My childhood debt to open source (II)

This article follows on the previous article of the same name. The previous article describe my childhood passion for computers and the necessity that open source software played in it. Being able to read and share source code was an undercurrent that I took for granted from 1983 onward.

IBM PC Years

By 1989 my family had retired the Atari 400 and the occasionally borrowed Apple II. We got a 286. Manufactured by Hyundai, no joke. Back in these days, the computer came with two gigantic binder manuals: one for MS-DOS and one for GW-BASIC. Being able to have the BASIC reference manual, not to mention its copious sample programs meant that an inquisitive child could soak it up fast.

Several friends and I had already learned Atarisoft and Applesoft BASIC, so moving to the PC was a snap. Graphics and sound capabilities were different and generally more difficult, but the core concepts were the same. We attempted to write parts of fighting games and Sierra-style adventures. Given that we could only use the interpreter and didn’t know much about graphics, text adventures were the thing that we could code.

One book, Compute!’s Guide to Adventure Games, stood out for me. The book talked through the plots of popular text adventures, but later got into the mechanics of programming. A sample chapter is online, preserved in HTML form by Richard Bartle.

Happily, at the end of the book, there was the full source code for “Tower of Mystery,” a complete text adventure. Predictably, I pored over the mysteries of the parser and tinkered in vain effort of adding my own rooms and objects to the game.

Online Years

Swapping floppies of BASIC programs had been the modus operandi for years. Once I got a modem, it had changed. No more floppies–we could just upload. No more GW-BASIC–it gave away our kiddie status. Once BBS and Internet access came, sharing and learning from source code took on new forms.

The games ZZT and TinyTIM embodied this well. Both of these offered ways to add value and replayability by writing extensions to the game yourself. In fact, TinyTIM depended on it. You could play the introductory module of ZZT and then proclaim yourself “done,” but TIM all but required the full participation of its players in expanding its life.

For both of these games, sharing the internals was the key. You learned to program ZZT games by downloading other games and inspecting their guts. You copied down someone’s “shopkeeper” program and adapted him so that instead of swords and shields, he sold light sabers and blasters. In TinyTIM, if you wanted to build, you learned by examining the objects that others made and used that as the basis for your new idea.

Of course, once you had created your new ZZT module or your new TinyTIM object, you shared it back to the group. It’s great to make a game for yourself, but the point was to have others play it. The goal of building your TinyTIM mansion was to have your friends over for a party. While they were there, you could bet that they were examining the camera and answering machine you made, so that they could build one too.

For years, I took for granted that having open source games and other programs was the way that computers worked. The natural openness of the platforms encouraged exploration, tinkering and alteration, ready for exploitation by a curious child.

In my final article in this series, I’ll wrap up with ways in which I shared back with the community. Hopefully these articles ring bells for others and can help bring an awareness of something that was largely taken for granted in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gift cards as DRM’ed cash

Digital Rights Management offers, some people’s minds, a way to do less with something that we have paid for. For example, a CD without DRM restrictions can be played on a CD player, ripped to a computer, mixed into new songs, put onto a CD-ROM with tons of other songs, or toted anywhere on an iPod.

A DRM-encumbered DVD, on the other hand, can only be played on a DVD player. It may not legally be ripped, mixed into a new movie, or be put onto a PSP or other portable device. Material with DRM allows you to do less with that material than you could without the DRM restrictions.

This recent article, 10 Reasons Gift Certificates make Horrible Gifts, uses similar language to talk about gift cards. In similar effect, a gift card allows you to do less with your money than you could do with cash or a check.

By purchasing a gift card,  you enter an exclusive agreement with one vendor only. The money spent is no longer valid at any other venue. A Best Buy gift card can’t be spent at Starbucks or Old Navy. The gift card can’t be deposited in the bank to be spent in the future (many gift cards expire or decrease in value over time).

In this was, gift cards allow us to DRM our own money. It’s a way to give money to someone without actually giving the flexibility and freedom that cash offers.

Bible etched on pinhead-sized silicon chip

Like the nanotech Advent calendar, scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology have inscribed the entire text of the Hebrew Bible (including vowel points) onto a 0.5 square millimeter silicon wafer. Professor Uri Sivan conceived of the project to get each of the 300,000 words down.

This beats the previous size records: “It may be noted here that the smallest known copy of the Bible known so far measured 1.1 x 1.3 x 0.4 inches and weighed 0.4 ounces. According to Guinness Word Record, the earlier Bible comprised 1,514 pages. That invaluable text is believed to have originated in Australia.”

