Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

Susan S. Banks, a photographer and an ethnologist, happened upon a small valley in rural Cuba. The farming families in this valley were hard-working people growing tobacco and trying to make a living. She became a friend to these residents and gained their confidence before starting to photograph them. She returned to this valley 5 years later to re-photograph most these same families before their way of life was destroyed by the spread of urbanization. Banks joins a group of photographers who have successfully documented a society on the edge of change.  GLB

“[My goal was both] to show the raw, essential details of daily life and at the same time dig deeper, to transcend the reality of what is there, and to confront the enigma of human nature.”
— Susan S. Bank

“Having grown-up in a depressed but culturally rich New England island village in the 1940s, I shared with the campesinos (tobacco farmers) a sense of ‘tamed space’ and community life”
— Susan S. Bank

“Susan Bank’s photographs are not just documents of farmers living in rural Cuba. They are powerful compositions in which people, animals and landscape are integrated into a new kind of whole. The photographs act as a visual diary of her time immersed in that culture and the result is poetic, fantastical and compelling.”
— Kristy Krivitsky, James A. Michener Art Museum

“Unlike Walker Evans who was assigned to Cuba in 1933 to expose poverty for Carlton Beals’ book The Crime of Cuba, or Dorothea Lange who followed migrant workers during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration, I had no political agenda. I had no intent to disturb life in el campo. I did, however, have to guard against drifting into a romantic vision of a way of life that on the surface appeared to be exotic and perfectly harmonious.”
— Susan S. Bank

“I think that I’ve tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.”
— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

“Can you imagine that Cuba and Europe’s youth, who had forgotten about traditional music, who only thought of rock music , are now looking back towards their grandparents? That is a phenomenon.”
— Company Segundo

“Forty-two years ago, I came to America from communist Cuba so I might have a better way of life, a freer way of life – a more democratic way of life. I wanted to live the American Dream where if you worked hard and put your mind to the task, anything was possible.”
— Mel Martinez

“I would love to go back and help rebuild that country and help – you know, kind of like what’s going on with Iraq right now. You know, they’ve got a new government in place. They’re trying to rebuild the country. I would love for that to happen in Cuba also.”
— Rafael Palmeiro

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation site, PhotoQuotes.com, which does not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting were obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Wikipedia.com web site which did not state any restrictions on their use. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

Susan S. Bank (Born: 1938)

Bank received her artistic training at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and also studied in Mexico with the renowned photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Graciela Iturbide and later with Constantine Manos in Havana. Her work has been published in such prestigious publications as Camera Arts and The Photo Review. The Campo Adentro series has received various local and national awards including the Fleischer Challenge Award, Perkins Center Juror’s Award, Texas Photo Project and Santa Fe Project Competition Juror’s Choice Award. Bank was the recipient of a Leeway Foundation grant in 2002. Prior to Cuba: Campo Adentro, Bank’s most widely recognized work is a series of photographs that document the people of the resort town of Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts.

Black and white photographs depicting tobacco farmers, their families and a rural landscape in Cuba’s Pinar del Rio Province are on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown from August 16, 2008 through January 4, 2009. Cuba: Camp Adentro, meaning "deep within the country," is a series by Philadelphia photographer Susan S. Bank who stumbled upon an agricultural community in the Valley of Vinales in 2002 while on break from a project in Havana.

Working simply with a 35mm camera on return visits to barrio Cuajaní over the next five years, Bank documented 10 households who appeared to have never before been photographed, growing their own food, surviving without any modern conveniences and a living a life firmly anchored in family, neighbors, animals and love of their land.

Susan Banks, the Publisher

Susan S. Bank founded Sagamore Press in 2008 to publish here work titled Cuba: Campo Adentro. Here Susan discusses some of the aspects of the publishing process. In her blog, Melanie interview Susan Banks about her experience as a publisher. The following are excerpts from that interview.

MM: What made you want to self-publish? Have you had any experiences with publishers in the past?

SB: It would be misleading to say that I set out with a desire to self-publish!

My decision to self-publish was based on ‘accepting the reality’ of what I wanted to accomplish, given the circumstances of the publishing industry.

