Various movies, some documentary and some fictional, chronicle the history and social impact of our field. I thought it would be fun to watch some of these as a group and then talk about them.  All are pre-screened by me, so you know they’re good.

For Fall semester 2011, screenings will be in 551 Soda Hall.

BYO popcorn and refreshments.  (Suggest a movie, but I have the right to veto movies if I think they suck)

Listen to the Mastergeek Theater theme music (Real Audio or QuickTime)

19??-??: Empire of the Air

1941-1945: Forgotten Heroes of Bletchley Park

It is easy to argue that the first electrical/electronic (albeit special-purpose) computer was Colossus, constructed at Bletchley Park, near London, to break Nazi codes in WWII.  You may think you know all about it—that Bletchley Park is where Alan Turing developed techniques that were used to crack the Enigma machine’s code (on which DES was based, incidentally).  But the effort that really won the war is a story largely untold with heroes mostly unsung, because they were required to hold it in secrecy throughout the rest of their lives after the war ended.  This documentary tells the story of how rookie mathematician William Tutte came up with a technique to crack the much more sophisticated “Tunny” cipher, and how engineer Tommy Flowers designed and built the world’s first electromechanical computer to automate it, shortening the war by months or years.

1942-1950: Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII

Looking back on a little-known part of the war effort that recruited female mathematicians to work as “computers” for the U.S. Army during World War II, this eye-opening documentary sheds light on some remarkable unsung American heroines. From developing ballistics tables to programming the first electronic computer designed to improve Army efficiency, these top-secret “Rosies” made critical wartime contributions.
If you’re interested in learning more:

1955-1975: The Real Revolutionaries

The quintessential—and original—Silicon Valley story of the “traitorous eight” engineers who left Shockley Semiconductor, the first Silicon Valley tech company, to found Fairchild Semiconductor, where the integrated circuit was not only invented but turned into a commercial phenomenon.  In time, most of the Fairchild Eight left to form their own spin-offs (the “Fairchildren”), including Intel (Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore) and AMD (Jerry Sanders), inventing the distinctive Silicon Valley corporate culture in the process.

If you’re interested in learning more:

1961-1969:  Moon Machines—The Apollo Guidance Computer

[viewed 2/18/11]  During Project Apollo, the US managed to land men on the moon, not just once but six times.  How did we do that with a guidance computer based on 1960’s technology, whose most innovative hardware feature was the solid-state NOR gate in 4-to-a-package quad flat packs?  How did people program a machine whose ROM consisted of long “ropes” of magnetic cores strung onto braids of thin filaments?  What kind of UI can you get when the input consists of a 19-key keypad (big enough for astronauts wearing spacesuits) and the output consists of five LED 7-segment displays and a handful of “idiot light” indicators?

Most intriguingly, this was the project that made NASA realize that software wasn’t an afterthought to be dealt with following the hardware design, but the “pacing item” on the critical path for a complex embedded system.

Learn more in Moon Machines: the Apollo Guidance Computer, which we’ll screen at 5:30 pm on Tuesday, 2/1, in 551 Soda.

As a bonus, we can check out the “Virtual AGC” open source software that does hardware-level emulation of this computer.  It’s a little known fact that all the source (assembly) code for every Apollo mission is in the public domain, having been developed by a civilian agency at taxpayer expense.  Virtual AGC can be used to run the same bits the astronauts ran on each Apollo mission.

1975-1991: Triumph of the Nerds (released 1995)

Travel back to the 80’s with Silicon Valley pundit and gossip columnist – er, podcaster -Robert X. Cringely, to learn about the roots of the PC revolution, the early days of the microprocessor, and how we ended up with a computer on every desktop.

  • Part 1: Impressing Their Friends
  • Part 2: Riding the Bear
  • Part 3: Great Artists Steal

If you’re interested in learning more:

  • Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely, the book on which the miniseries is based
  • Insanely Great, by Steven Levy.  The story of how the Mac came to be.
  • iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon, by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith.  Autobiographical account of the founding and early days of Apple, and the creation of the landmark Apple ][ computer.

1990-1995: Nerds 2.0.1—A Brief History of the Internet (released 1999)

[viewed 10/20/10] If you’re interested in learning more:


1980-1989: GET LAMP (released 2010)

[viewed 11/17/10]  No idea what a “text adventure” is? Read this 1-page intro.

