"This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes)."
Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards.
Short doc on video games vs. pinball machines and the supporters of each.
"Half documentary - half animation, this is a killer little film about arcade games from the late 70s. Actually, the main focus is on pinball wizard Geoff Harvey and Space Invaders and Defender champion Stephen Highfield. Harvey shows off his massive collection of pinball machines and provides us with a little history about their evolution- and of course demonstrates his stuff. Highfield shows off his skills as a video arcadist, tells us why he loves games like Space invaders and Defender and explains his philosophy behind playing them. Both men have an adamant adoration for their preference which has led them to form an oppositional hate for the other. Highfield thinks there is no skill involved- no "mind" to fight against- in pinball, while Harvey thinks that Space Invaders is just another annoying reason to be glued to the "idiot box" and feels that it should be shot into space for the "moonmen" to play. The whole argument culminates with the game characters exploding from the pinball machines and TV set into the "Edwardian Dream" world, from which they move into an animated world where a mighty battle ensues. This is a fun, arty and funny film with lots of great animation and special effects."
A Tesla coil is a type of resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. It is used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity. Tesla coils produce higher current than the other source of high voltage discharges, electrostatic machines. Tesla experimented with a number of different configurations and they consist of two, or sometimes three, coupled resonant electric circuits. Tesla used these coils to conduct innovative experiments in electrical lighting, phosphorescence, x-ray generation, high frequency alternating current phenomena, electrotherapy, and the transmission of electrical energy without wires. Tesla coil circuits were used commercially in sparkgap radio transmittersfor wireless telegraphy until the 1920s, and in pseudomedical equipment such as electrotherapy and violet ray devices. Today their main use is for entertainment and educational displays.
Network Awesome - Thu, Feb 23
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