Cut that cable

After I worked myself through the first three chapters of the Applesoft textbook it was now time for graphics. The high-resolution screen counted 280 x 160 pixels. But oddly enough the Pearcom did not respond to the HGR and HGR2 statements. I thought that it could be a lack of memory because it should have been at least 24 Kb. But when I checked it I saw that we had 48 Kb on board so it should work. However, I could not find the problem and I got in touch with engineer Schröder by telephone. I told him about the HGR problem. His answer was that he would call me back. A few hours later he called me back with a rather basic but also terrifying question ‘Do you have a pair of cutters?’

Engineer Schröder continued his explanation: ‘Is your computer on? Than turn it off! Open its cover. See the motherboard? Do you see the 14 slots? On the right of those you can see the CASSETTE DATA IN (K12), CASSETTE DATA OUT (K13) and the VIDEO OUTPUT (K14). A bit below them you will see the AUXILIARY VIDEO OUTPUT CONNECTOR (J14B). Do you see that cable at the right of it? Yes? Cut that cable! That’s it. Now put the cover back on the computer and start it. Type HOME. And then VTAB 24. And try the HGR statement!  Do you see a blinking cursor at the bottom? Than type: HPLOT 0, 0 TO 279, 0 TO 279, 159 TO 0, 159 TO 0, 0. If everything is typed correctly you should have a big rectangle on your screen now. Is that correct?’ Yes that’s right!

After we had done some experiments on the screen of the Pearcom, we got more insight into the limitations of the system. The resolution of the screen was still far too low for us. And all the text you typed, or any line you had draw was stored in the Pearcom and you could never get the data out of it. You could save it to a floppy. But that was all you could do. We tried a way to work around it. We decided to take pictures of the screen. Therefore, we did some testing. We made photographs and recorded the time and settings of the monitor and camera. Brought the negatives to a photo developer. Than you had to wait for two or three weeks. Get the photos and make conclusions. This too was an unsatisfactory situation because you did not see immediate results. Photography was also quite expensive. Especially if you wanted to order enlargements of the pictures in a later stage. You could make Polaroids. But finally we thought that the image quality was not good enough and large prints were out of the question anyway.

Then we came up with the idea to buy a printer. We got back in touch with TriComp’s engineer Schröder. It was an EPSON FX-80 dot matrix printer. Picked up by train in Eindhoven. At home in Amsterdam we first checked whether we had all the parts in the box (including the FX Series Printer User’s Manual). That of course we should have done in Eindhoven. But everything was complete so we could install the printer. This was a lengthy process of making the printer ready including determining the printer’s place in our room. Very important due to the noise it produces during printing. Checking the paper separator, covers, manual-feed knob, DIP switches, ink ribbon and paper loading tractor feed. Check top of form position, paper thickness lever. Also checking the control panel and finally the FX self test. Printer on. Followed by a little dance from the print head. Three lights came on. POWER, READY and ON LINE. I turned the printer off. Pressed the LF button and turned on the printer during which I held down the LF button for the self-test.

Next step was reading the tutorials in the FX Series Printer User’s Manual. It started with an introduction intended for everyone. What followed was only for experienced users (they wrote). But we were so impressed that we could now print roman and italic. With a speed of 160 characters per second! And we had the choice of six different print pitches plus two options for bold print. We also could use the underline, sub- and superscript functions. Plus three fonts: PICA, Elite and Compressed. There was also a possibility to create user definable character sets. So now we also could design our own fonts.

While working myself through the manual I found out that with using the backspace function you could make overstrikes. The backspace function moves the print head backward one or more characters. You could combine two or more characters to form completely new ones. So I did a small project which had the intention to make typographic structures using special characters only. The FX 80 also had the possibility to use variable line spacing. It was also able to generate line feeds from varying from 0 to 85 dots. The 0 dots option was especially interesting because you could do multiple strikes on one line. It could also do reverse feed. The FX 80 moved the paper but it had the effect that its print head was moving. So I think I’ve made the following structures with only using the backspace and line feed function. I have found nothing else from this small project because no data has survived. Only these 10 prints. Since the last print is numbered DAT.09.06.1983 STRUCT.NO.28. DISK.NO.11 I think that I have at least 28 structures made.

I want number 5

After our test at the TU Delft university, we learned that it was difficult to be dependent on national institutions and their hard-and software. We would like to have more freedom to decide when we wanted to use a computer. That freedom was limited by our salary. The first home computers had become ‘cheap’ enough for consumers to buy. You could choose from a range of suppliers. The Apple ][, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, the ZX-81, the Nascom and later the Commodore VIC-20, the BBC Micro, MSX 1 and successors, the Commodore 64, the Acorn Atom and the Atari 400 and 800 series.

At one point we found ourselves in an apartment in Eindhoven where the engineering office of Tricomp was located. It was a chaotic space. Everywhere there were boxes with computers and peripherals. You had to step over the boxes when you wanted a chair or table. Coffee was served on boxes while engineer Schröder apologized for the chaos. We said that we hesitated about a NEC APC microcomputer or an Apple ][. Engineer Schröder advised us an English Apple clone: the Pearcom. In the end we chose the Pearcom because it had 14 input / output slots. That was 6 slots more than the Apple ][ computer. Some data: screen size 25 lines of 40 characters (upper and lowercase). 32 Kbyte of RAM (expandable to 96 Kbyte on board). BASIC, Fortran and Cobol available. Full Colour PAL video supplied (16 colors). Professional keyboard with function keys and two Apple disk drives. In 1982 it costs us about 5677 Euro.

