Tag Archives: retro

Retro Friday: The Sounds of Technology

In this era of web and app development, we pay lots of attention to how things look, how things feel — but not much, these days, to how things sound. Yet there are so many iconic sounds of technology that just don’t exist anymore, or are dying fast.

One of the most popular, of course, is/was “You’ve Got Mail” from AOL — so popular that it spawned a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan! Throughout the 1990s, though, sounds were a key part of many software releases.

Think, for instance, about the lowly startup sound. Many combinations of Mac hardware and operating system gave different startup sounds (and different crash sounds, too — although the screeching tires were heart-stopping enough). It was followed so closely as to have a web collection! Windows iterations matured similarly, from the clunky Windows 3.1 sound to the zen Windows 95 startup and beyond. Again, there’s a web collection to allow you stroll memory lane.

But even the hardware had sounds of its own, even if it was merely a byproduct of how it worked. I still think fondly of the sounds of the old Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer — a printer that was so popular that you can STILL purchase ribbons online. Hearing the sound of the print head sweeping across the page and then loudly depositing dots of ink before doing it all again just signified that you were DOING something, you were creating something. Far more satisfying than the quiet fan and rollers of a laser printer today. (Although you’ll notice I’m saying nothing about relative quality of output.)

Why don’t we consider sounds as key interface features much anymore? Perhaps it’s because technology is used so much more in a crowd these days; it can be a little too disruptive if buttons click or startup comes with a chime.

But listening to the Museum of Endangered Sounds and other old sound repositories, I can’t help feeling like we’ve lost a little something along the way.

Retro Tech: Early Software Creator Culture

Today, I write in appreciation of Bill Budge. Budge got his start writing games for the (then-new) Apple ][. But almost right away, that wasn't enough for him. And that's where things got interesting.

After some initial forays into writing games, he got more interested in one of the key underlying parts of the games themselves -- namely, the graphics routines. The Apple ][ was a pretty revolutionary computer of its time, after all, but the limitations of its graphics processing were huge. So how could you get around them and make things that looked good – and, important for games, rendered quickly?

After working on that for a while, Budge developed another game, and this one (unlike his earlier products) would be a classic: Raster Blaster. This was not just a pinball game – it was a pinball simulation. Budge had found a way to take the amazing work he had done on getting fast, high-resolution graphics out of the Apple ][ and give it the best proof-of-concept ever.

It was no wonder that Raster Blaster became among the best-selling games of 1981. But Budge didn’t even stop there. And even though I loved Raster Blaster when it came out, and played it a LOT, it’s this next step that put him in the innovator’s pantheon.

The next year, he released a Pinball Construction Set. For the masses of Apple ][ users who didn’t know how to program (or couldn’t program advanced high-res games, at least), it was a revelation.

You fired up this program, and you could make your own game! You just dragged and dropped (a new construct at the time) components onto a pinball board, adjust physics parameters if you wanted, and go. You could tweak all kinds of things along the way, and when you got a game put together that you liked, you could save it independently to a disk and share it with friends.

Pinball Construction Set was the first (as far as I can tell) “builder” kind of game/app. All of the Sim games and other simulations that came later — they have Bill Budge to thank. (In fact, Will Wright, creator of many of those great simulations, has cited Pinball Construction Set as an inspiration!)

So it seems only right on this Retro Friday to offer our thanks to Mr. Budge as well. Not only for helping us misspend much time in our youth, but for sparking a bit of the creator culture and vibe that has become a cornerstone of development today. It all started with some bumpers and flippers.

Retro Tech: Whiz Kids

From time to time here, we like to go into the wayback machine and look at some our formative tech influences from early in our development. Well, this week, it’s a pop culture tech entry: the TV show Whiz Kids.

Never heard of it? It ran only for one season. And it featured plotlines like trying to defeat Russians who break into US databases and steal the data — or, in another episode, cybercrimes like online theft. Ripped from the headlines, no?

Except this show ran from 1983 until 1984! Talk about ahead of it’s time…

Of course, there, we lose the realism a bit. Sure, the technology that was employed in the show was pretty true to what was current in that time, and some of the storylines were prophetic. But the overarching plot was about some precocious young hackers who ended up saving the day each week. Which made it pretty unrealistic, but made it a must-watch for this young hacker at the time. That could have been me!

It turns out I’m not alone, either. Not only was it pretty popular among the hacker/geek contingent in the US, but it went over to Europe (in France, it was called Les Petits Génies) and was big among the same group there. According to one French blogger, there are IT professionals across Europe who attribute their interest to watching this show!

Lamentably, in 1983, even though WarGames (a seminal tech movie, and Matthew Broderick’s film debut) was the movie of the summer, the potential audience for Whiz Kids wasn’t big enough for it to last. So after only one season, it went away. (And one of the female leads went on to be on ALF. Talk about adding insult to injury!)

But it still holds a special place in the heart of many, including me.

Retro Tech: Beagle Bros

Back when I was trying to figure out this whole technology stuff, The Great Migration happened. For me, that was the migration from a mainframe you had to drive (or, in my case, take the bus) to see and use to a computer you could just go to your room to use. And my first computer (before the TI, before the CoCo, before the C64, before all the rest) was an Apple ][.

Now this is not the time to rhapsodize nostalgic for the Apple ][ per se. But the environment around that computer encouraged hobbyists, students — and it encouraged fun. And one of the leading fun-makers was a software company called Beagle Bros.

They were weird. They were fun. They were whimsical. They’d put code snippets or bits of hexadecimal in their ads that would reveal funny lines, or a previously unknown feature in the computer’s code. Their whole purpose seemed like it was to enable hobbyists to dig ever deeper into the machine and get ever more out.

Take, for instance, their Apple Mechanic software. With it, I could create my own shape tables to use in my little hobby games. I could make ‘em look like they were professionally done. And this was in 1982!

Who else (before Clarus the dogcow) could teach you how to make your computer moo? (CALL 985, by the way.) Who else released so much professional software that was unprotected with code listings available, so you could see how it was done and try it yourself? Who else ran their own comic strip in their catalogs?

And perhaps most tellingly, who else had a software company (now gone) that inspired its own online museum? There aren’t many. And few had as much an impact on an entire generation of today’s programmers.

Perhaps it’s nostalgia, but Beagle Bros was ahead of its time in creating and putting forth a culture that engaged its customers (contests, for instance), respected them (no copy-protection, just a request not to pirate), and supported them (the PEEKs & POKEs poster alone was huge support). Many a company today could take a page from their playbook.