I had used up the routes of winning book prizes, entering the Leica Book Award twice, which was a long shot: it is an international award and two books on Cuba had recently been selected. The Duke/Honickman First Book Prize was attractive and I made it to the finals twice; in 2004 and in 2006 when Robert Frank was juror with just 12 finalists. Frank awarded the prize to an outstanding portfolio by Danny Wilcox Frazier titled Driftless: Photographs from Iowa. I had sent out a marquette to about half a dozen publishers, university and commercial presses, getting the same response, that while they liked the work, they did not believe it would sell. I picked myself up and decided that I did not want to flood the market with more maquettes, (how long would that take?) and in 2007 I moved forward to self-publish. Making the decision to self-publish was a huge relief! I realized that by self-publishing I would have complete control of the process and the results. This was a position that I relished. No, I had no previous experiences with publishers. A publisher did offer to jump onboard once I had nearly completed the book but I decided that I did not want to lose control at that point.

MM: What exactly was your role, other than photographer, in the book production?

SB: This was a ‘hands-on’ project for me. I was involved with every aspect of the production. I selected the pictures and the sequencing. I worked as team player with the designers. Before we went to work, I sent them a memo with what I wanted and what I did not want. I personally oversaw all the details, including researching and selecting the paper. I like ‘details’ hence this was not difficult for me. I ‘sat’ on press. Bob Tursack, the printer, commented when we were finished that he had never worked for such a demanding photographer but it was good for him to raise the bar in his own business.

MM: Finally, you originally described Campo Adentro environment as "like walking into a diorama in a natural history museum". By identifying your relationship with these people and their locale as foreign, how do you think you were able to deal with your need to create a realistic and unromanticized view of the location? Do you feel as if you achieved this goal?

SB: There is no question that the first few trips to el campo, an ‘exotic’ shadow was hovering. I was fortunate in that I was able to go to the valley two or three times a year and to live with the campesinos in their homes. Although I was not familiar with farming life (the first two years of my life I did live on a farm but have no memory), I did feel a ‘kinship’ with the campesinos as I had grown up during tough times after the Depression and during the War. I began to imagine that they were family to me. Looking at the book as a whole, I don’t believe I romanticized poverty. It is not a book about poverty in rural Cuba but a book about relationships. (I am troubled when I see so many pictures of desperate faces of African children gazing into the photographers’ lens . . . while not intended, this represents to me a way of romanticizing poverty.) However, I concede there are some ‘romantic’ pictures in the book. For example, the opening picture of the sugar cane field represents what we might imagine this rural place to look like. I struggled with whether or not to use it then decided I needed to establish a sense of place early in the book. I also struggled with using the boy swinging on the clothesline (# 47) but saw it as a metaphor of transition, between the known and unknown, the future and the past, the beginning and the end so in that context, one could see it a ‘romantic’ picture. But I believe, overall, that by working with the simple details of daily life, I was able to create a portrait, often surreal, of the human landscape in rural Cuba grounded in a raw, yet respectful beauty.

Video of Campo Adentro (in Cuba)
 http://www.luag.org/netexhibits/susanbank/sbanklg.cfm

Cuba: Campo Adentro

On her Web Site, Banks sets the context of her photo essay on the people in this small agricultural community in rural Cuba. She has observed this community twice with decades separating the two visits. The following is taken from her Preface on her site (see the References section for specific citation.)

The “Campo Adentro” project began in March 2002 as an accident. What I intended to be a weekend retreat from the hustle of Havana became a deeply intense personal journey, returning again and again for the next five years to barrio Cuajaní, in the Valley of Viñales, Pinar del Río Province. Landing in Havana, that illusive, mythical citadel of contradictions and juxtapositions, one feels catapulted back in time to the 1950’s. To know Pinar del Río, is to feel gently pulled back another fifty years.

I lived and worked among campesinos (tobacco farmers) and their families who subsisted without the benefit of modern conveniences. Here was an opportunity to photograph people whom I believe had never been touched by another extranjero/foreign photographer. Carrying a handheld Leica M6 and using natural light, I concentrated on ten households, all related either by blood or marriage.

Having grown-up in a depressed but culturally rich New England island village in the 1940’s, I shared with the campesinos a sense of ‘tamed space’ and community life. In my imagination, the campesinos were to become my family.

