Way Back Machine
Tomorrow, my latest project becomes an open beta and so I’m pretty excited about that. And maybe that’s the reason I’m reflecting back on some of the projects I’ve been a part of over the years. I stumbled across this little gem this evening:
Click for a much larger version
This was a GUI I wrote for the SeriesTEN-B automated mixing console by Harrison back in 1991. I was 22 at the time. It was called VIC (I didn’t name it). Some clever people at Harrison designed a dual TMS34020 Nubus card that was to be used in the upcoming MPC consoles which is a predecessor of the current MPC3-D consoles. I was somehow assigned to update an older vector graphics based GUI for the SeriesTEN using this beast.
I don’t recall a great deal of the technical specs.. I do remember that I had an entire megabyte of video memory to work with! So 1024 x 1024 with a fixed 8 bit palette. Of course the monitor only displayed 1024×768, but there was a register I could set to alter start of display video memory and thereby scroll the GUI up and down. This all ran on a Mac IIfx. Oh I had an enviable setup on my desk in those days 🙂
There were a couple of challenges with this project. First was stealing the mouse from the Mac when it hit a certain corner of the screen. I couldn’t actually configure the video card as a Mac display, as “VIC” (stupid name) needed to own the display. So I had to learn about patching traps to steal the mouse when it was it hit the correct edge of the screen and smoothly switch the cursor over to the application running on the video card and of course switch control back to the Mac as needed.
Also, there was no buffering of video and so I had to resort to display list interrupts which handled updating sections of the display after refresh had progressed passed a certain scan line. No flickery redraw.
Drawing the signal path (bottom right of the image) based on all of the various settings was a bit of a pain as well. But it ended up so nice, the little dashed lines rotated through a pattern giving that nice marque effect indicating signal flow.
Of course, some of the stuff in here was just for fun. The miniature channel strip to the left represented the state of the actual physical channel being controlled at the time. It served no practical purpose, but I thought it was way cool… and yeah I drew that background image by hand in PixelPaint I believe.
And I was also better about making sure that my software contained easter eggs back then. If you clicked on the Harrison logo while holding some set of modifier keys, it would be replaced with a picture of me and my tiny eyes would follow the cursor around the screen.
VIC didn’t really sell too well. Most people preferred working with knobs and faders rather than a mouse in back then and even now there are plenty of holdouts. But it did make it to the cover of BroadcastEngineering magazine and was therefore seen by tens of people. I have a copy of that magazine around here somewhere.
Fifteen years ago… hard to believe it’s been so long and how far we’ve come.
Holy Crap! You write software for Griffin. It’s a really small world after all that one of my relatives (I don’t know exactly our relation) is a Mac geek (me too) and writes software for a really good company that I have a couple of their products.
Yep, especially when your name is Fleser. There aren’t very many of us. I’m pretty sure that I’m one of five that live in Tennesse 🙂
So which one are you? Last Name equals FLESER
I would be I3530 (Mike and Karen are my parents) and what’s weird is that I have an old business card of another Mark Fleser, he’s a John Deere salesman in Mason, MI. I also think that us Mac geek Fleser’s are few and far between. You and me only that I know of. My brother in law is so I guess that kind of counts, he’s the one that got me to switch. I was hardcore peecee fan before, I did a complete 180 last year when I switched.
I downloaded Proxi, it’s pretty cool, somewhat like automator but does more simple tasks. You should consider making it a menu extra or preference pane rather than have it take up space in the dock.
Glad you’re liking Proxi. You can put it in menu extra mode by opening up the Preferences and selecting Hide Dock and Menu Bar. I thought briefly about a pref pane, but it doesn’t allow much flexibilty for the GUI. I think max width is like 590 pixels or something?
And let’s see I3530.. related to I170… 3rd cousins. This genealogy software rocks. And I think that means you qualify for the family discount on Griffin gear 😉
I wish I would have known that sooner 😉 oh well I got my earthumps pretty cheap anyway (12 bucks plus shipping) I could have used it on the iMic though. But I bought that from apple when I ordered my new iLife and iWork suites (those things are sweet).
Speaking of Griffin….. you wouldn’t happen to know when the iTalk Pro is coming out do you? I really want that thing. I just heard (they did some recording on it) iLouge’s little review on it and was surprised at the audio quality.
Shh…I (markfleser@gmail.com) didn’t say anything about it though.
No, I can’t say I know about that timetable, sorry 🙁
Are you guys going to make this thing expandable so third party people could develop plugins for it for other software. NetNewsWire comes to mind.
I’d also like to see in the iTunes part of it, a command to show the current song. I tried to set it up to launch iTunes then do a keystroke press of CMD+L but it didn’t work.
If you’re talking about Proxi, then yep. Check out this post on the Proxi blog.
If you’re talking about VIC, then sadly, no 😉
I know it will be obvious as soon as you tell me but what is VIC?
Scroll up 😉
Duh! I told you it would be obvious.