I’d been exposed to electronics at a young age… I must have been only about five or six years old when my – six years older – uncle was already building radios from scratch and opening every electronic device in my grandparents’ household. I distinctly remember the sharp smell of the soldering iron when we visited their house – Josef was always building or fixing something.
I showed enough interest to receive my own first Philips experiment kit when I was maybe nine years old – I’m not sure anymore about the exact year, but I was barely able to comprehend the instructions, I remember that.
The kits used a unique system of small springs that where pushed through holes in a baseplate to hold all the components in place and it was easy to assemble, debug, re-assemble and take apart a complete radio in an evening, without destroying any of the included components in the process.
In the beginning I only had a smaller, older kit that Josef had long outgrown, but I was more than happy to build small shortwave and AM radios and listen to them on the little speaker all night long. It was the most fascinating thing in my young life – to start out with a handful of components and to slowly build up a functioning receiver and amplifier out of two or three transistors and to then plug it in with shaky – and often bleeding – fingers to hear the white noise on the shortwave band.
Tuning these primitive radios was often a very problematic business, with lots of twisting of wires and squeezing of hand-rolled coils, but then suddenly Radio Luxembourg or the BBC would come in strong and I would just sit there, amazed by what the few components in front of me were doing. Happy days.
I don’t think a comparable kit as sophisticated as the Philips EE series exists nowadays – it’s all gone and buried under a neverending avalanche of integrated circuits and computers. It would probably take a lot more today to interest a typical fully wired nine- or ten-year old in a handful of transistors that – at best – pull in a very scratchy shortwave transmission from two countries over… “Look Dad – streaming MP3s from Outer Mongolia!”
And I myself haven’t touched a soldering iron in a decade – something I am not very happy about, and also something I want to change as soon as we move to a bigger space where I can set up a small corner as workspace. It’d would be nice to build a few small things and to get back to making physical objects for a change… pretty much all the work I have done over the last ten years fits on a few CDs and is as fleeting as a lonely song in a dark forest.
I think I’ll have to go down to Radio Shack next weekend and spend some silly money…
Great news for lovers of San Francisco and podcasts – Sparkletack podcasts are back!
After a few months of silence Richard has restarted the podcast with a new twist: He is now producing a This-Week-In-History version of Sparkletack, and the first episodes are out and they are very promising. These shorter episodes are accompanied by great blogposts about the same topics, with photos and links to more in-depth material.
I’m very happy to see Sparkletack again in my iTunes library, and as with the longer episodes, the production quality and content makes this one of the best podcasts on the web.
Maybe two years before I bought my first computer I read one of those “Science for 12-year olds” compilations with short illustrated essays about everything a boy in his early teens should be interested in – space rockets, lasers, radios, racing cars…
One of the articles in the book described a completely alien concept, a new kind of math: Cellular Automata. The focus of the essay was Conway’s Game of Life, invented by John Conway, a mathematician with rather different ideas for the time. The essay had a photo of a dashing, young John Conway with a big smile on his face next to a huge computer terminal with a round screen – something that made sense when seen with a 70s design sensibility.
I must have read that article several times just to understand all the concepts that had been squished into it, remember, this was before I had ever touched a computer or heard of anybody who owned one. There were iterating cell structures, computer graphics, self-replicating cell formations…
And then there were examples of the simplest Life structures and illustrations on a grid of their first few generations. There were also instructions on how to try these structures at home on a chess board or on paper – which I of course immediately tried out. I was hooked, but processing Life manually was hard, hard work. So I went back to my Lego.
Fast forward to 1982, and one of the first listings I typed into my shiny, new ZX81 was a 20×20 grid Game of Life simulation in Basic. The listing worked on the first try, which was spectacularily unusual, and it ran slooooow, which was as expected on the poor little ZX81. But it still beat manual processing by a factor of at least 1000, and gliders actually moved! So that’s what Conway had been grinning about in that photo…
Over the years I’ve installed – and occasionally programmed – versions of the Game of Life on every computer I owned. I usually didn’t do any ambitious research with it, I just ran a bunch of glider cannons against each other and watched the carnage with much satisfaction. But still, I must have spent many hours of my life looking at the little cells doing their thing. The most frustrating aspect was that in 25 years we went only from 20×20 grids to 1280×1024…
For the last couple of years I hadn’t been paying much attention to it, until a few nights ago when I stumbled over Golly. Somebody must have had a major revelation, and there is now something called the hashlife algorithm, that allows to run huge patterns in unlimited grids at very fast speeds! Once I had Golly installed on my Intel Duo Mac Mini, the speed with which this program runs million-bit grids is just amazing!