Unlike Walker Evans who was assigned to Cuba in 1933 to expose poverty for Carlton Beals’ book “The Crime of Cuba”, or Dorothea Lange who followed migrant workers during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration, I had no political agenda. I had no intent to disturb life in el campo. I did, however, have to guard against drifting into a romantic vision of a way of life that on the surface appeared to be exotic and perfectly harmonious.

Rising before dawn, walking alone along the dark caminito, stepping over untethered oxen, waiting for that magical hour, the first flutter of light over the mountains . . . wanting to believe in the possibility of hope for that one day only . . . working from raw, simple, ordinary details, I set out to create an intimate and poetic portrait of daily life of the campesinos of barrio Cuajaní.

Juan Antonio Molina, in his review of Bank’s photo book Cuba: Campo Adentro, makes the following observation of her capture of the life of these Cuban farmers in this little valley. Please check out the full article at the web site in the References section.

Making documentary photographs in the Cuban context is not a naive exercise, much less for a photographer like Bank, who has had to cross not only geographical but also political and social boundaries.

These crossings have led me to emphasize the place her work occupies, between imagination and history. As a result I do not hesitate to stress her contribution to an iconography of “the Cuban.” I believe that the construction of “the Cuban” in the last fifty years has had more to do with the image than with history. I turn to the epigraph of this essay, the enigmatic words of José Lezama Lima, which translated into English mean “the image is the secret drive of history.”

I believe that Bank’s work springs from the same intuition that underlies the Cuban poet’s phrase. His words are very consistent with the tenor of this work, which is that these campesinos, photographed in the twenty-first century, do not differ from others photographed in other times, and perhaps elsewhere, in places beyond Cuba.

One might say that this observation merely reflects the fact that areas of the Cuban countryside exist in a limbo untouched by the passage of time. Provoked by specific social conditions, this limbo manifests itself like a parenthesis in history.

Yet in these photographs I sense that this parenthesis (this lapse) is nonetheless an aesthetic construction of the artist’s own making, such that the image—with all its symbolic force—makes incursions into territory seemingly independent of history.

The truth is that Bank has a special talent to capture moments and situations that, when represented in the photograph, look unreal, despite their ostensibly mundane nature. The facts of daily life appear unusual and extraordinary. 

Bank’s direct and frank gaze has resulted in images that simultaneously idealize their photographic subjects and render them unfamiliar. It is this very distance that we call “aesthetic” and which is tantamount to the chasm between the photograph, as a beautiful object, and the photographed, as the starting point of the artistic act. What is most significant in this volume is that each picture retains its autonomy as an object and that such autonomy holds the key to its beauty. Thus, each image may evoke the “natural” beauty that motivated Bank to put the camera to her eye in the first place, but then it forces us to discover within it another type of beauty, unprecedented, that is possible only in a photograph, and then only thanks to the photographer.

References

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Susan Bank… 
Not Available

Web Sites and Blogs:

Brainy Quote: Susan Bank…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/cuba.html

Lens Culture: Cuba: Campo Adentro…
http://www.lensculture.com/bank-2.html

Melanie Photo Blog: Interview with Publisher Susan S. Bank about her Imprint Sagamore Press…
http://melaniephotoblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/interview-with-publisher-susan-s-bank.html

Susan S. Bank Web Site: Cuba: Campo Adentro…
http://www.susansbank.com/Text_page.cfm?pID=1843

by Gerald Boerner

What can you say about the Apple II? It was innovative, easy to use, expensive, and filled the need for the computer hobbyist for a personal computer with high resolution graphics. It was, in a word, the PERSONAL computer for the REST OF US! It provided the entre into computing for many home users. Its big advantage over the TRS-80 and other competitors was its open architecture. Users could add expansion cards to perform function that were not built into the computer, as needed. Its weakness was that it could only use one of those expansion cards at a time. You could display something on the screen, print a page, or save/retrieve a file, only one thing at a time; this required some very convoluted programming to create an operational system.

