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Digital Evolution and me

(online release 2.1, November 2003)

By Viktor Polic
Analog introduction

This story is not just another story about digital evolution. It is the view on evolution from unicellular perspective. I would skip chapters on my first research into mechanics, about disassembling clocks and radios. Although, I might come back to those aspects later if it proves to be relevant to digital evolution. Interestingly, my 18 months old son just disassembled our TV remote control and he is very curious about his sister’s Game Boy. On the contrary, my 5 years old daughter never disassembled any household apparatus but she was always curious about painting tools and materials and experimenting with those on the furniture.

My story starts in New Belgrade in early eighties. Fascinated with science and nature, I was experimenting with Electro-pioneer, my first kit for learning physics. As experiments were getting more complex, my Electro-pioneer kit did not contain all required components. Therefore, I joined the “Nikola Tesla” radio-club that had its own shop selling small electronic parts and kits. I discovered amazing world of electronics and communication. For example, I discovered that one could build simple AM receiver with one diode and a piece of wire! At the age of 10 I could not understand how a device could receive radio signal without being at least battery powered. Now I cannot understand why power sources could not evolve with the same pace of digital evolution.
Encounter of the digital kind

During summer vacations I used to play video games with friends at the nearby game park. We discovered Sega, Atari and other game machines. That type of entertainment was expensive for teenagers’ pocket budgets and not very motivating having to start game every time all over again. In the summer of ‘82 my friend’s uncle brought him Atari 800 from the States. We played PAC MAN, Centipede, Defender and other games now considered classics. Few weeks later, we got bored with those games and started to look in books and manuals and discovered Basic programming language. We learned that it could be used to design sprites that move across the screen, to create sound effects, to control inputs and outputs of computer and many other amazing things. The digital adventure began! I cannot put the full stop on this chapter without mentioning another milestone from 1982. The world was concerned about pollution, overpopulation, traffic, crime and other problems of living in large cities. The human kind was also concerned about social impact of robotics and cybernetics. That was all illustrated in the cult movie “Blade Runner” released in September 1982. Lets follow the path of digital evolution…
Abduction by digital aliens

I could not convince my parents to buy Atari, instead we made compromise and I got Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I learned Spectrum’s Basic programming language and struggled with its rubber keyboard. It was 1983, I used to read “Galaksija” popular science magazine. They published a special issue “Computers in your home” written by Dejan Ristanovic. It was the first publication in Belgrade to introduce small computers in everyday life. Those digital aliens, bits and bytes abducted more and more people. I’ve just realized that year 2003 is 20th anniversary since I got my first 8-bit computer!
Wireless networking (I meant to say, radio data broadcasting)

Exchange of programs started to flourish with popularization of home computing. Spectrum stored programs on audio tapes using 1500 bauds I/O. People used to copy tapes with their tape recorders and exchange was from hand to hand. Here of course, I refer to open source programs. In autumn ’83 popular Belgrade DJ Zoran Modli (link in Serbian) started first radio broadcasting of computer programs in Belgrade. (More about this in English) Meaningless noise for our ears was at that time our sneak preview to the future of networking. Unfortunately, at the time it was limited by the transmission media to one-way communication only. The feedback was given by auditors via telephone, letters and other low-tech media. (Telephone was still very low tech in Belgrade, not to mention that now, 20 years later, fixed telephone lines are still very low tech in Belgrade)

I wrote my first contribution to the digital evolution in the form of Basic program listing that I typed on the typewriter (lacking a printer) and snail mailed to the above-mentioned magazine. My program never got published, but after this exercise I convinced my parents to buy Seikosha GP-50s dot-matrix printer for my Spectrum. It helped me a great deal in conquest of programming.

Still 8-bit but more human friendly

My Spectrum saga ended the following summer, when my father bought the Apple 2+ clone in Singapore. Computing power was very similar to Spectrum, with enormous memory expansion in form of 16Kbytes language card. It had better graphics and sound capabilities, standard keyboard and great peripheral devices like single sided double density floppy drive and graphic touch pad. With the latter I’ve entered into the world of Graphical User Interface (GUI). Nevertheless, I missed free games and radio broadcasting because most of Belgrade audience had ZX Spectrum and Commodore64 computers. There were no shops with software. Home computers were considered luxury goods in Yugoslavia and were extra taxed and restricted for importing. It was the local contribution for further deepening the digital divide. I could understand that there was the extra tax and customs for imported cars in order to protect local car industry (Zastava Yugo) but home computers I still cannot explain.

Staying off-line

First Bulletin Board Systems appeared like Compuserve and Prodigy but that was far away from Yugoslavia and I did not bother to buy a modem. Staying off line had a lot of consequences on my participation in digital evolution, but gave me more time to enjoy music of 80’s. ;-) This was the social impact of digital divide on my development.

