video

Making links

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software “agents” that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being… Read More »Making links

(Not) in glorious Supermarionation

Thanks to , I’ve now seen SuperThunderStingCar, the rather affectionate Pete and Dud parody of all things Gerry Anderson from Not Only…But Also, for the second time in fifteen years. For the UWSF&FS folk, this was shown at a couple of the video weekends back when Mike was running them in the early 90s.

Len Lye

While I’m not currently a member of a film society, I don’t regret the 10 years that I spent with film societies and the BFFS. For one, I’ve ended up married to as a direct result, but more importantly, I’ve been introduced to a wide range of cinema and filmmakers that I just wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to (and I’m fairly certain that would probably have put those in the same order). One such filmmaker is Len Lye, a New Zealander who worked in the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit in the years before WWII. During this time,… Read More »Len Lye

The mother of all demos

This isn’t exactly news, but it may interest some of you. First, a bit of computer history. In 1968, Doug Englebart gave a ninety-minute demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. NLS, the oNLine System, had been under development by the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford since 1962, and had a number of features which we now consider commonplace: the mouse, outline lists, hypertext links, and so on. The demo was filmed at the time, and there have been copies and fragments of varying quality floating around ever since. Some enterprising soul has now uploaded… Read More »The mother of all demos