances.

Of course, a wild west mentality can produce black-hatted villains alongside the white-hatted heroes.  We're all familiar with the bad stuff that can be done with computers.  However, dipping our toes back in the original wellsprings of idealism can remind us why the wildness was (hopefully!) worth it.

No gnews is good gnews

Can 30 year old ad copy make you cry?

Although I haven't yet discovered any new Electronic Arts ads, like the one that I blogged about earlier, check out what I did find, in the September 1983 Scientific American...

Click for big ideas

Yup, the original.  Bagged in the wild, two months prior to the appearance of the Bill Budge follow-up ad that I posted earlier.  Its full text is archived HERE by Chris Hecker, who was kind enough to link to my previous post.

Is it a coincidence that my nostalgia for this heady era of "retro-computing" shares similar space in my brain with a love of fantasy role-playing games of the same era?  My own (still-unfinished) contribution in that arena is called Homebrew '82, after all.  What the two things share is a fierce Do-It-Yourself ethic that may still exist in some places, but has been largely supplanted by many more people that are happy with just buying stuff and using it OTS (off the shelf) or playing it RAW (rules as written).

Yes, yes, I know.  "In my day..."

But there are other, possibly more timeless, connections.  The EA manifesto above says that what they're after is "Something along the lines of a universal language of ideas and emotions."  But how is that any different from this...?

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

That's Hermann Hesse, from The Glass Bead Game.

That's what I still think is possible to create, now, a mere 30 years after Bill Budge put on that silly leather glove and began to remake the world.  Computers may help make it easier to accomplish, but they're just tools.

Let's get building!  :-)

Unearthing another classic EA print ad

I spent a rare weekend away from all email and internet, and I'm back with a unique relic from an era that I've been thinking a lot about lately.  In my review of Austin Grossman's novel "You," I linked to an old print advertisement for Electronic Arts titled "Can a Computer Make You Cry?"  Grossman also talked about the impact this ad had on his characters, and it seems to have been rather pivotal in the computer game industry.

However, I had no idea there were other EA advertisements other than that one!  While paging through the November 1983 issue of Scientific American, I came upon this:

Click for bigger version

I searched for pieces of its text online, and could not find it anywhere.  Is it possible this intriguing follow-up ad is not archived anywhere on the net?  No worries, though, because the remainder of this post contains the full text, transcribed hopefully with no errors by yours truly.

First, disclaimers:

(1) I didn't want to put my old magazine through the hazards of a scanner, so the above cell-phone pic is as good as it gets for now.  I could attempt to snap higher resolution pics, but now that you know it's the Nov. '83 issue of SciAm, and that it's on pages 24B and 24C of said issue, you may be able to find it elsewhere.

(2) I presume the text below remains copyrighted by Electronic Arts, but I hope my transcription can be viewed as "fair use" since it is of clear historical interest, and it seems to exist nowhere else on the net (as of August 2013 anyway).

(3) There are some unintentionally chuckle-worthy moments in this text.  Maybe there's a bit too much of a halo erected around Budge, too.  Still, it's a fascinating slice of life from those heady early days.  Please comment away about the content.

(4) There may be other ads in this series, too.  If I find any more, as I go through my moldy stack of magazines, I could post them.  Is there interest in that?

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[Header text:]

Bill Budge wants to write a program so human that turning it off would be an act of murder.

Are you sure you want to call this guy an artist?

[Main body text:]

In a bedroom in a frame house in Berkeley, California, a guy who looks like he might have stepped out of a TV family series is playing with some ideas that could change your life. They are ideas that are amusing, even charming. And they are ideas that are, quite frankly, a little scary.

His name is Bill Budge and he talks about things like how programming for a microcomputer is like writing a poem using a 600-word vocabulary. He talks about how the elements are so limited and how you have to make them mean so much. And he talks about how, if you do it right, you can make those elements suggest something more than aliens -- something that begins to make you believe it has a life of its own, something he calls "a software friend."

A software friend. It sinks in slowly.

To create a personality in the computer, you have to come to some decisions about what the personality is in the first place. We often think of it in nearly the same way we think of "habit" or "character traits" -- a way of describing continuity in our behavior from one moment to the next.  (F. Scott Fitzgerald called it "a series of consistent gestures.")

According to Budge, however, the essence of a software friend is quite the opposite. "Creating the illusion of personality," he says, "means creating an intelligence that's always changing. It reacts differently to different situations."

The idea is probably ten years away from actuality. But when it comes to working such a mojo on our home computers, well, Budge stands about as good a chance as anyone of pulling it off.

After all, look at PINBALL CONSTRUCTION SET. Everyone always knew Budge was good, but when he cranked out PINBALL, well, the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree.

It was a program that changed the way people thought about personal computers. Instead of reacting to the machine, you were suddenly inside it, trafficking information this way and that, making things. It was like programming, but with familiar items -- you'd grab this bumper, move those flippers, change the colors, then shoot a ball through it all and wonder. Maybe for the first time in a popular program, you could feel the power of the computer.

Steve Wozniak called it "the best program ever written for an 8-bit machine." And suddenly, what-Budge-would-do-next was something you heard people talking about. To Budge himself, however, things weren't quite that simple.

"Sometimes I worry," he says. "I worry about the ability of software to absorb you, focus on you, steal you away from your family and friends. Because in its short-term excitement, it seems to be more interesting. Of course, it's not."

He leans on his hand. "Not yet."

[Upper-right inset text:]

Bill Budge's classic PINBALL CONSTRUCTION SET is just one of more than a dozen remarkable publications by a company called Electronic Arts. We're an association of software artists, united by a common goal: we want to realize the potential of the home computer. To do this, we're creating software worthy not only of the capabilities of these machines, but also of the minds that use them. If you'd like to know more about our company and its products, call ... or write us at ... [old contact info omitted]

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