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The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

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Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#21

Post by MomsAVoxell »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #9
undebuggable wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons why touchscreen smartphones dominated the market in less than one decade. They made the dream of "real-time videotelephony from a rectangle" come true, a dream which had been present in literature and culture for around hundred of years.

And yet, while 90's (and earlier) TV was talking breathlessly about video communication, it feels like it just "snuck in" to our daily lives when webcams and e.g. Skype became mainstream, and it never felt magical. Of course, the demos were tightly scripted and stifled.

When I first got our labs two SGI Indy's webcams pointed at each others relevant coffeepots over ISDN, with 30km's space between them, there was definite magic.

The same when I sat in the hills of Griffith Park with a Ricochet modem and a tiBook, wondering how much ssh'ing and CUSeeMe I'd be able to do until the batteries ran out.

Once these kinds of activities became integrated into a laptop, the magic of all of the pasts' future predictions definitely became atmospheric.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#22

Post by MomsAVoxell »

JdeBP wrote: post #13
a1371 wrote: post #3

I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with mov…

It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all. Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. … And while we remember that we had flip-'phon…

>There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all.

Vectrex. Jaz drives. MiniDisc. 8-track. CB Radio.

The more I notice, the less I feel there is a discussion to be had over this distinction.

The sci-fi predictions all came true - many of them, also came to pass, which is to say that the weight of the accomplishment of speculation to reality becomes immediately irrelevant in the context of the replacing technology.

Star Treks' communicators did catch on - among the content creation segment - but on the other hand, we also got the 'babelfish'-like reality of EarPods ..

I think the never-ending march of technology becomes fantastic at first, but mundane and banal the moment another fantasy is realised.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#23

Post by dmd »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #21
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, while 90's (and earlier) TV was talking breathlessly about video communication, it feels like it just "snuck in" to our daily lives when webcams and e.g. Skype became mainstream, and it never felt magical. Of course, the demos were tightly scripted and stifled.

When I first got our labs two SGI Indy's webcams pointed at each others relevant coffeepots over ISDN, with 30km's space between them, there was definite magic . The same when I sat in the hills of Griffith Park with a Ricochet modem and a tiBook, wondering how much ssh'ing and CUSeeMe I'd be able to do until the batteries ran out. Once these kinds of activities became integrated into a laptop, the magic of all of th…

Were you really still using CUSeeMe in 2001+ (when the tibook was released)?

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#24

Post by MomsAVoxell »

dmd wrote: post #23
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first got our labs two SGI Indy's webcams pointed at each others relevant coffeepots over ISDN, with 30km's space between them, there was definite magic . The same when I sat in the hills of Griffith Park with a Ricochet modem and a tiBook, wondering how much ssh'ing and CUSeeMe I'd be able to do until the batteries ran out. Once these kinds of activities became integrated into a laptop, the magic of all of th…

Were you really still using CUSeeMe in 2001+ (when the tibook was released)?

Yes, it was a regular tool for determining if there was still power to various racks around SoCal, and the reason it was still in use was because those racks were in various locations around SoCal and nobody had the budget to switch to something else (plus, CuSeeMe binaries for SGI were a thing...)

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#25

Post by dmd »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #24
dmd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you really still using CUSeeMe in 2001+ (when the tibook was released)?

Yes, it was a regular tool for determining if there was still power to various racks around SoCal, and the reason it was still in use was because those racks were in various locations around SoCal and nobody had the budget to switch to something else (plus, CuSeeMe binaries for SGI were a thing...)

Hah! I thought we were the only ones. I was using it to watch the screen of a machine with no other out-of-band monitoring, in a server room in 2002, mostly because "I've been using it forever and it still works".

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#26

Post by MomsAVoxell »

dmd wrote: post #25
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it was a regular tool for determining if there was still power to various racks around SoCal, and the reason it was still in use was because those racks were in various locations around SoCal and nobody had the budget to switch to something else (plus, CuSeeMe binaries for SGI were a thing...)

Hah! I thought we were the only ones. I was using it to watch the screen of a machine with no other out-of-band monitoring, in a server room in 2002, mostly because "I've been using it forever and it still works".

Yes indeed, in fact my early productive use of videoconferencing mostly didn't involve humans, but rather - as you say - out-of-band monitoring of devices and systems.

On occasion it was nice to know when some tech was also in the closet, in case I knew their # and could get them to flick a switch or two, on my behalf, in lieu of the 1 or 2 hour bike ride (depending on traffic) I'd have had to endure to use my own fingers...

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#27

Post by BoxOfRain »

lopis wrote: post #16
KevinMS wrote: post #6

I wonder why they didn't find somebody with a CRT display if they were doing a story about the future instead of those horrendous teletypes.

I think in 1967, an affordable computer terminal was not more than 2-way fax machine. Being able to drive a CRT sounds significantly harder than driving a typewriter.

I'd quite like to hook up a teletypewriter to a modern Linux box, sounds like a fun little project.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#30

Post by pixelpoet »

kristopolous wrote: post #19
a1371 wrote: post #3

I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with mov…

That's Ivan Sutherland though. He's one of the living legends of computing. His doctor advisor was Claude Shannon and some of his students include the founder of Adobe, The founder of SGI and the creators of both Phong and Gouraud shading. He also ran the pioneering firm Evans & Sutherland, a graphics research company starting in the 1960s. They produced things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1…

I always fund it amusing that Phong was actually the guy's given name, but Vietnamese family name ordering isn't the same as in the US so everyone thought it was his surname and just rolled with it.
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