Links:

1. Bible put on a pinhead-size chip
2. World’s smallest Bible
3. Israeli scientists etch out Bible on pinhead size chip
4. Scientists create nano-Bible
5. Bible etched onto area the size of a pinhead
6. Bible on chip smaller than pinhead

Cory Doctorow’s alchemy metaphor and bad history

Cory Doctorow’s talks typically include a metaphor on alchemy. He contrasts alchemy and the Dark Ages to science and the Enlightenment and compares them to the difference between DRM culture and free culture. His metaphor is based on some bad history but making the metaphor more accurate improves his metaphor by paying more attention to our present location in history.

One version of this metaphor was the speech at the Singularity Summit, “Singularity or Dark Age?” At about 3:05 into the speech he says,

For five hundred years the dominant mechanism for doing science was to do it in secret and not share what you’d learned. We call that alchemy and we call the five-hundred-year period the Dark Ages. Every alchemist discovered for himself that drinking mercury was a bad idea and not much technological progress occurred.

One day, an alchemist got the bright idea of publishing his outcomes and sharing his knowledge and that begat the practice that we called the Enlightenment and the technological progress that has flowed from it, and we are today creatures of that decision to publish instead of hoarding knowledge.

The distinction of dark versus light is an attractive rhetorical device. From a historical perspective, however, there is no moment when the Dark Ages easily gave way to the Enlightenment. There simply is no support for referring to two adjacent periods of history in this way.

Generally speaking, the concept of the Dark Ages come from Petrarch, who died in 1374. Since then, this period spans the period from the fall of Rome (ca. 500) up through the Crusades (ca. 1100). Starting and stopping points are debated by scholars, but these brackets are approximate to a century or so.

The Dark Ages are said to end with the beginning of the Middle Ages, marked with the Crusades. When the Crusades began, Europe encountered the Middle East. Usually the sensational violence of this period is highlighted and the intercourse with Islamic thought is neglected. The Crusades offered Europeans access to Greek thought (e.g. Aristotle) preserved through Arabic commentators (e.g. Averroes).

By learning what Islam had known for so long, logic and science came to Europe to usher in not the Enlightenment, but the Middle Ages. Gothic architecture becomes possible and the the University system rises. The Middle Ages is a period of the first universities and hospitals in Europe, providing scholastic thought, humanism and scientific inquiry.

Over time, the cumulative effect of this contact with Islamic thought, joined with the freedom of printing and near-limitless copying, gives rise to the Enlightenment.

The gap between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment spans about five hundred years, rather than the instantaneous movement that Cory suggests. This is not to say that his metaphor is wrong or broken, but it can actually be made better with a fuller look at history.

Could we consider ourselves a part of a Middle Ages, spanning the gap between the alchemical Dark Ages and a knowledgeable Enlightenment? Might we turn to global perspectives as the medievals did in appropriating Islamic thought? Might we seek academic integrity and scientific integrity as they did when establishing universities? Might we be the ones to frame a new world view, relentlessly questioning, as the scholastics did (e.g. Thomas Aquinas)?

Thinking of ourselves as in a Middle Age opens up fruitful metaphors for the work we are doing. Cory’s metaphor for understanding copyright history is a powerful one; only when we understand our moment in that history can we best play our role in it.

Jason Fox: my childhood hero

Here’s two pictures: on the left is me, circa eleven years of age. On the right is Jason Fox of Bill Amend’s FoxTrot.  Other than Mr. Fox’s bowl of cereal, we’re pretty much the same guy: blonde, glasses, red shirt and under-athletic.

I started reading FoxTrot at age 10 and found myself instantly drawn to my cartoon doppelganger. Blond, skinny and a nerd of the worst sort, I knew that I had met my match and my inspiration.

My childhood debt to open source (I)

Growing up in the 1980s gave me as a child a huge number of opportunities to learn about open source software first-hand. By reading shared source code, I learned to program computers and to share source with my friends. Later, I grew to have a respect for the open source ethos and to have a desire to export that ethos to other areas of my life.

I suspect that I’m not the only person who has had these experiences, so I’m sharing them here for like-minded people to read. Additionally, it serves me as a link farm of web pages that I don’t want to search and hunt down again.

The first part of this series covers my own life up through elementary school.

Atari 400 Days

Around 1983, my dad brought home an Atari 400 for my sister and me. Being himself an electrical engineer, he wanted to share some of his interest in computers with us. Of course, this year is a little late to bring home a 1979 vintage Atari 400, but I suspect it may have been a clearance item at Service Merchandise.

At any rate, he showed me the ropes and bought several books on BASIC programming. I remember having Basic ATARI BASIC that was exhaustive and encyclopedic, but difficult for a six-year-old to read. At any rate, I could type in the programs and draw pictures of rolling dice on the screen.

Another book, Rainy Day Games for Your Atari, was much more formative. The BASIC listings were simple and short and offered a fun game to boot. Importantly, most of the listings had “variations” listed also. So, after you played once, there were suggestions for changing a few lines and making the game a little more challenging.

