The Crime & Punishment Journal 3rd June 2014
Let me describe my studio. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTLplJ0Irlo 1:56:00 Imagine, a dark space, with automatic lights, a wooden floor, no food, no sleep. In the early days it would have had just a wooden bench at knee height to write at, and outside if I cared to look, it would have been night, but a stream flowing past a rock wall or something like that, or if I wanted, an ocean. Everything in there I had made myself. If I wanted to record a symphony, I could easily do so, by recording each instrument in turn. All the instruments I would have made myself, and there was/is no shortage of seasoned timber. If I wanted to record a vocal track I could easily imitate or sing using almost any voice I chose.
More of that later if you like, but I want to get straight on to software. n the side bar is a link to Bitcom. This is explained in the software edition, and nobody I've spoken to has believed that I wrote it. First there was the
it. First there was the chip, but before that the transistor had to be designed. Before that there was a lot of architecture, of the building kind, especially churches. St Paul's Cathedral. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren. WRENS were as we know, the Women's Royal Naval Service WRNS, The ampitheatre or Colosseum in Rome. It probably comes as somewhat of a surprise to know that on moost planets the transistor radio preceeds the valve radio. This is based on advances in electronics, and the diode, but here on earth the transistor radio came after the valve radio.
The first computer used a cathode ray screen, and all the letters were in green. How many people today remember those. I was aware that three programmers at Microsoft were working on the DOS 5 operating system, but they were handicapped by the fact that at the end of each day they had to discuss what they had done that day, and how it would fit with what the others had done. Often it wouldn't fit and had to be redone. Often it was either too big, or too slow, and had to be redesigned to make it fit better. We were all working from the platform that Tim Patterson had written, and this was the foundation the new software had to fit in with. I also wrote that software, as Patterson, and sold it to Microsoft.
For a start the OI.Sys files were too big to copy using the copy command, and so Xcopy had to be written to combine the files to copy them. Previous to that Microsoft had no timing system as such. Early software had the y/n option for yes no, and would prompt you, do you wish to do this? Strike any key to continue, and so on. There was a piece of software called BOX which would draw a box using various predesigned lines and corners, and if the string was 17 characters long or less, draw a box around them. Then there was PAWS. Paws or Pause used the timing system on the chip to make a delay or time in seconds and minutes instead of the y/n strike any key to conntinue dialogue.