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From: bzs@MULTIMAX.ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Hacker's Convention 4.0 (1)
Message-ID: <8810240421.AA08611@multimax.ARPA>
Date: 24 Oct 88 04:21:55 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 77


The Hacker's Convention is a gathering of some of the most innovative
minds in computerdom once a year to formally and informally discuss
just about everything having to do with computers and technology in
general. I was fortunate to be among them this year and I thought I'd
report some things that should be of interest to this list.

DVI (Digital Video, Interactive) - This is also known by other
acronyms. There were demos of some interesting systems and talks about
its potential. One system, for example, framed the screen with typical
windows in which television quality video was displayed. You were on
an Aztec site in Mexico and could "walk" around the buildings and
grounds with a mouse. For one scene they pointed a fisheye camera
upwards and had a 360 degree view of the entire site you could positon
yourself in (this got a round of loud applause.) Clicking a menu put
you inside a museum to wander about with a collection of relics from
that site. Another system let you interactively do interior decorating
with composite video images.

HyperText - Ted Nelson and the Xanadu crew were about demo'ing their
system which is starting to look very convincing. It looks like
they're really going to be putting the world's written thoughts
on-line. I think the term Ted Nelson used was "the manifest destiny of
literature", I couldn't agree more!

Mathematica - Stephen Wolfram was demoing his Mathematica system, I
was impressed. It looks like someone has finally pulled together
symbolic mathematics, graphics, text processing, workstations,
backends, the whole shebang into one system. This one will be *very*
important in Universities, I expect it to be a dominant software
package in the math and sciences. It can both get a student excited
about math and be a professional tool for the scientist.

Graphics - A new film from Pixar was shown (I believe it was Todd
Rundgren giving the talk, I walked in a little late.) They used a
16-CPU transputer system to generate several minutes of stunning film.
I think it's safe to say they have now surpassed the best of Disney
and Warner Bros (etc) in quality of animation, this stuff has detail
the hand animators could only dream of, reflections reflect, shadows
move, snot wobbles (sorry, but it really was in there.) The film is
called "Tin Toy", don't miss it, synthetic movies are fast becoming a
reality.

Other scuttlebut (in the halls of conferences the conferences go on in
the halls...):

People were excited about bringing multi-media computing to the homes,
the next "television", only this time it's useful. The question was
how? What's needed? On-line services, cheaper/faster/more-interesting
home systems. Someone talked of the entire home being the computer, of
it not being this box that sat in the corner but part of everyday
life, an extension of the microprocessors in your VCR and microwave
oven. Your stereo melded into your telephone melded into your
television melded into library systems, shopping networks etc. It's
been mostly said before, but I think the pieces are slowly falling
into place.

Someone talked about this brave new world marking the end of the
industrial revolution. The industrial revolution brought uniformity,
the assembly line, massive production of goods which were a best guess
at the customer's needs honed down by a feedback loop of marketing and
mass redesign. The new wave would be customization, I can sit down and
design my own shoes or whatever on a screen in my home (possibly by
just altering standard models) both for look and fit and a robot at
the factory would receive that spec and build it for me, to my tastes.
Everything would be customizable!

There was a large poster being handed out from Rockwell outlining
a plan for the next 100 years of space travel.

Although no official winner was announced there were nominations taken
for the best hack of the year and voting by applause. I think NASA won
for their launch of the Discovery the previous week.

It was an interesting conference.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||