Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 by Hap Aziz
Back in 1945, a gentleman by the name of Vannevar Bush (an MIT faculty member and a science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II) pondered the nature of his research: he observed that he spent much of his time just looking up what other people were doing in his field before he even got to the point where he could start making meaningful contributions to the field. As a solution to this problem, Bush proposed a device which he called "memex" (for memory extender) that would be able to store the sum total of human knowledge, and if one had a question on any subject, one only needed to consult this device. Look at his description of the memex, and keep in mind that he came up with this idea in 1945, before computers with keyboards and display screens where even on anyone's drawing board:
"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
"In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely"
There's more to the description; in fact, he published his thoughts in an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think" in July, 1945. A very interesting read.
A footnote to all this is that Vannevar Bush is widely credited as being the conceptual inventor of the Internet--that's what the memex really is, after all. The irony is that when there was talk in the 2000 presidential election that Gore "invented" the Internet, Bush could very truthfully claimed that it was a Bush that really started it all. :)
- Hap Aziz
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Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 by Hap Aziz
Every so often, I like to play the game where I think of how much technology things cost when I first got them. For much of my life, I was a dedicated early adopter of all sorts of gadgets. Well, as the gadgets have become more complicated and more expensive, I've become much more comfortable waiting a little bit before picking up the latest and greatest. It may not be the latest anymore when I get it, but the significant price drop is always appreciated. Here are some of the devices I've picked up over the years:
- the original IBM PC - this machine came with a whopping 16kb of RAM, a single sided floppy drive with a 160kb storage capacity, and a green monochrome monitor. The CPU ran at a blistering 4.77 MHz speed. The total cost to me, monitor included, was about $2700 in 1981.
- Yamaha CD R/W drive - this was a tool necessary for my game company to burn master disks for reproduction. The drive had a 4x read speed and a blazing 2x write speed, and I got the drive for the bargain basement price of $3,000 in 1995. By the way, each recordable disk was a gold master, and they ran $10 apiece.
- Hewlett Packard fax machine - in 1988, the communications consulting partnership I had needed to receive and send documents by fax. We considered leasing a machine, but we decided to make a purchase for the long-term instead, picking up the machine for a cool $2800.
- 10 Mb hard drive - when it came time to upgrade my IBM PC, I found a great deal on a hard drive. 10 Mb of storage space (I'd never fill that up!), and only about 5 pounds. I got it cheap at $600. (Yes, that was 10 Megabytes of storage space.)
- NEC 3D Multisync monitor - Sometime in the early '90s (though I can't recall the exact date), I was so thrilled to get this $700 video monitor. It gave me an incredible 1024 x 768 interlaced resolution on a whopping 14" CRT. (Today I just ordered a 24" LCD monitor capable of a full 1920 x 1200 resolution for $269.)
- Online BBS service - before the ubiquitous Internet and World Wide Web, I paid an hourly rate of $12.95 for my blazing 1200 baud connection. Ah, the good old days of getting a $400 montly bill to get an online text service.
There's a whole lot more, and I'm afraid to do a full inventory--I don't need to think about how much money I've spent to stay in the hi-tech club, especially now with my 401k taking a nosedive. But the more important point is the fact that the cost of technology has dropped so dramatically over the years, and it continues to do so. Free market innovation and competition takes the lion's share of the credit in that regard. All I can say is, keep the gadgets coming!
- Hap Aziz
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Posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 by Hap Aziz
My first encounter with text adventure games was back in the fall of 1980 when I got a job with a communications engineering company. The company ran a Data General Eclipse minicomputer, and one of the programs on it was the original Colossal Cave Adventure program written back in the late 1970s. Several of us in the office would stay late to sit in the terminal room and explore the virtual world, asking each other for help when the puzzles were particularly challenging. We all spent a fair amount of time typing one- or two-word commands at the cursor hoping we were on track to unravel the puzzles sprinkled throughout the game. Soon after that, I purchased a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer, and I was delighted to find a whole series of adventure games by Scott Adams.
