[hackerspaces] first time seeing tron

[Matt Joyce]

Oh starfish prime
On Sep 4, 2012 8:43 AM, "Stewart Dickson" <mathartspd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello, Frantisek,
>
> Well, I was a computer programmer in a very interesting place in 1982,
> when "TRON" came out.  (Directly from graduating the Bachelors in
> Electrical Engineering in 1981).
> It was AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratory, Naperville, IL -- (Not New
> Jersey) -- I was employed by Western Electric Company/AT&T
> Technologies.  But, the rest of Bell Labs was available by network
> extension.  AT&T/Bell Labs had their own satellites in 1982.   That
> was how the data network was run.
>
> I was interested in computer graphics, and so I soon discovered that
> Bell Labs had several Information International Inc. (III -- or
> "Triple-I") FR-80/Comp80 vector-graphics microfilm printers -- the
> same kind of printers used to render the digital imagery for "TRON".
> In Illinois, the camera heads they used with the FR-80/Comp80 shot to
> B/W positive 35mm unperforated film.  The vector graphics display had
> a huge addressable resolution -- Like 40,000 points in any direction
> -- and could resolve 33 lines-per-millimeter on 35mm
> film -- I measured it using a microscope.   It was good enough to
> create optical diffraction gratings and Fresnel Zone Plates
> (diffractive
> lenses/single-point holograms).  The FR-80/Comp80 with the 16mm cine
> camera head, suitable for rendering animation was located
> in Holmdel, NJ, but was available via the data network.  You got your
> film back in inter-office mail.
>
> In those days -- prior to the US Department of Justice Consent Decree
> of 1984 -- The networks were all open.  After 1984, the walls came
> down, like Berlin.  The loss of freedom in the name of Security and
> division of Intellectual Property.   I had never heard this term
> previously.
>
> Remember that the Billy Kluever/Robert Rauschenberg Experiments in Art
> and Technology took place in cooperation with Bell Labs:
> http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=306
> (1966-1980)
> Remember that AT&T launched Telstar in 1962 in a cooperative venture
> with NASA.  (AT&T had to pay the entire bill for the launch.)
> Telstar's transistors were subsequently cooked by radiation in the
> magnetosphere due to above-ground nuclear tests.
>
> Remember that numerous luminaries in the Arts came from Bell Labs --
> Max Mathews (Radio Baton), Kenneth Knowlton (ASCII Art),
> Lillian Schwartz.  Lillian flat outright denied to me that she ever
> made Art at Bell Labs -- Although she was commissioned to make films.
> Kenneth has related to me the stories of official corporate denial of
> ASCII-Art until it made the popular press.
>
> -Stewart, http://us.imdb.com/Name?Stewart+Dickson
>         http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~sdickson
>
> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/10/vedic_math_machines_and_3d_zoetrope.html
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20100218191347/http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/Clock_Cam.html
> http://boingboing.net/2011/06/17/jeff-bezos-co-to-bui.html
> http://longnow.org/clock/prototype1
> http://longnow.org/people/associate/StewartDickson
> http://www.hastac.org/blogs/sdickson
> http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/author.html?author=Stewart+Dickson
>
> On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 9:16 AM, Frantisek Apfelbeck <algoldor at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi to all,
> > I have seen for the first time The Tron, great movie!
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron
> >
> > Wishing for a moment to be a computer programmer back then but alas I was
> > just one year old ...
> >
> > I just wonder if the “master control program (MCP)” was a kind of vision
> of
> > “Windows” coming? Or was it a "generalisation" of "control versus free?"
> >
> > Sincerely,
> >
> > FA
> >
> > Frantisek Algoldor Apfelbeck
> >
> > biotechnologist&kvasir and hacker
> >
> >
> > http://www.frantisekapfelbeck.org
> >
> >
> > "There is no way to peace, peace is the way." Ghandi
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> > http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> >
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