The car: what better avatar for our age than that mass-produced, self-contained, mobile habitation that frames the outside world through an anamorphic screen? Over the last century, the car has conditioned our world and lives perhaps more than any other technology, shaping our ideas by accident or design while hobbling the growth of public transport…
Despite the Canute-like efforts of the BBC and the UK establishment to promote the home computer as a useful domestic tool and edifying source of instruction for the young, it was clear as soon as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum made its appearance in August of 1982 that the future of British home computing would revolve around video games…
The cover art featured on the boxes and cartridges of Atari games from the company’s heyday—1977 through the crash of ’83—has been much admired and discussed, and rightly so: video games were an upstart medium, and Atari president Nolan Bushnell felt that the packaging “needed all the care and attention that a record album did.”
In the early years of home video gaming, Pong reigned supreme. Released in its arcade cabinet incarnation in 1972, Pong became a sensation and inspired a revolution in computer gaming, headed by Sunnyvale, California’s Atari. As Atari’s programmers created more games for the lucrative arcade market, the race was on to create versions that could be played at home on a television set…
In Lesson Seven, we learned how to draw Space Assault’s title screen, complete with theme music generated by Atari BASIC’s SOUND statement, and through the course of this series, we’ve covered nearly the complete source code of the game. Appropriately, the last section of code to discuss is the “game over” screen, which uses yet another powerful feature of the Atari Home Computer to combine multiple graphics modes…
The funny thing is, I don’t remember exactly where I was when the Challenger disaster happened. I don’t think we watched the launch in school or even heard about it there, because the first time I clearly remember seeing the footage was at my friend’s house after school…
The Western mentality during the Cold War was that since all the frontiers were conquered on Earth, our eyes now needed to be pointed to the heavens, to a “new frontier” that would give humanity’s great triumphs and tragedies some sort of meaning in a new postwar world in which God’s existence was, if not outright denied, then highly indeterminate…
Murmurs of Earth was published the year after the 1977 launch of the twin space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. While the Voyager program’s primary mission was to survey, photograph, and analyze the planets of the outer solar system, the book focuses on our attempts to communicate with whatever intelligent entities might encounter the probes as they flew headlong into the interstellar night…
Texas Instruments (TI), which had pioneered both pocket calculators and speech synthesizer technology in the 1970s, released its TI-99/4A home computer in 1981. After the release of its first personal computer, 1979’s TI-99/4—a fairly substantial commercial disaster—TI went back to the drawing board to produce a home computer that was cheaper, easier to use…
In Lesson Six, we saw how Space Assault’s enemy ships move and attack with a semblance of intelligence, learned how to create an Atari “earthquake,” and generally completed our coverage of the core of the game’s code. Now it’s time to explore the incredible sound capabilities of the Atari home computer, including music and exciting effects…
We Are the Mutants 