The first thing that annoyed me was that I now had to learn programming. There was hardly software available. So I tried to understand what was going on. There was a 156 pages textbook which explained how you could learn Applesoft BASIC (a dialect of Microsoft BASIC). But there was some help available. As the handbook explained ‘With this handbook, an Apple computer (in our case the Pearcom) and some time and patience you will notice that programming a computer is not at all difficult. The secret of success is that you take your time and try-out everything. You can’t learn to code or program by reading this book. Likewise you can only learn bicycling or playing the violin by doing. You have to make mistakes and correct them. Don’t let programming discourage yourself when you make mistakes.’

I browsed through the Applesoft BASIC textbook and looked through the chapters: starting with Applesoft, the principles of programming, PLOT error messages, GOTO loops, NEW, LIST, RUN and HOME, graphics, strings and arrays. It all seemed very interesting but puzzling at the same time. When the computer started the ‘DISK II MASTER DISKETTE VERSION 3.2 16-FEB-79 COPYRIGHT 1979 APPLE COMPUTER INC.’ appeared. The menu was also very reassuring. The textbook stated that the menu on the screen was in fact working on the same way as if you were in a cafeteria. If you would like to have fried eggs with chips, vegetables and coffee you just can say, ‘I want number 5.’ Number 5 is the color demonstration program.

At one point I was asked if I understood the operation of the presented program. First, an array is filled with numbers, after which the contents of the array is mixed up. Note that the array does not have to start at zero. Suppose we have two glasses. A wine glass (WINE) and a glass of milk (MILK). Oh no, there was something wrong. The milk is in the wine glass and wine sits in the glass of milk. Fortunately we have an extra glass (TEMP). We can use the extra glass to fill it with milk, then we pour the wine into the wineglass and then the milk in the milk glass. Now we have both drinks in the right glass. Well… its fine that we could use the TEMP glass to get the drinks into the right glass but why do I have to know that? It really did not make any sense at all.

The second point which annoyed me was the terrible low resolution. Yes… you had the choice to work in two modes: low and high-resolution. In the low resolution you could draw 40 x 40 dots. And you had 16 colors available. You could draw teletext-like images. The high-resolution screen counted 280 x 192. However, that reduced your color palette from 16 to 8 colors. A huge disappointment if you compared the resolution of the computers within the University of Delft. So what could we do with this Apple clone beside playing Space-Eggs?

No code at all

In the early 80’s (of the previous century) Jeanne de Bont and I worked at the renowned design agency Total Design in Amsterdam. Beside work we had also presentations we could go to. On one of these friday-afternoon presentations Dutch graphic designer, writer and creative director of Total Design Ben Bos presented us a short film. It was a short stop-motion film which was made in 1965 and it showed us the unlimited amount of variations you could make using a simple grid. The amount of variations were astronomical. IBM calculated that if you would display all variations next to each other it could easily fill the length of the earth’s equator. Anyway it was very impressive. So from that moment on I thought I would like to know more about working with computers and how to use them in my own design process. But that seemed not as easy as I thought.

Besides the work that we did during the day at Total Design we did projects which we made public by silkscreen posters. The design and implementation of these projects was a very lengthy and expensive process because everything had to be done manually. You had to draw the illustrations which explained the idea and beside of that there was also a photography and printing process. This process lasted sometimes for a whole year. But the result was always a static poster in an edition of 500 copies.

During one of these projects, which we later gave the name Dialogue, the idea came up to try to use a KORG MS10 synthesizer for an animated film. I experimented with music at that time so that brought us to the idea to design a symbolic language that allowed us to generate images of the KORG MS10 settings. For the music I made a composition with the KORG MS10 that I recorded on tape. That composition was the basis for the images that we were going to show in the animation. The animated film we wanted to realize through computer animation because that appeared to be the easiest and most efficient way. But the most important reason to use a computer was because we were very interested in the new graphic possibilities. We were not at all interested in the hardware.

When you would like to use computer graphics as a starting point for your project then questions arise immediately. Where do we get a computer? And where do we get one who does what we want? And who does the programming? We only had indirect contact with computers through the redesign of the Eurostyle font. This font was to be used for Philips computer keyboards. A project we worked on in 1978. We had almost no money so we decided that we needed some funding. Thinking of funding let see first whether it is possible to create a test on a computer. Somewhere. Somehow.

It was almost impossible for a graphic designer with an income of barely 1,850 guilders per month (about 839 Euro) to buy a computer. Computers were too expensive and not yet produced for the consumer. Therefore, computers were only to be found in government institutions and multinational companies such as IBM, Philips or Shell. Another place they could be found where the universities. Luckily for us Total Design had already contact with the Technical University in Delft.

So we tried to get in contact with the Computer Centre of the Technical University in Delft. It took several weeks before we had found the right people. All communication had to go by letters written with a typewriter or by telephone. Finally we ended up at R Janse and engineer C Thijs. After a first meeting in which we explained what our intentions were, they were willing to make a small test for our Dialogue project.

There is not much left of these experiments. I found a few slides (click on the ‘Next’ button when you are at the Flickr page) with a terrible photographic quality because I was not interested in photography. I used a Russian Zenith camera which I had bought 10 years before. But the test was successful and we managed to compile a document in which we explained the end result we would like to get. That document was sent to the Frans Duwaer Foundation to ask them for funding. The funding was rejected. And we still don’t know what the reason was.

This was our first experience with computing and graphics but also with getting funding for projects. Now you may wonder why we did not go ahead with the manual approach. Beside of making the illustrations of the different settings of the KORG MS10 that would take us more than a year. After that stage we had to rent a studio with staff who would produce the film. Also the synchronisation of sound and visuals would be an awful lot of work. Financially this would be impossible for us at that time. But we had gained a little experience with computers and some essential changes in the near future would make it very much easier for us.