Have been following this saga via RSS (the "days" stretch out over weeks) and getting the device to boot up is a major step.
The Alto is the computer Steve Jobs "borrowed" many of his ideas from back in the '70s. The degree of work to restore a 40-year old machine should give anyone pause about the longevity of current data.
Search Results for: shirriff
found design
Source: Ken Shirriff, Inside the HP Nanoprocessor: a high-speed processor that can't even add
pun
Top: Eva Hesse, Metronomic Irregularity II, 1966
Painted wood, Sculp-Metal, and cotton-covered wire 121.9 x 609.6 cm; each panel 121.9 cm (materials via)
Bottom: IBM "plugboard" accounting machine, circa 1948, photo via Ken Shirriff
Previous iteration of this pun (Pinterest scraped my sharpened image of the Hesse piece -- which I scraped from "the internet" back in the day -- the difference being I didn't lock the image behind a subscription wall)
about that calligraphy class...
Ken Shirriff notes a bit of corporate self-puffery by Steve Jobs, back in '05, regarding the development of the Macintosh computer.
Jobs claims the first Macs had multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts because of a calligraphy course he took after dropping out of college.
Shirriff reminds us that the Xerox Alto computer, which Jobs saw in the late '70s, had these features.
Here's a detail of Shirriff's photo of the Alto he's been restoring, with Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford, where the "calligraphy" brag originated, typed in multiple, proportionally spaced fonts:
And Shirriff's detail from the above photo:
In fairness to Jobs, Shirriff adds that "[o]f course, Steve Jobs deserves great credit for making desktop publishing common and affordable with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter, something Xerox failed to do with the Xerox Star, an expensive ($75,000) system that commercialized the Alto's technology."
televisions (with and without recursion)
On the subject of recursive images, this post about Ken Shirriff's nested Alto computers reminded me of an earlier idea. In the late '80s I'd been invited to show in an exhibit on the theme of television, organized by some artists who did public access cable. The venue was a "major museum" so I wanted to make a statement. I had the idea of televisions in toilets receding to infinity. I couldn't make it work -- drawing a toilet seat is easy but it was hard to make a TV monitor that "popped" in the arrangement. Below is as far as I went with it:
An initial sketch:
After abandoning these I did this painting, TV Dinner (acrylic on canvas, 62 x 46 inches). The museum had a Philip Guston show up at the time and a local curator thought my painting was "derivative." One person's inside joke is another's failure of imagination.