Always deserving mention is 3-2-1 Contact magazine and its Basic Training articles. At one point I had found someone’s scans of all of these articles, but I can’t find it now. Every month a new BASIC program came to type in.

The best lessons came from typing the source and absorbing the language by practice. Having suggested variations on the programs encouraged a critical reading of the source and promoted tinkering with the programs.

Apple and IBM Years

One of the downsides of using the Atari 400 was that the Atari 410 cassette recorder was my only means of saving a program. Often this meant that the most practical way to save a program was just not to switch the computer off.

Also, even if I did save to cassette, I couldn’t share my programs with friends. I was the only one I knew who had an Atari, my friends had a Timex Sinclair 2038 or a TI-99/4A. Different computers and different (closed, proprietary) formats meant that we couldn’t share programs.

This all changed with REACH, my local school district’s gifted-and-talented program. Suddenly, we had a room full of Apple II’s with floppy disks and a room full of like-minded geeks. So, once a week we could get together and swap BASIC programs and come up with awful programs to destroy paper on the Imagewriter II.

David Ahl’s books Basic Computer Games and More Basic Computer Games were the shining lights of this time. Pages upon pages of source code for games gave us geeks a treasure trove. These books combined with rudimentary programming lessons yielded a whole world of hacking. I particularly remember creating a version of Rock, Paper, Scissors that couldn’t be beaten, because the computer cheated.

In the REACH computer labs, we found a floppy disk with an Applesoft BASIC game on it called, “The Ebony Castle.” It was a simple illustrated adventure game, in the spirit of Sierra On-Line’s early offerings. I’ve scoured the Internet and cannot find it, so I presume it was a one-off program that didn’t make it anywhere else.

Being a good sized program, we routinely printed it out and took it home to learn from. Reading it, we could figure out what GOSUB did, how the animated graphics worked and all kinds of programming trickery.

From 1985 to about 1989, my friends and I all learned about programming be reading and modifying source code. Even though it was long before the days of the “open source” concept, the spirit was there: sharing program source is a way to learn and have fun together.

In the next article, I’ll describe ways in which we, as children, tried to give back to this nascent “open source” community.

ANSI Art and Illuminated Bibles

The History of ASCII (ANSI) Art page shows the history of using writing as a visual medium. Rather than communicating just the words, the medium itself brings an artistic message. The writer follows through the history of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Christian illuminated manuscripts, children’s drawings, Radio teletype (RTTY) art and finally the ANSI art of the early 1990s BBS scene.

The site is just about exhaustive. I’ve never considered that Christians had a contribution to ANSI art, but it’s worth reflection. Of course, Anglican priest George Herbert made his contribution to written art in his 1633 poem, The Altar. While the content of the poem itself is worth comment, the fact that the shape of the words is a picture of an altar reflects the content in the form, the message in the medium and puts a good Reformation era milestone on the contribution towards ANSI art.

A few other items this past week on written art:

Today bOINGbOING points us to an illuminated Cockney Bible, which can be yours (via Amazon) for only £50.

Jason Scott’s interview with John Sheetz, recently mentioned on his blog, ASCII. He gives an account of his life as a Radio Teletype operator and the art that he created and shared.

Christmas in Video Games: Homemade Mods Roundup

This is the last in the series: check out the previous articles (1, 2, 3).

One of the fun things about looking into Christmas themed video games is that so many of the games are authored at the grass roots. With the exception of Daze before Christmas and license games like Home Alone, almost all of them were made by folks in their homes, usually modifying (modding) some larger game.

BBS Door Games (search this site)

I wish that I had more concrete evidence of Christmas-themed BBS doors. Searching around the internet, mostly on Jason Scott’s excellent cd.textfiles.com, I can see some of the programs I remember from the late 80s to early 90s. Some just offered Christmas trivia at logon. The more complex ones allowed the user to send email to the North Pole or have an Eliza-style chat with a computerized Santa. Cute and fun, most of these games found their way to the Internet in one form or another.

The ZZT Christmas Special (download here)

If you aren’t aware of the game ZZT, learn about it now. Tim Sweeney’s 1991 offering from Epic Megagames provided gamers with something that no other video game did: a built-in object-oriented programming language. As a result, three things came together: the hackish impulse extend programs beyond their original intent, ANSI artwork and a BBS community to share the results with. It was Web 2.0 before there was a Web 0.9.

So, eventually, someone came up with a Christmas-themed game, uploaded it and shared it around the BBS networks. The theme is pretty spartan: Santa got trapped by a home alarm system and it’s up to you to save him. To get past the alarm system yourself, it’s a timed Sokoban-style box-pushing adventure! Here’s what it looked like:

More Wolfenstein 3-D Mods

I never realized that the old Wolfenstein 3-D still had an active mod community around it. The site linked above, the Wolfenstein 3-D Dome, is a treasure trove of packages to change the original game. One on their front page now is a like to Hotel Romanstein 6 (download it here).

