Ginger, Ginger!
(4/18/11) Dan Pope, Gus Large and I recorded some new songs about a month and a half ago.
Here's a finished piece called "Ginger, Ginger!".
Also, an on-the-fly, entirely live piece featuring Dan called "Dog Doombie",
or "Dabbity Doo".
New software for your Color Computer!
Just when you thought you no longer had a use for your 30 year-old computer, here's something new!
| This is Unatron, a game I wrote in 1982-83. I prepared it complete with documentation and source code and put it up for sale in a small advertisement in Hot Coco, a magazine dedicated to the Radio Shack Color Computer. I received a lot of interest and zero orders. The problem was that I put the wrong town name on the mailing address. I had the correct postal code. It was sort of forgiveable; I'd just moved into the area. As soon as I realized the error, I ran down to the post office. The clerk assured me that it wouldn't make a difference, but it did. |
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The game is very playable. Copies that I gave away caused serious addiction problems. My son tells me I ought to update for some newer platforms (which leaves out ENIAC but includes pretty much every other computer ever made). Click through the image to get to the documentation and executable.
I've published a couple of books.
My favorite of the two was High Performance Computing.
It came out at a time when "high performance computing"
meant parallel supercomputers, like Cray machines and
weird massively parallel matrix architectures.
The book covered that, but it also talked about more pedestrian
stuff, like the new breeds of processors coming from Sun Microsystems,
IBM and Intel.
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I would almost say that I had no business writing the book,
since I was not (still am not) an academic, and that was an
area for more lettered men and women.
But I had a lot of practical experience.
I'd just left Multiflow Computer,
a parallel supercomputer start-up out of Yale,
where I'd spent much of four years optimizing scientific code to
run on our own bizarre architecture.
I completed the book when I was working at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) in 1993. UTRC was a goldmine for information about the computer architectures from the 50s and 60s. A lot of the engineers just reaching retirment age had worked with the IBM 704 and other neat old computers. They still had the manuals! |
High Performance Computing started to age by the late nineties, and the publisher took it out of print. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan wrote me and said "I'll update it!," which he did quite ably, and it went back into print for a time. Interestingly, High Performance Computing still shows up in the reference lists on syllabi. And it sells for more than it did when it was in print! That makes me happy—a 16 year-old computer book that's still relevant. Read chapters 2 and 8.
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The second book,
Getting Connected, was about
Internet plumbing.
I wrote it during the time when people were just starting see
what the Internet was all about.
Getting Connected never got the audience I hoped for,
but it became the reference book that the sales
teams at UUNet and Bell Atlantic were given, and that translated into
a lot of business for Atlantic Computing, my company, through the 90's
and into 2000.
Eventually, that led to the sale of
the company.
Both books have been translated into other languages. I have Japanese and Chinese versions. |  |
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A few odds and ends.
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Speaking of synthesizers and Color Computers...
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Portions copyright © 2011, Kevin Dowd
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This Doesn't Look Promising...
Lately, I have been playing music with garage bands. In the process, I've taken an accelerated tour of music synthesizer technology through the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Gear that once cost many thousands of dollars is now regularly traded on eBay or Craig's List for 100s or less. I've bought and sold a good number of modules, skimmed off what I like, and made a few bucks in the process. The shipment above is an E-MU sampler coming from California. I'm waiting to see what sad fate has befallen it. By the way, here's a quick guide to interpret what certain phrases mean in eBay and Craig's List postings for used electronic music equipment:
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Jesus' Spaghetti Sauce This is the best. I just ate some with a couple pieces of rye toast. It's so good, I'm passing my recipe onto you. Please open a restaurant and get famous.
Ingredients:
Chop the onion. Chop the pepper. Mince the garlic. Put the hamburger into the bottom of a pot and start frying. Once it gets underway, add the onion and the fennel seed. The fennel will make the mix reminiscent of sausages. Let the beef and the onion cook at medium heat until the onions are floppy and the beef is braised. Add the garlic and peppers and let them fry with the mix for a minute or so. Add the beer, the diced tomatoes, the bay leaves and the sun dried tomatoes, plus a pinch of salt. You can add some oregano or savory if you like. Once it gets hot enough to boil, turn it to a simmer and walk away for a couple of hours, coming back once or twice to stir. Add the tomato paste about an hour into the process. The sun dried tomatoes will rehydrate. Unlike fresh or canned tomatoes, they're going to have some backbone left after the boiling is all over. Find Jesus in the sauce.
I found this shirt on the beach This is a picture of me (headphones) taken from the Helsingen Sanomat in 1982, when I was a nuclear engineer for Combustion Engineering. I was at the power plant in Loviisa working on a project for the OECD to see if artificial intelligence/human factors safety systems could help a power plant operator during an emergency.
I might be wearing your shirt.
That's it in the picture.
I found it at the hole-in-the wall beach in Niantic,
washed up in the seaweed.
It took many launderings.
Maybe you'd be happy to know it got to see Finland.
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