April 14Th Morton Subotnick

term “fifth generation” referred the lifetime of the site, she to the era of machines following moved into an apartment and April 14th vacuum tubes (1st gen), increased the number of camera transistors and diodes (2), to cover her entire living space. integrated circuits (3), and The site remained online for microprocessors (4). Morton Subotnick more than seven years, and at its Born April 14, 1933; The aim was to create an peak drew seven million hits a “epoch-making computer” with day. Of course, when she started Los Angeles, California supercomputer-like out, her most successful Subotnick's 1967 album, “Silver performance based around competitors were a coffee pot Apples of the Moon” is massively parallel processing. It [Nov 22] and a fish tank [Aug considered a milestone in would provide a platform for 00]. electronic music, being the first future developments in AI by JenniCam is widely considered record to feature a voltage- utilizing ideas from logic to be the first successful based analogue synthesizer programming [May 15]. example of “lifecasting,” [May 23], the Buchla 100, The machine would have a although Steve Mann [June 8] developed by Don Buchla with performance of between 100M was probably the first suggestions from Subotnick. and 1G LIPS (Logical “lifecaster”, having started in Inference Per Second). At 1994. the time, typical workstations were capable Ringley claimed that the site was an attempt to document her life, of about 100K LIPS. but it also generated a great deal Unfortunately, the FGCS of controversy for its voyeuristic project failed to be a nature. commercial success for Ringley shut her site down on reasons similar to the Dec. 31, 2003, after PayPal [Feb failure of the Lisp machine 15] stopped processing [Dec 25] initiative in the US donations due to its new anti- – their specialized computer nudity policy. Since then she's architectures were largely shunned public eventually surpassed in attention, even as “reality TV” speed by more has gone mainstream. A Buchla 100 synthesizer. Photo standardized, cheaper hardware by Bennett. CC BY-SA 2.0. (for example, Sun workstations A famously disastrous lifecasting [April 9] and Intel x86 boxes experiment was “Quiet: We Live The Buchla 100 was designed in [April 10]). However, the project in Public” [Dec 3]. did produce a new generation of a modular fashion, combining boxes that each served a specific Japanese researchers, and function, such as an envelope encouraged like-minded generator, oscillator, filter, and research around the world Squeak Released amplifier. By mixing and (e.g. SCI [Oct 28] in the US, Alvey April 14, 1996 matching the different modules, [Aug 30] in the UK). a composer could affect the Except for the director, Kazuhiro The Squeak language was pitch, timbre, amplitude, and Fuchi (1936 - 2006), all the derived from Smalltalk-80 by a spatial location of the sound. researchers at ICOT were under group at Apple that included 35, and in some cases well under some of the original Smalltalk The formal name for the developers, including Alan Kay synthesizer was the “Buchla 100 that. Fuchi pointed out that revolutions weren’t made by the [May 17] and Dan Ingalls [Oct series Modular Electronic Music 12]. System,” but it was often just elderly, and coined the word called the "Electric Music Box". “Young8”, meaning “young and It supported a more modern excellent.” color graphics model and an experimental user interface called Morphic, adopted from an ICOT Formed JenniCam Live old project at Sun [Feb 24]. April 14, 1982 Morphic replaced Smalltalk’s April 14, 1996 influential Model-View- The Institute for New Controller toolkit. Generation Computer Jennifer Ringley (1976 - ) hooked up a camera in her dorm Squeak’s development was Technology (ICOT) was set up to taken up later at Walt Disney guide Japan’s ten-year research room at college and set it to upload a picture to her Imagineering, but still headed by and development program, the Kay who was by then a Disney Fifth Generation Computer “JenniCam” website every three (or perhaps 15) minutes. Over fellow. One outcome was Etoys, Systems (FGCS) project. The a child-friendly computer 1 environment based around scripted objects, which motivated further refinements to the Scratch language [Jan 8]. Namely, Etoys revealed some limitations of Morphic, which led to the creation of Tweak by Andreas Raab [Nov 24] in 2001. Tweak added concepts such as islands, asynchronous messaging, costumes, and tile scripting. Some larger Squeak projects include Open Cobalt (a 3D virtual workspace), and parts of the now-dormant Nintendo ES OS [Sept 23]. 2 .

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