I also had more time to discover other ways of programming my Apple 2+. I discovered Fortran and Assembler. Assembler was inevitable if one wanted to design sprites on your screen and move them around quickly. I mentioned earlier that it was possible to implement it using Basic on ZX Spectrum, but on those 8-bit computers with few Kbytes memory only Assembler could achieve good performance. It was very important to rationalize with resources. Oh yes the screen, I forgot to mention that Spectrum used TV set as its graphical output. For Apple 2+ I got my first computer monitor. It was Kaga Taxan monochrome monitor. It was great for programming as it did not flicker like 50Hz TV set. (Try to sit 30cm away from your TV for couple of hours and let me know about your experience, and please, do not cheat with 100Hz TVs, LCD TVs or plasma TVs) Still, if I wanted to see colors I had to switch back to my TV set.

It was mid eighties when I was in the secondary school. I was studying in the field of civil air traffic. At the time computers were not directly related with my study field so we didn’t have any computer in the classroom. Having computer today is like having phone or even having water tap. There is one PC in the preschool class of my five-year-old daughter.
My first PC

In ‘89 I got my first 286-based PC with the legendary MS-DOS 3.30. It had a 20MB hard disk that I partitioned in several “huge” storage areas. One for programming, one for documents, one for games, etc. Since the color screen was too expensive, I bought gray monochrome monitor but it had real flat screen compared to the one I used with Apple (Not to be confused with today’s TFT flat screens).

The same year I entered Faculty of Organizational Science at the University of Belgrade, we had two 286 PCs in the computer lab. One of them had a color screen and huge 40MB hard drive. However, the core of the lab was one Honeywell Superteam computer with ten terminals available to students. We learned principles of programming, systems analysis, and languages like Pascal, Fortran and Cobol, computer architecture, networking…
The Internet

In the beginning of nineties I took the wind of opportunity and sailed off to Geneva. I settled at the outskirts of CERN in Meyrin. CERN is the cradle of the World Wide Web and I happened to be just there next to it at the time. I was the silent witness of the new communication era.

My stepfather bought on his office sell out the Digital Rainbow based on MS-DOS and CP/M operating systems. It was an old computer with monochrome display, not very useful at home. More importantly, it was not “wired” so I soon replaced it with the 386-based PC equipped with modem. My first home online services provider was International Telecommunication Union. I used Lynx text based browser to access Gopher menus and mail account. I joined the “global village”. This term was frequently used to illustrate the effect of the Internet on the communication. Over one decade later we are still facing phenomenon called “digital divide”. It is the gap between digital village and digital metropolis.
GUI DOS extension

I continued my studies at Webster University. The Computer Science Department had a dozen PCs networked to the Digital VAX machine as a file server. The VAX server was migrated to the i386 based Novell NetWare 3.11 server. At the same time MS Windows 3.1 appeared on the market. As it was much more reliable than its predecessor, we installed it in the lab. Apple MAC users laughed when PC fans discovered GUI. I even bought one copy of Windows 3.1 for home and installed NCSA Mosaic browser. It was the WWW as we now it today, with images and text on the same Web page. In fact, that was the World Wide Wait due to the very slow connections for both clients and servers. It was just the beginning of the new era in data communications that started with introduction of HTML (HyperText Markup Language). In the University lab however, we were still switching to DOS to use compilers and databases, Windows was used for word-processing, desktop publishing and Internet.
Silicon Valley

In May ’93, I joined Prof. H. Slettenhaar’s Silicon Valley Association and went on the study tour. The topic was multimedia and networking. We visited Stanford University, University of California San Francisco, Cisco Systems, Apple, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Synoptics, and other centers of digital innovation. I was impressed to see that concentration of knowledge, technology, capital investment, pleasant climate, and good vineyards. That visit marked my ‘90ties and broadened my views on technology and its evolution. It was 10th anniversary of the tour last month! Thanks to Prof. Slettenhaar’s amateur video enthusiasm a collection of video material from the various tours is available on a DVD. It is very interesting to hear now what people predicted about digital evolution decade ago.
Multimedia

On the way back I expanded multimedia capabilities of my home PC by purchasing my first CD-ROM drive and a sound card. This brought the new dimension to my home computing experience. Until then, only sound was buzzing from PC’s internal speaker. It had no better quality than my 10 years earlier ZX Spectrum. With 640MB capacity on the CD-ROM I did not have to go through tens of diskettes to install application packages. Sound card also had input line for sound recording and digitizing. It was much more easy to use these features with Windows multimedia capabilities than with DOS or earlier with Apple2 or ZX Spectrum. (These features existed earlier but were not very easy to achieve.) Developers were still struggling with hardware resources, games for example had to run in the DOS mode in order to have more memory. It was the time of creating special bootable diskettes with different configuration files in order to prepare the PC for the application’s requirements. Users needed multiple startup and configuration files, memory managers, DOS drivers/Windows drivers and number of other system tools. It was the challenge to make your PC as fast as possible.
Beyond Moore’s Law

