Fri 01 November 2024

This article is written based on a prompt I shared with a friend a couple weeks ago. You can my article from that "round-robin" prompt exercise here.

Since neither of my fedifriends have written their prompts yet, I'm actually borrowing the idea I gave Amin to write:

I'm going to write about things/places/events I consider[ed] magical:

The Epcot Center

One of the most magical places I recall seeing as a kid was The Epcot Center in Orlando. This would've been in the mid-late 1980s, and I was in middle school/junior high.

Nearly everything about Epcot blew my mind as a kid. The rides were so futuristic, and unlike the actual future, everything was optimistic! Technology would free us! We would solve the Fossil Fuel problem with hydrogen, or flywheels, or something! The potential was limitless!!! There were tons of great technical innovations coming across the horizon and there was no sign of the digital dystopia we're finding ourselves in today.

There were many really groovy rides which I only vaguely remember, but I do remember riding Spaceship Earth (the big silver golf ball) which was narrated at that time by Walter Cronkite. Cronkite!!! The dude exuded calm optimism and was the absolute antithesis to the hyper-caffeinated-the-world-is-ending-TODAY kind of awful news delivery we get nowadays.

But the one thing I remember somewhat clearly from one of the rides that absolutely blew my mind was some variation of the illusion known as "Pepper's Ghost". In this version, I was riding in a normal 4-6 seater ride car, and there was a mirror to the left. I looked to the left and saw myself and the other riders, but to my amazement, the car I was riding in somehow appeared super-futuristic. My imagination was absolutely ablaze!

"Money for Nothing"

Something else that gave me a similar feeling of amazement/whimsy was the 1985 Dire Straits music video "Money for Nothing". It's rather difficult to explain to someone younger than 40 just how ground-breaking this was at the time. I had never seen anything quite like it, and it gave me such a thirst to know more about these miraculous machines (computers, that is) that could just generate video out of the aether like that. I was glued to the TV set every time it came on!

Similar to that was the 1994 "ReBoot" series (which coincidentally was created by the same people that did the animation for the Dire Straits music video). The thing I remember the most is how all early cgi had this very floaty feel to the camera movements, because the (software) cameras followed very simple linear vectors. It wouldn't be until later that cgi got sophisticated enough to implement human-feeling, "imperfect" camera motion. Ironically, I get the same kind of "floaty" feeling from a lot of drone or boom camera footage, as they tend to have the same very smooth motions across a large distance.

Multi-touch and the iPhone

If you're old enough, you remember 2007 pretty well, and you recall how the entire world basically lost their minds for a solid year because of the device in question. Bloggers were literally calling it the "Jesus phone."

But let's take a step back. One year prior, Jeff Han gave a TED talk that was equally as shocking, and on a much larger scale than 3.5"/8.9 cm ;)

Imagine someone pulls out their laptop next to you, pulls up an image of an apple, then reaches into the screen, yoinks out the apple, and takes a bite. That's a little how watching this demo felt the first time. This guy was interacting with his computer in a way I had never, ever seen before. Even though I was just watching it online, and not in person, it felt visceral and real. It's hard to understand the reaction unless you try really hard to forget that you'd ever seen a multi-touch interface before in your life, and place yourself in the context of 2006. This was perhaps my generation's equivalent of the famous 1968 Douglas Engelbart "Mother of All Demos," and I haven't seen anyone mention it since then.

Of course, the iPhone took that idea (and a few other innovations) and shrunk it down to fit in your pocket. It might be difficult for younger folks who grew up with multi-touch smartphones to understand, but just seeing someone do a pinch-to-zoom on the maps application would make folks lose their minds a little. It was just so uncanny.

The Macintosh

If I lost a few readers travelling back to 2007, then 1984 is going to be quite a leap.

I got my start in the Home Microcomputer revolution (yes, that is what they were called: "Home Micros") with an Apple ][+ and a Commodore 64. Computers of that day were bulky, keyboard-centric, and noisy. Even before grindy, clicky hard disks and whirring case fans become the norm, home computers had loud floppy drives (the Apple ]['s floppy drive stepper motors would auto-home by noisily crashing against the hard stops every time you powered it on, which sounded like a machine gun) and annoying beeps.

Sitting down in front of the very first Macintosh model in 1984, I quickly realized it was everything my Commodore 64 wasn't. It was compact: consisting of the body (which contained the chips, power supply, screen, and floppy drive) a keyboard and a mouse. The original compact macs were really considered portables -- they actually sold a carrying case for them! It had a cool bluish high-resolution (for the time) monochrome display, not green or amber (or a few colors with very fuzzy/blocky pixels). The mouse itself was a revolution: the original Macs didn't even have arrow keys for the first two years/models! You literally placed the text selection cursor with the mouse, every time. That sounds so exhausting to us vi/vim nerds today.

Beyond the amazing visual things that differentiated the original Macintosh from home computers of the era, there were a couple very noteworthy auditory things: The Mac had no fan at all (it actually really did need one), no clicky/grindy hard disk (also would have been nice, but hey, this was 1984!), but most notable to me was the floppy disk drive!

Ok, let me explain. Floppy drives sounded weird. The Apple ][ drives sounded like death. The Commmodore 64's 1541 was quieter and smarter, but was the size of a computer itself (because it WAS a computer itself -- oh Jack, what were you thinking!?). Most 3 1/2" drives had a kind of annoying "thock-thock-thock" sound.

But the sound on the original Macintosh 400K drives?

Those drives HUMMED at you

I am NOT making this up. It's not easy to find, but if you do some digging online, you can find videos of the original Macintosh 400K disk drives in action, and those babies hummed. It was such a soothing sound, and can bring me nearly to tears up to this very day.

Also, unlike other computers of the time, the Macintosh was capable of outputting 8-bit audio at up to 22khz sample rate, and was capable of rudimentary wavetable synthesis.

University

The last time I had a magical moment was sadly some years ago. I will save that story for my next post: My Socratic Sign!

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