BUT yes, it was great and innovative if you could afford it.  GLB

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
— Popular Mechanics

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
— Thomas Watson, Sr., IBM

“But what…is it good for?”
— IBM Engineer commenting on the Microchip

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
— Ken Olson, DEC

“Hey, I know this! This is Unix!”
— Jurassic Park

“Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.”
— Byte Magazine

“I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processings is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
— Editor for Prentice-Hall

“So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.”
— Steve Jobs

Wizards of the Internet: Apple II Computers

The Apple II (often rendered Apple ][ or Apple //) was one of the first highly successful mass produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and introduced in 1977. In terms of ease of use, features and expandability the Apple II was a major technological advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I, a limited production bare circuit board computer for electronics hobbyists which pioneered many features that made the Apple II a commercial success. Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, the Apple II was among the first successful personal computers and responsible for launching the Apple company into a successful business (and for allowing several related companies to start at all). Throughout the years, a number of different models were introduced and sold, with the most popular model manufactured having relatively minor changes even into the 1990s. By the end of its production in 1993, somewhere between five and six million Apple II series computers (including approximately 1.25 million Apple IIGS models) had been produced.

The Apple II became one of the most recognizable and successful computers during the 1980s and early 1990s. It was aggressively marketed through volume discounts and manufacturing arrangements to educational institutions which resulted in it being the first computer in widespread use in American secondary schools. A focused effort to develop educational and business software for the Apple II, including the 1979 release of the popular VisiCalc spreadsheet, made the computer especially popular with business users and families.

The original Apple II operating system was only the built-in BASIC interpreter contained in ROM; most commercial Apple II software on disk, e.g. educational games and productivity programs, booted directly on the hardware and either had no operating system or incorporated one of its own (which was usually invisible to the user.) The Apple DOS Disk Operating System was added to support the diskette drive; the last version was "Apple DOS 3.3". Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS, which supported a hierarchical filesystem and larger storage devices. With an optional third-party Z80 based expansion card the Apple II could boot into the CP/M operating system and run WordStar, dBase II, and other CP/M software. At the height of its evolution, towards the late 1980s, the platform had the graphical look of a hybrid of the Apple II and Macintosh with the introduction of the Apple IIGS. By 1992 the platform had 16-bit processing capabilities, a mouse-driven Graphical User Interface, and graphic and sound capabilities far beyond the original.

Despite the introduction of the Motorola 68000-based Apple Lisa system in 1983, and its more successful cousin the Macintosh in 1984, the relatively unsophisticated Apple II series was Apple's primary revenue source for most of the following decade: with its associated community of third-party developers and retailers it was once a billion-dollar-a-year industry. The Apple IIGS was sold until the end of 1992; the last II-series Apple in production, the IIe, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.

Models

Early II-series models were usually designated "Apple ]["; later models "Apple //", plus a letter suffix.

Apple II

The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 5, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 kB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator. The original retail price of the computer was US$1298 (with 4 kB of RAM) and US$2638 (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). To reflect the computer’s color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple’s corporate logo until early 1998. The earliest Apple II’s were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore.

An external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached via a controller card that plugged into one of the computer’s expansion slots (usually slot 6), was used for data storage and retrieval to replace cassettes. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak, was regarded as an engineering masterpiece at the time for its economy of electronic components. While other controllers had dozens of chips for synchronizing data I/O with disk rotation, seeking the head to the appropriate track, and encoding the data into magnetic pulses, Wozniak’s controller card had few chips; instead, the Apple DOS used software to perform these functions. The Group Code Recording used by the controller was simpler and easier to implement in software than the more common MFM. In the end, the low chip count of the controller contributed to making Apple’s Disk II the first affordable floppy drive system for personal computers.

As a side effect, Wozniak’s scheme made it easy for proprietary software developers to copy-protect the media on which their software shipped by changing the low-level sector format or stepping the drive’s head between the tracks; inevitably, other companies eventually sold software to foil this protection. Another Wozniak optimization allowed him to omit Shugart’s Track-0 sensor. When the Operating System wants to go to track 0, the controller simply moves forty times toward the next-lower-numbered track, relying on the mechanical stop to prevent it going any further down than track 0. This process, called "recalibration", made a loud buzzing (rapid mechanical chattering) sound that often frightened Apple novices.

