Retro Dork

Dorkbot, we've missed you. If our attendance record for the monthly technology and art event has been spotty at best recently --we've only been to one meeting since it lost the CoCA digs-- it's not because of the scheduled themes. They've all been awesome: Multimedia Performance at the Abbey, Innovation in Games back at CoCA, remote aerial photography at CHAC (actually we did get to that one)... New curator whatshisname (can't find it on the website--someone help) has done great things. Please, though, find a permanent home. Last night was at the 911 Media Arts Center and that seems like it could work. Make it work, Dorkbot.

Last night was retro computing, or "Retro-dork" in the parlance of the group. Donald C Martin Ph.D. talked about some early computers he used to launch rockets in Florida and at various universities during his long career dating back to the FLAC or Florida Automatic Computer, geographically named because why would there ever be more than one computer in a region? He talked about a number of early computers and their, uh, peculiarities. For example, when programming a serial memory computer that uses a rotating drum for storage you want to align your commands so that when one finishes executing the next is positioned on the drum in a way that makes it available for accessing immediately following, otherwise you have to wait for the drum to complete another revolution. He talked a bit about the IBM 1401 and, we don't quite get this, but apparently the 1401 emitted some kind of AM frequency waves during operation so its tenders would put radios next to it and be able to listen to the computer operating in this way. They could hear if it got stuck in an infinite loop or there was some other kind of programming break down. He mentioned the track "IBM 1401: A User's Guide" which appeared on NPR a while back that makes use of some of those recordings for a piece of music. You can listen to some of it here.

The other speaker was Phil Foglio who is half of the team that produces the comic Girl Genius. Girl Genius is for the retro dork because it's set in what seems to be a Victorian steam punk magic realism type of world. This is re-imagining what the past would have been like it technology had advanced along more mechanical lines. And if magic existed. And if magic and technology were rolled into one and the ability to practice same was inherited by a firey redhead with jiggly boobs and a talking cat companion who ranged the wilds of Victorian Europe. And there are lots of air ships everywhere. Check it out.

We had to skip out before the open session at the end, but there were some cool very old calculators and bits and pieces of old computers on hand and we're sure the descriptions of those were interesting. 911 was a great host (as was CHAC previously, as was CoCA previous to that) but please, Dorkbot, settle in somewhere.