“Before there was the first-person shooter, there was the second-person thinker.” Text adventures, or Interactive Fiction (IF), is one of the oldest categories of interactive entertainment. This documentary looks at the rise and subsequent disappearance of a fascinating subgenre whose potential perhaps remains underappreciated. A gaming scholar writing in 2000 said: “Lured by the siren song of ever-improving graphics power, terrified by the risks involved with truly unique ideas in gaming, the [gaming] industry is collectively stumbling along a path well worn by Hollywood.” Watch this documentary and learn about the road not taken.

As a bonus, we’ll also play the original (1975) ADVENT text adventure (compiled from the original FORTRAN source code), play classic adventures from pioneer Infocom (including Zork) on vintage hardware, and discuss an open-source DSL & bytecode interpreter for writing platform-independent text adventures, developed in the days when “port the software” meant “rewrite the software”.

If you’re interested in learning more:

  • Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game. IEEE COMPUTER, April 1979.  Article by the authors of the original Zork (for PDP-10) who then founded Infocom and ported ZIL (Zork Intermediate Language) and the Z-Machine interpreter to most of the microcomputers of the day, and sold a number of commercially successful text adventures.
  • The Inform Designer’s Manual.  Inform is a high-level DSL for creating adventure games that compile to ZIL interpretable by the Z-machine, created post hoc by reverse engineering ZIL.  The manual is both a language reference and a “howto” for creating interactive fiction.  Maybe someone can create an adventure that takes place in and around the RAD Lab…
  • Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave.  Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2007.  After the original Crowther source code was found, this article examined the original ADVENT as a work of interactive fiction.
  • Twisty Little Passages, by Nick Montfort.  A scholarly but accessible survey of IF (interactive fiction) as a genre.

1980-1995: BBS: The Documentary

Imagine a virtual public space where anyone with a (free) account can post or reply to messages, using consumer networking equipment connected to their home PC’s, both of which were rapidly falling in price.  Some of these sites are free and operated by hobbyists; others tried to go commercial, and the site managers ranged from smart hobbyists to clueless get-rich-quick schemers who figured if they put some lame pr0n pictures on the site, people might pay a monthly fee for access.

Of course, the sites are Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), the home PC’s were TRS-80s and Apple IIs and IBM clones, and the consumer networking equipment was analog modems at 300, 1200, 2400, and ultimately 56K baud.  It’s easy to forget that as late as the 90s, local phone service was metered, long-distance was unaffordable for most people, and having hundreds of active users meant having hundreds of modems.  All the mini-dramas of the Internet—n00bs, pr0n, warez, flame wars, stupid handles, free & open source software vs. payware, clueless investor$, foreign sites circumventing local rules—happened here first.

1993-2000: Download: The True History of the Internet

Until 1990, the Internet was for academics and researchers.  The invention of the World Wide Web in 1990 was a major turning point, but what brought the Web “to the masses” was the first point-and-click graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic, later commercialized as Netscape Navigator.  The story of how Netscape took the IT world by storm, and what happened when Microsoft awoke to the threat, is the subject of this fast-paced documentary that reveals as much about the personalities involved—Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark, Bill Gates—as it does about the technologies that formed the IT battleground of the late 90s.

To learn more:

1995-2000: Revolution OS (released 2002)

[viewed 12/1/10] Microsoft Windows may have kicked the living daylights out of the Mac, but the war is far from over.  Through interviews with Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and others, we learn about the origins of the open-source movement, the Free Software Foundation, and how Linux became the first serious server OS to challenge Microsoft Windows NT.

1980-1995: The Video Game Revolution

While all those people were earnestly trying to use computers to “improve productivity,” some slackers who thought computers might be fun for just playing games.  The first video games used technology that had been brought to the mass market by the commercialization of PCs, and as PCs got more powerful, games went hand in hand.  Before long, they had created a multibillion dollar industry that’s larger than the movie business and has become a driver of PC technology.  From Space Invaders and Pac-Man to movies inspired by video games, video games have been both a cultural force and a shaper of the IT industry.

If you’re interested in learning more:

  • Supercade —a killer coffee-table book with color screenshots/photos of all the major video games since Space Invaders
  • The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent—just what the title says.  Lots of good books about this topic but this is the most comprehensive.

2002-2010: The Social Network

What hath the Internet wrought?  In 2012, one person in 7 on Earth had an account on Facebook.  WTF?  How all did that happen?  A glimpse into the post-boom startup culture, and a cameo portraying one of Prof. Fox’s grad school colleagues, and great writing by Aaron Sorkin are just three of the many reasons to watch this dramatization of Zuck’s rise from dropout to billionaire.

Trackdown

[viewing date TBA]  A dramatized cinematic account of Takedown, the nonfiction book by Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff, on how 90s hacker Kevin Mitnick was caught.