It’s a much better version of the XMASWOLF game that I posted earlier. The artwork is much nicer, the santas a little more compelling and the game is full of elf-girls in skimpy elf-outfits. What’s not to love? See screenshots here.

Doom 2 X-Mas Nightmare Mod (download here)

There’s almost no words. Imps wearing santa hats. Rampaging Santas that give up their gifts in exchange for hot lead through their skulls. Just watch the video. But not for too long.

Knights of the Old Republic II

Star Wars is in on it too! I haven’t played Knights of the Old Republic, but something about it seem to just scream out, “The main female leads in this game need red, furry bikinis!” Apparently. Follow the link above for screenshots and a download link.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Wolfenstein 3-D wasn’t the last game in the series to get Christmas themed mods! The link above has screenshots and a download link. Return to Castle Wolfenstein can now offer Grinches instead of Nazis, snowballs instead of hand grenades and little red bows on ammunition boxes. Heartwarming, no?

Enjoy the mods! Something about the spirit of Christmas encourages gamers and hackers to give the gifts of the violent mods to their favorite games! Perhaps the game companies aren’t foolish by staying away from this concept after all…

 

That’s it for this series! Merry Christmas!

Save the lemmings, kill the Nazis, destroy the Empire and have a cool Yule!

Atypical technology employed in churches

The Evansville Courier Press, in a Nov. 30 article, “Digital Age doxology: Pastor knows gadgets, chapter and verse,” reports on uses that churches have for digital technology. I particularly enjoyed this one

The Turning Pointe United Methodist Church on Evansville’s West Side (www.theturningpointe.com) recently tested a new idea called TXT BAC CHRCH. The Rev. Steve Walker invited worshippers to send text messages with questions about his sermon. After the sermon, staffers displayed the handful of responses on a large screen, and Walker answered them.

Usually when the idea of church technology comes up, the discussion goes two ways. In my experience the reactions are:

1. How people do or don’t want Microsoft PowerPoint displays in worship.
2. Finding a way to save money on postage by emailing the parish newsletter.

The article reports on Pastor Dan Hendricks who has a “road warrior” type setup, carrying around laptops and such. He uses arrangements like Pastors Christopher Esget and Bob Hyatt, who both employ Backpack for organizing ministerial minutiae.

Cory Doctorow on the Bible

In 2004 Cory Doctorow spoke to Microsoft on the topic of Digital Rights Management. If you don’t know Cory, run his name through Google Video and watch something of his. Or read bOING bOING. Please do. I’m a superfan and have been catching up on all of his talks lately.

In that talk (video here or transcript here), Cory spun out his excellent talking points in the EFFing lion’s den, Microsoft. This is the oldest talk of his that I’ve seen and it’s always fun to see someone’s presentation skills evolve and his talks get better over time.

There is one analogy that he used that I haven’t heard repeated in his talks since (at least, as far as I know). Cory brought in the Bible. Not using verses as prooftext to make a point, he specifically talks about the changes in thinking about

At 27:25 minutes into the talk, he says,

This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful
new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn’t
succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable:
they were ugly, they weren’t in Church Latin, they weren’t read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience,
they didn’t represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by
someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made
the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more
popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for
a new medium pale beside its profligacy.

He returns to the analogy at 30:27 minutes:

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.

At 42 minutes or so, a question comes from the audience pointing out that the Luther Bible (in German) and the Gutenberg Bible (in ecclesiastical Latin) are different documents. Cory stands corrected, but his point isn’t finished at all. The language isn’t the issue; the access to the text itself is.

The printing press technology made automatic, cheap and fast what was once manual, expensive and slow. Even more importantly, the technology took away the intermediary of the scribe and the verbal interpreter. In the same way, digital technology is taking away the intermediary of the printer and the footnote commentary.

As Cory says, the technology created something that “didn’t succeed on the axes” that the previous technology depended on. The technology created a new axis and offers a new dimension. For the Reformation, that meant the proliferation of the Word of God. For the Internet, it means the proliferation of words in the computational sense.

For Christians, and especially for Reformed Christians, the propagation of the Word is our prime directive (Matthew 28:18-20). Theologically, the Word of God is Jesus Christ himself (John 1:1-18) and we are called to be agents of his spreading grace. We are also called to spread the Word, which gives us the many, many translations from many, many publishers in many, many languages.

To be true to our theology and to our history, Christians should be interested in the free and unencumbered transmission of words in the literal, computational and theological sense. These principles entail our involvement with free software and looser copyright restrictions.