I still don’t have the inclination or energy to spend too much time researching the finer details of cellular automata, but some of the examples that come with Golly are mindboggling – several of the patterns start out with 6-10 million cells. See the picture to the right and compare with the animation above – a minor accident with a glider gun in a previously well-organized pattern of about 6 million cells, only about one million shown here. On my Mac Mini I’m getting about 6-10 generations per second at the time of the screenshot.
Maybe I do have to spend some more time with the Game of Life…
A recent post over at the excellent DadHacker blog as well as my post from yesterday reminded me of my early programming days.
The Sinclair ZX81 came with an exemplary programming manual that made it very easy to start programming immediately in Basic. Those first small programs – in 1K of RAM, no less – were eye-opening for me.
I had only programmed a Casio calculator with 32 steps before, so the fact that I was writing a program on a TV screen in real words was all by itself mind-blowing. But the implications of many of these small sample programs made my heart beat faster… I knew, just knew, that this was the future. Each of the small listings pointed to something much bigger, endless possibilities…
The future was programming, and I wanted to be there!
After a few months of doodling around with Basic – and after a much-anticipated 16K RAM expansion module was bought with my Christmas money – I started to see the limitations of the Basic interpreter. Clearly it was not the fastest way to do things on a computer. I had typed listings into the machine that came with long sections of hexcodes, and those programs were much faster than Basic alone.
So I ordered a Z80 reference book from a much bewildered old lady in our local bookstore and tackled Assembly programming. I still remember the days I spent in late spring of 1982 on my parents balcony, deep in the 500-page reference book.
One thing that I had completely forgotten until now (probably an attempt of self preservation by my brain) – I had no Assembler back then! I very clearly remember now how I sat there with the reference book on my knees, writing long lines of hex codes onto sheets of paper, creating my first Assembly programs by hand. That any of these programs ever worked at all must have been a minor miracle!
But the bug took hold in my mind… Assembly programming was – and is – somehow different. Every other programming language, from Sinclair Basic to C to Java to Perl to JavaScript always felt removed from the hardware – no doubt part of the intended function of these languages. But with Assembly you really get down to the dirty details of the computer. There are registers to write, bits to set, interrupts to catch. It all has to be done just so, or the machine will probably crash spectacularily on the first run of the code.
So while Assembly can be very frustrating, it also comes with a very special feeling of power. Nothing will ever run faster on any given computer than a well-crafted piece of Assembly code, the CPU dancing along to the very specific, exacting and – hopefully – flawless instructions of a human brain.
Back in the early 80s – before the Web, the Internet… modems and BBS, really, it was pretty hard to get any kind of information about the just-then available home computers. The only real option were computer magazines, which at the time were of a much rougher quality than anything you’d see nowadays.
I very much remember going to the main train station in Munich, which was a half-hour bike ride followed by a half-hour train ride from my home, to buy imported magazines from the UK. Most of them were thin affairs, with maybe fifteen pages of editorial content and five pages of listings, and maybe the same number of pages full of ads. But, oh, how intensively I studied these pages in their black-and-white glory.
In 1982 I had a ZX81 and spent many evenings after school typing listings for the various games into the little machine, always hoping that the memory pack didn’t dislodge itself, sending the last hour of typing to bit heaven. And the games were invariably buggy. It was probably the toughest, meanest school of debugging code, ever.
It’s strange how far we’ve come in relatively little time. I had been reminded of those ancient times when I found the Retrogeek blog yesterday, where the owner is posting some truly ancient gems of the computer literature genre. Many of the articles from back then are now nearly incomprehensible, as well as our present would have been unbelievable 26 short years ago.
An unexpected effect of the Internet has been the Maker Movement. Forums, blogs and magazines have sprung up everywhere for people to share all the things that they make and how they make them.
There’s not very much that is not made by somebody who shares their knowledge online, from suborbital balloon satellites to knitting patterns, it’s all out there. I sometimes spend hours fascinated by the blog of a maker where they do the most extraordinary craft – and even while I know I will never do it myself, it is just plain fascinating to see how these things are done.
And now with the many video sharing sites, we can not just read about it – we can watch it being done! Here’s one of the more amazing videos in that genre – a gentleman in France who makes working vacuum tubes from scratch…
Our good friend Vera Costa just launched her new site – Sillydot.net. The site features her beautiful and extremely cute clothing designs for kids and also offers wall art and pillow covers.
If you have young kids or know somebody who does – here’s a chance to take care of your gift shopping with some unique and cute gift ideas and to support a great San Francisco artist.
It’s amazing how little the city has changed in these 40 years. Many of the scenes around Nob and Russian Hill just look different because the trees have grown a bit along the streets.