I upgraded my home 386 PC with 387 math-coprocessor in order to try some 3D rendering in Autodesk 3D Studio. It worked but was too slow. 486 based PCs were already out on the market, so I retired my old PC and bought new 486 (CD, sound, modem, was already a must) Since the PC price dropped considerably I could afford buying a better screen. I bought Sony 17” Trinitron. In just less than two years I replaced my 486 with Intel Pentium based PC. The amount of RAM was doubling with processors upgrades. In 386 I had 16MB RAM, in 486 had 32MB, and in Pentium, guess, 64MB. Than, I bought another module of 64MB more.
Another computing dimension

In ’99, we went back to California but this time to visit friends in San Diego. Friend of mine had Windows CE based handheld computer. So far, I had two Casio personal data assistants (more powerful model had 32KB memory, still less than 48K in my old ZX Spectrum). But this handheld computer could do almost anything one desktop PC could. I decided to have one and bought Phillips Nino 500 based on Windows CE 2.11 and MIPS 75MHz processor.

I still use it. It has 16MB RAM, infrared port, colour LCD touch screen, modem, speaker and microphone. Its bulky compared to more recent pocket PCs but has same functionality and it’s still quite fast. I mostly use it to synchronize its Web browser with my preferred web sites when it’s docked to my office PC and read them later offline. When I was on the Cisco training in Brussels, I used its modem to connect to the Internet. It’s only 14’4 kbps, but enough to check your mail and local events. However, when we went on vacation to Belgrade, I wanted to use it for the same purpose and was hit by the “digital divide”. The telephone system in my area of the town allowed only pulse dialling and my Nino supported only tone.
Portable vs. desktop

In 2001, I bought my first portable PC. There are several reasons for that neither of which is travelling. Portable prices are dramatically gone down while performance reached those of desktops. TFT screens are common to portables for few years already. I had to save some space at home as there is a big housing problem in Geneva region. Last but not least I wanted to connect my digital video camera to the PC and do some video editing. Therefore, I bought Sony Vaio based on Pentium III with iLink (FireWire, IEEE-1394) connection, and 192MB RAM. It is my current PC at home. In addition I bought CD writer and produced several SVCDs (super video CD) with recordings made with my camera. Built in CD-ROM evolved into DVD-ROM. And now its several months that I am following prices of external DVD writers…Why waiting several months? Well, there are DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW standards. I’m still not sure if I should by a DVD writer that combines all these standards or just one of them. In addition, I have a doubt for the choice of connection. Should I choose USB 2.0 or FireWire or again combination of two? At least I did a good choice back in ’99 to invest in DV (Digital Video) camera so that my videos are in the digital format and waiting for the rights choice of optical storage. Or maybe, if I upgrade my home Internet connection to broadband and my audience does the same, I could than store all my videos on this Web site.
Child in you

Referring back to the second chapter of this story, my digital encounter started with games. Children are learning and discovering through games and play. My kids use our home laptop, Playstation 2, Nintendo 64 and Game Boy. My 5 years daughter is familiar with Internet, knows the difference between CD-ROM and DVD. She does not know the whole alphabet yet, but she is familiar with windows interface. Still only games keep her attention to the screen longer than 15 minutes. Well, to be honest I still like to play games occasionally. My grandfather played chess to entertain and keep his mind and intellect healthy. I play strategies and simulation games for same reasons. Few years ago when I bought Nintendo 64 game console, I was impressed with its 3D capabilities. Many accessories were announced for that game console like hard drive, modem, and I thought that N64 would evolve into something more than just a game console. Marketing strategy of Nintendo failed. Community of game developers judged N64 engine too complex and hence costly for games programming. Despite the superior technology to the playstation 2, N64 failed to compete. It could not offer sufficient number of game titles to accumulate revenue high enough to let Nintendo achieve other planned projects and let N64 evolve into something more than a game console. This was not the case with Sony Playstation 2. In mid January 2003 Sony announced that 50 million PS/2 units were sold worldwide. However, the main revenue comes from games sold. In addition it ships with YABASIC (Yet Another Basic) programming language. One can taste the power of programming with Yabasic but have to struggle with the on screen keyboard (even worse than ZX Spectrum’s rubber keyboard). However, hardware keyboard is available as an optional accessory. As an option, one may also get network adapter and modem. And for those who want to get most out of this entertainment machine there is a Linux kit for PS/2 that comes with 40GB hard drive, keyboard, mouse, network adapter and 2 DVDs with software. Still it’s not under $200 computer system because together with Linux kit it costs $400. At least it is one among several species that evolved from a simple game machine. (Playstation 2 Computational Cluster)

(This story will evolve)

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