It was late in 1981 when I acquired my first IBM PC that I also got my first game for it: Deadline by Infocom. Infocom was a company that specialized in what they termed "Interactive Fiction," that is, text adventure environments written in sophisticated prose format. The game natural language parser was also able to "understand" short sentence input rather than simply two-word phrases. It was then that my taste for text adventures--interactive fiction--grew to the point where I began to write my own. The language available to me on my PC was BASIC, and I wrote thousands of lines of procedural code to build my games. Over the years I've used BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Lingo, Java, and even LISP to build my games.
Not too long ago, I discovered the Inform sofware (currently Inform 7) development system. Inform is an environment specifically design to author interactive fiction. The language of Inform is set up specifically to support the conventions of interactive fiction, which makes it easier to program these types of game. For example, if I wanted to set up a space where there was a Kitchen and a Dining Room, with the Kitchen to the north, I would write simply:
> Kitchen is a room.
> Dining Room is a room.
> Dining Room is south of the Kitchen.
At that point if I run the program is start out in the Kitchen, and if I type "s" (for south) at the prompt, I see that I have moved into the Dining Room--and I can type "n" to move back to the Kitchen.
Of course, the programming environment supports much more than moving around virtual locations, but the exciting thing is that it takes care of the programming underpinnings while the author/programmer can focus on the logic of the game itself. That is very appealing.
But the most exciting development for me is the release of Frotz for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Frotz is an interpreter that lets a target computer platform run interactive fiction files. I can play all my old Infocom games... or I can write my own games in Inform 7 and run them on my iPod Touch. That's what I'm talking about!
- Hap Aziz
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Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2008 by Hap Aziz
The Blu-ray disc is out. While the Speed Racer movie was a box-office disappointment, it represented an amazing step forward in special video effects. So of course I had to run out and pick it up on its date of release (today, September 16) to view it in glorious 1080p resolution. (Okay, that and the fact that my little 7 year old daughter has already seen it six times in the theater and begged that I get it on disc for her.)
I must admit, I'm not one of the movie's detractors. The storyline, simple as it was, certainly was sufficient to hang the action on. The themes of family obligations, parental love, and driven purpose kept me engaged as entertainment, if not grand philosophy. And the digitally-driven cinematic technology was remarkable--one of the disc's bonus features delved deeper into the techniques used by the Wachowski brothers, and that alone was worth the price of admission for me. It was fascinating to see how the majority of the film was shot in a green screen environment, and how the special effects were interwoven with the actors themselves.
If you haven't seen Speed Racer yet (and based on the box office numbers, I know most of you have not seen it), at least pick it up as a rental--definitely in Blu-ray format if you have a player. Don't expect anything beyond feel-good bubble-gum entertainment, and you'll likey not be disappointed.
- Hap Aziz
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Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008 by Hap Aziz
Seven years ago today as the terrible events unfolded, my wife and I were right in the middle of welcoming our baby girl into the world. Our time at the hospital was very surrealistic; the nurse wouldn't stay in our room, preferring instead to watch television, and the people in the waiting area were sobbing as the news that morning was broadcast. But for us, Emma's birth was a covering over us. It was a reminder that even in the darkest of times, seeds of joy can blossom and grow.
Today, my wife and I visited Emma's school to have lunch with her and her classmates in 1st grade. As we walked by a group of children in the parking lot, we overheard a teacher explain to her students why the flag was flying at half staff. The children seemed to take it all in with a look of solemnity and understanding, but without that posture of despair that so many adults experience. And in the lunchroom, the seriousness of the anniversary gave way to delightful laughter as the children traded french fries for cookies and got icing all over their faces from the birthday cake Emma chose for us to bring to share.
The day was a wonderful reminder that as long as there are children in our lives, joy trumps tragedy.
- Hap Aziz
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