More New Vintage Computers for ELL
The trunk to the black PF Cruiser popped open to reveal a pile of vintage computers, keyboards, boxes of software and other tech goodies destined for ELL. In the car’s backseat was another mound of vintage tech. The man who provided this “Christmas in June” experience was none other than Bill Bly, pioneering electronic literature artist and author of We Descend––one of the five works that Stuart Moulthrop and I worked to preserve in the Pathfinders project. Bill, who drove to WSUV from Pennsylvania by way of Seattle, was on his way to Denver to visit with Deena Larsen, another pioneering electronic artist. Both will end up in Milwaukee…
Heading to DHSI 2014
ELL was in a shambles today as we packed up computers and other gear we needed for DHSI 2014 where I am teaching a week-long course in Electronic Literature with Sandy Baldwin, Margie Luesebrink, and Davin Heckman. We are taking 10 Mac Minis, iMac, my Apple IIe, Classic, and G3 iMac (my Bondi Blue baby) and setting up a lab for our participants. Twenty-six people have signed up to attend, so it will be a busy week. The course materials have been planned for quite a while and have been put online. Stuart and I got rough drafts of the Pathfinders videos uploaded to our YouTube channel so that I…
Getting Ready for the Next Pathfinders Traversal
The Electronic Literature Lab is the site where the research for Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature is taking place. The project extends the notion of digital preservation by developing a method that captures not just the content of a work of electronic literature but also attempts to recreate the experience readers had when they encountered the work at the time of its publication. We have selected four artists at this stage of our research: Stuart Moulthrop, John McDaid, Judy Malloy, and Shelley Jackson. Each author is asked to come to ELL and, using the vintage Mac on which the work had been originally been read, the artist…
Upcoming Visitors to ELL
We are hosting two tours of ELL during the month of August. The first is scheduled for the 30+ members of the Seattle Metro Chamber Leadership Trip to SWWA on Thursday, August 1, from 4:00-5:00 p.m. This event is sponsored by the Columbia River Economic Development Council. The second is a tour of various members of the state and federal legislators on Tuesday, August 13 from 9:00 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. It is such a great opportunity to highlight the work of the department to so many different people.
The New Addition to ELL
My friend Jeff brought a very nice treat to the lab today: a Kodak DataShow Projection Pad, replete with a cooling fan and the original case. It works with my Apple II GS just fine, and there is some speculation that it is the very first projector a PC. A good find there! The bad news is that I do not have a vintage projection system for the Classic, as I hoped I would have in time for the Pathfinders traversals, which starts on Tuesday, but Jeff helped me rig up a system involving Apple iSight that is quite workable. Some very good news is that the Classic that Jeff…
All the Macs Are Back Home
I got my Mac Plus back yesterday from repairs, thanks to my Mac Guru, Jeff, who has been overseeing the health of my Macs for several years. Our love (okay, obsession) for Macs continues to bind us even after he has moved on from being a student to a full-fledged, well-paid programmer. He is my go-to guy for all things Mac at the Electronic Literature Lab. The Plus (System Code Name: “Mr. T”) was produced from January 1986 to October 1990. Mine was manufactured in 1988, runs System 6.0.3, and has 2K of RAM installed on it. It came with System Finder 5.1 and could, if pressed, run System 7.5.5,…
Vintage G3 iMacs Are Now Online Running Netscape Communicator
We can now show Talan Memmot’s Lexia to Perplexia and other works of electronic literature requiring Netscape Communicator in the lab, thanks to our terrific IT team and my research assistant Greg Philbrook.
Visitors to ELL
I invited Nathan Stahlman and Jim Voorhies, from Instructional Technologies, Inc. (ITI), to visit the lab today to show them the computers and talk about the kinds of research we do in ELL. ITI has been partnering with the CMDC program for the last year and a half, sponsoring our 2D simulation summer study last year and our iPublishing summer study this one. Since meeting them, they have hired five of our students and Nathan now sits on the CMDC’s Advisory Committee. But the most important issue to mention about Nathan and Jim is that they are both geeks. So, when they saw the vintage computers, it did get them pretty…
Getting Ready for Pathfinders
Big doings in ELL this week. We are getting our Mac Plus back from repairs in time for the first Pathfinders’ traversal featuring Stuart Moulthrop. Fresh paint, new tables and chairs, and cabinets for storage should be in place by the end of the week. Seti has organized the media library, and Greg and Jeff have been working to develop specs for each of the 24 computers.
