Das Interview von A. Luehrmann (vermutlich einst Lührmann aus Europa) gibt einen Eindruck in die universitäre Nutzung von Mainframecomputern und die spätere Privatisierung mit dem Apple II und dann PC junior.
https://www.atariarchive.org/an-interview-with-arthur-luehrmann/embed/#?secret=asZrd3q9iX#?secret=OQFcE8h2Mm
Elearning
Es ist eine interessante Sache zu sehen, wie die Universitäten und ihre Informatik, das Medium Computer sofort nutzen, um damit Lehre zu betreiben. Es war quasi das Anwendungsfeld innerhalb der Universitäten neben Rechnen und Auswerten.
Arthur: Well, I got involved in computers as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I was doing a thesis that involved a lot of computation. It was basically a cataloging thesis, all the possible formations that crystals could grow in. It turned out, the best way to do it was to write a general-purpose program that would explore different crystal symmetries and print out all the relevant numbers that scientists would use, who was investigating those structures. This was in the days of germanium, and solid-state devices, and all that.
Das Setting in Darthmouth ist ähnlich wie bei Plato Systems (PLATO Systems – ein ELearning-System und darin ein GameDesign-Biotop (1960+/1972+) (Updated)). Es geht um ein neues Tool in der Hochschule.
Timesharing als Grundlage und Entwicklung der eigenen Welten
Then I got a job at Dartmouth. Dartmouth had just gotten its time-sharing system, which was put together largely by students with a few faculty supervisors. John Kemeny, who went on to become the president of Dartmouth a few years later, led a team of a dozen or so really interested students, and built the time-sharing system. Was one of the first ones ever. MIT had a time-sharing system it had built, but it was primarily for researchers.
Dabei standen natürlich die Mainframes und ihre Timesharingsysteme und damit Terminals im Fokus. Luehrmann beschreibt auch dies eingehend. Interessant auch hier, dass die Sachen oft von Studierenden entwickelt wurden und anscheinend keine Top-Priorität hatten oder diese „Neuen“ entwickelten auch gerade (wie später die GameDev/Cracker/Demoscene) die eigenen Mitteln und stiegen dabei mit auf.
Textual Games
Wie immer waren die Games eigentliche Telewriter Games, weil dies die Terminals waren.
Arthur: Then I got a job at Dartmouth. Dartmouth had just gotten its time-sharing system, which was put together largely by students with a few faculty supervisors. John Kemeny, who went on to become the president of Dartmouth a few years later, led a team of a dozen or so really interested students, and built the time-sharing system. Was one of the first ones ever. MIT had a time-sharing system it had built, but it was primarily for researchers.
Arthur: -which often happened at Dartmouth football games because there were many dog lovers there, and the field was pretty open. It was very teletype oriented. It was, you made your play, you saw the outcome, you made your next play, and so forth. The odds were reasonable coming from Kemeny who knew statistics. That was one.
Elearning – neu Visualsierung (davor statisch)
Das Grafische als Unterstützung und Visualisierungsmöglichkeit, die davor nicht bestanden.
Arthur: I was instrumental in getting graphics into the system. We were able to get plotting devices that could connect to the teletype machine. Even at those low data rates, it was okay. [chuckles] The plotter could move, [gibberish] around to draw whatever, I used it in teaching physics because there were a few mathematical problems that you can solve in motion in mechanics dynamics, very few close forms and solutions. You can look at pendulum swinging. You can look at a ball bouncing. You can look at a motion on an air track. That’s pretty much it.
Plottergames – Potshot
Games mit Plottern. Das billigere Display.
Arthur: You could do the same things with the paper, the pen and ink plotter, you could do it on the screen there. I developed some games there that were graphic. One of them was, it would draw a random mountain, and on each side, a position varying in height. The game was to shoot over the mountain and lob the other guy. We call it Potshot.
[…]
Kevin: Do you remember the circumstances around, you mentioned the Tektronix plotter, and then the display. Do you remember the circumstances around those arriving at the university?
Arthur: Yes. Tektronix’s had reps who would come out because they were selling lab equipment for the science courses and the medical school. I encountered one and showed him what we were doing. He got interested. The next time I saw him, he had a terminal that could do graphics.
BASIC
Arthur: BASIC was interactive, and it was a very simple syntax. It was easy to teach beginners the rules. It had both numeric type and a string type, and that was it. Nothing more complicated. No complex numbers. Nothing like that. It would take not more than half an hour to teach beginners.
The introductory math course taught everybody on campus how to program in BASIC. Staff and faculty, of course, were behind the curve, but they picked up. They did more and more interesting things, including building databases of various kinds of art, and historical databases, and so forth. It was good.
Computer zu Hause: Anleitungsbücher dazu
Auch für Basic brauchte es verschiedene Bücher. Und damit konnte man Geld v
He was writing for specific computers, introductions to programming in BASIC. He said, “Why don’t we do a book together?” I said yes. At that point, Pascal was coming along as a very interesting language. I didn’t know anything about it, but I thought that’s a great time to write a book. You’re learning and you know what the learners need to have, so we did. Apple bought out of them, and packaged it with the software. That’s how we started in the different career of becoming book publishers and authors.
Das Strukturierte Apple-BASIC – abgeschossen
Anscheinend entwickelte Apple ein neues eigenes strukturiertes BASIC. Dieses wurde von Bill Games mit dem Argument gekillt, dass Apple ja schon Microsoft Basic hatte.
We got involved with Apple. They were developing a new version of BASIC. It was gorgeous. It was so modern. It was so structured. It was like Pascal in that sense of a structured programming language. Jobs killed the project. We were down working at Apple. We had offices there, so we could talk to the programmer who was writing this. That was great. We could just walk down the hall and say, “Hey, Don, how about this? Maybe do this. Instead of that.” He was very receptive.
I was particularly keen on getting graphics into this version. He was after to that too. We had offices right down from Steve. One day, he came to me. He said, “Well, we got bad news. We’re killing your project.” I said, “Why? This is beautiful. Don is doing such a great job. It’s the best version of BASIC there is. It’s got a lot of Pascal-like features. It’s got control structures and all that good stuff.” He hemmed it hard.
Xerox Park
Xerox Park und sein Problem, die Zukunft in den eigenen Händen des Managements zu sehen.
Arthur: Never more than casually. No. No. I did have some time at Xerox Park. Alan Kay was the top engineer at Xerox Park and he was keen on developing an interactive terminal for Xerox to do– He could see the way things were going. He had great ideas of what an ideal terminal or desktop computer should look like. The problem was that from Xerox’s management point, it wasn’t their business. They was the copy machine business.
They let the guys in Xerox Park play, but they never realized that they had a great product there. Now, who did realize, of course, was Steve jobs because paid visits there. He looked at it and said, “I got to have that mouse thing. That’s key.” He got the benefit of what Xerox Park was doing. Alan Kay was a brilliant guy. It was a pleasure to know him and interact with him.