didn’t need to leave his home suburb to join Cubicomp
I was the UI specialist at Cubicomp, back in the days before there were menus so my job was to build the UI and menus for a next generation hierarchical 3d modelling animation package. The early Cubicomp modelling didn’t have sense of connectivity so then we added this hierarchical element that allowed different elements to impact upon others, in essence a skeletal system in modelling which connected all the elements and allowed them to have behavioural relationships.
ED-80
Adrian Ettlinger worked away on yet another editing system. He called it the ED80 and like his previous systems it was controlled with a state of the art light pen. The user interface was modelled on an interactive medium as old as Hollywood itself.
The Script.
Displayed on a computer screen for the editor would be the production's final script and a text link to camera rushes on the database. Ettlinger completed the first round of coding for the working prototype and sought out opinion to guide him through the next phase.
Through a mutual friend he arranged for Bill Hogan, the proprietor of post-production facility Ruxton Ltd to fly to Alameda for a demonstration. Hogan had a long and distinguished career in many aspects of film and video and had just been named a co-winner of the Technical Achievement Academy Award for the engineering of the Universal City Studios 24fps color video system.
The system was used to cut the feature film Norman is that You? as Hogan recalls:
Obviously I had experienced quite a lot of different methods of electronic editing by this stage and nonlinear was ultimately just the progression of technology applied to a problem. I like technology and I may not be the best at picking all of the trends but I remember thinking that Adrian’s system was definitely a step forward from what we had and not just a ‘me-too’ copy of others.
The ability to try different edits from the same material and then decide which was better, to me was the fundamental difference with the ED-80. Ultimately you could be more creative and at the same time edit much faster.
The two men discussed the possibility of working together and marketing a completed ED-80, but it was obvious that there was a great deal of refining over many hours of coding to complete the system. Hogan knew the ideal candidate to assist Ettlinger in the process.
The young part-time Dubner Computer Systems engineer Andy Maltz was faced with a quandary. His parents had moved from New York to Los Angeles and Maltz knew that he would be spending some time on the West Coast. Then fate stepped in.
I got a call from Bill Hogan, who ran Ruxton Ltd, but I had no idea who he was in the industry. He told me he had been to the Dubner stand at NAB and had viewed the demonstration reel for the CBG-2. I would discover later that Bill had a real nose for new technology and had quickly decided he wanted to be the first on the West Coast to have a CBG-2, so he watched the entire demo reel that included the credits of the software engineers at the end of the reel.
He stored away the credit 'Growing States by Andy Maltz' and when he received my resume, he put two and two together. He said, "I see you're coming to California, I'm buying a CBG-2; why don't you come work at Ruxton through summer?"
Maltz moved to the West coast and into electronic editing.
MINDSET
Two former Atari executives, Roger Badertscher and Bruce Irvine, were determined to create a different kind of personal computer. They raised $4m in investment to create the Mindset Corporation in Silicon Valley. The startup focused on computer products for what it called ‘the productivity/creativity market’. The new PC was to be built by a dozen ex-Atari marketing and engineering staff including engineer Ajay Chopra:
A long time before Windows, we wanted to create a fast platform to run graphical applications like games (which we understood from Atari) on one hand but also graphic arts, what Photoshop is today and also CadCam applications.
The Mindset team worked to create custom chips for an IBM compatible PC platform that it believed was able to run applications at a speed 50 times faster than that of its MS-DOS competitors.
WEBER, UBILLOS & EDELMAN
Commodore Computer released the Commodore 64. Charlie White recalls:
The Commodore 64 (gave) real computer power to those who only had about $500 to spend on such things. For video, though, in those days about the only thing the contraptions were good for was sorting various (EDL) lists. Looking for even more ways to use the things, I encouraged a few enterprising programmers to write a program called "Shot Sheets," which was designed to take a list of shots for music production and sort them into individual lists for camera people to follow during the performance.
It worked, saved the director some time and got us into the whole computer thing. Someday, maybe we could actually edit video on it??
Having grown up in a family of artists, Markus Weber was intrigued by the C 64.
The C64 offered an unbelievable 64kB of memory and a graphics card that could display 320x240 pixels in 32 colors. It was the graphics capabilities that aroused my interest.
Weber convinced his mother to finance a C64 purchase for him.
Then I virtually disappeared into my room for half a year. First I had to master the BASIC programming language of the machine, only to discover that you could not simply program graphics on this machine.
You first had to understand how the processor worked, then you had to master some much more advanced programming technique called Assembler programming, that let you directly control the registers of the CPU, which you then used to actually develop “machine language subroutines” for printing a point (a pixel), a line (a number of pixels) or a circle (a curved number of pixels) on your graphics screen.
Only once you had mastered these primitives, could you start looking for doing more advanced stuff in “high-level” BASIC. There was absolutely nothing available on how to create such a 3D grid, how to mathematically program the rotations, how to “project” the abstract model to the screen and how to remove hidden lines (or to be more precise, how to avoid painting them, because removing them might remove visible lines as well). So I holed-up with my 2 years of math majors and worked it all out for myself over the course of 3 months.
Weber contacted other geeks and built a small library of graphics-based computer games.
Today you would call it a social network, for us it was just a way of getting new games for free by ways of trading. What we didn’t know, what no one knew by the time, these things made you addicts and I became one of the worst.I would get up, have some coffee, then get in front of the machine to figure out my 3D stuff, barely stopping for food once in a while and then switching to gaming by 6pm, to continue hunting the latest high-score