The approach taken in the Disk II controller was typical of Wozniak’s design sensibility. The Apple II used several engineering shortcuts to save hardware and reduce costs. For example, taking advantage of the way that 6502 instructions only access memory every other clock cycle, the video generation circuitry’s memory access on the otherwise unused cycles avoided memory contention issues and also eliminated the need for a separate refresh circuit for the DRAM chips. Rather than using a complex analog-to-digital circuit to read the outputs of the game controller, Wozniak used a simple timer circuit whose period was proportional to the resistance of the game controller, and used a software loop to measure the timer.

The epitome of the Apple II design philosophy was the Apple II sound circuitry. Rather than having a dedicated sound-synthesis chip, the Apple II had a toggle circuit that could only emit a click through a built-in speaker or a line out jack; all other sounds (including two, three and, eventually, four-voice music and playback of audio samples and speech synthesis) were generated entirely by software that clicked the speaker at just the right times. Not for nearly a decade would an Apple II be released with a dedicated sound chip. Similar techniques were used for cassette storage: the cassette output worked the same as the speaker, and the input was a simple zero-crossing detector that served as a relatively crude (1-bit) audio digitizer. Routines in the ROM were used to encode and decode data in frequency-shift keying for the cassette.

Wozniak’s open design and the Apple II’s multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices to expand the capabilities of the machine. Apple II peripheral cards such as Serial controllers, improved display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, and networking components were available for this system in its day. There were plug-in expansion cards, such as the Z80-card, that permitted the Apple to use the Z80 processor and run a multitude of programs developed under the CP/M operating system, including the dBase II database and the WordStar word processor. There was also a third-party 6809 card that would allow OS-9 Level One to be run. The Mockingboard sound card greatly improved the audio capabilities of the Apple, with simple music synthesis and text-to-speech functions. Eventually, Apple II accelerator cards were created to double or quadruple the computer’s speed.

Apple II Plus

The Apple II Plus, introduced in June 1979, included the Applesoft BASIC programming language in ROM. This Microsoft-authored dialect of BASIC, which was previously available as an upgrade, supported floating-point arithmetic, and became the standard BASIC dialect on the Apple II series (though it ran at a noticeably slower speed than Steve Wozniak’s Integer BASIC).

The Apple II Plus was otherwise identical to the original Apple II. The smaller memory sizes were no longer available, so the II Plus always had a total of 48 kB of RAM, expandable to 64 kB by means of the "language card", a 16 kB RAM expansion card that could be installed in the computer’s slot 0. The Apple’s 6502 microprocessor could support a maximum of 64 kB of memory, and a machine with 48 kB RAM reached this limit because of the additional 12 kB of read-only memory and 4 kB of I/O addresses. For this reason, the extra RAM in the language card was bank-switched over the machine’s built-in ROM, allowing code loaded into the additional memory to be used as if it actually were ROM. Users could thus load Integer BASIC into the language card from disk and switch between the Integer and Applesoft dialects of BASIC with DOS 3.3’s INT and FP commands just as if they had the BASIC ROM expansion card. The language card was also required to use the UCSD Pascal and FORTRAN 77 compilers, which were released by Apple at about the same time. These ran under the UCSD p-System operating system, which had its own disk format and emitted code for a "virtual machine" rather than the actual 6502 processor. The UCSD P-system had a curious approach to memory management, which became even more curious on the Apple III.

Apple IIe

 An Apple IIe with DuoDisk
and Monitor //.

The Apple II Plus was followed in 1983 by the Apple //e, a cost-reduced yet more powerful machine that used newer chips to reduce the component count and add new features, such as the display of upper and lowercase letters and a standard 64 kB of RAM.

The IIe RAM was configured as if it were a 48 kB Apple II Plus with a language card; the machine had no slot 0, but instead had an auxiliary slot that for most practical purposes took the place of slot 3, the most commonly used slot for 80-column cards in the II Plus.

The auxiliary slot could accept a 1 kB memory card to enable the 80-column display. This card contained only RAM; the hardware and firmware for the 80-column display was built into the Apple IIe, remaining fairly compatible with the older Videx-style cards, even though the low-level details were very different. An "extended 80-column card" with more memory expanded the machine’s RAM to 128 kB.

As with the language card, the memory in the 80-column card was bank-switched over the machine’s main RAM; this made the memory better suited to data storage than to running software, and in fact the ProDOS operating system, which was introduced with the Apple IIe, would automatically configure this memory as a RAM disk upon booting.

Apple IIc

The Apple IIc was Apple’s first
compact and portable computer.

Apple released the Apple //c in April 1984, billing it as a portable Apple II, because it could be easily carried, though unlike modern portables it lacked a built-in display and battery. The IIc even sported a carrying handle that folded down to prop the machine up into a typing position. It was the first of three Apple II models to be made in the Snow White design language, and the only one that used its unique creamy off-white color. (The other Snow White computers from the Apple II series, the IIGS and the IIc Plus, were light gray, called "Platinum" by Apple.)

The Apple IIc was the first Apple II to use the 65C02 low-power variant of the 6502 processor, and featured a built-in 5.25-inch floppy drive and 128 kB RAM, with a built-in disk controller that could control external drives, composite video (NTSC or PAL), serial interfaces for modem and printer, and a port usable by either a joystick or mouse. Unlike previous Apple II models, the IIc had no internal expansion slots at all, this being the means by which its compact size was attained. Third parties did eventually figure out how to wedge up to 1 MB of additional memory and a real-time clock into the machine, and a later revision of the motherboard provided an expansion slot that could accept an Apple memory card bearing up to 1 MB of RAM. The disk port, originally intended for a second 5¼-inch floppy drive, eventually was able to interface to 3½-inch disk drives and (via third parties) even hard disks.

To play up the portability, two different monochrome LCD displays were sold for use with the IIc’s video expansion port, although both were short-lived due to high cost and poor legibility. (An Apple IIc with the smaller of these displays appeared briefly in the film 2010.) The IIc had an external power supply that converted AC power to 12 Volts DC, allowing third parties to offer battery packs and automobile power adapters that connected in place of the supplied AC adapter.

The Apple IIc (in its American version) was the first microcomputer to include support for the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which was activated using a switch above the keyboard. This feature was also later found in late-model American Apple IIe computers (though the switch was inside the computer) and in the Apple IIGS (accessible via the built-in control panel). The international models used the same mechanism to switch between the localized and the American keyboard layouts, but did not offer Dvorak.

Apple //GS

The Apple IIGS setup, with
keyboard and mouse shown.

The next member of the line was the Apple //GS computer, released in September 15, 1986. A radical departure from the existing Apple II line, the IIGS featured a true 16-bit microprocessor, the 65C816, operating at 2.8 MHz with 24-bit addressing, allowing expansion up to 8 MB of RAM without the bank-switching hassles of the earlier machines (RAM cards with more than 4 MB were never directly supported by Apple). It introduced two completely new graphic modes sporting higher resolutions and a palette of 4,096 colors; however, only 4 (at 640×200 resolution) or 16 (at 320×200 resolution) colors could be used on a single line at a time, although a technique known as dithering was often employed in software to increase the number of perceived colors.

In a departure from earlier Apple II graphics modes, the new modes laid out the scanlines sequentially in memory. However, programmers in search of a graphics challenge could always turn to 3200-color mode, which involved precisely swapping in a different 16-color palette for each of the screen’s 200 scanlines as the monitor’s electron beam traced the screen line by line. This exotic technique did not leave many CPU cycles available for other processing, so this "mode" was best suited to displaying static images.

The Apple IIGS stood out from any previous (or future) Apple II models, evolving and advancing the platform into the next generation of computing while still maintaining near-complete backward compatibility. The secret of the Apple IIGS’s compatibility was a single chip called the Mega II, which contained the functional equivalent of an entire Apple IIe computer (sans processor). This, combined with the flawless 65C02 emulation mode of the 65C816 processor, provided full support for legacy software.

The computer also included a 32-voice Ensoniq 5503, ‘wavetable’ sample-based music synthesizer chip with 64 kB dedicated RAM, 256 kB of standard RAM, built-in peripheral ports (switchable between IIe-style card slots and IIc-style onboard controllers for disk drives, mouse, RGB video, and serial devices), built-in AppleTalk networking, and a ROM toolbox that supported a graphical user interface derived from the Macintosh toolbox. The computer could run existing 8-bit Apple II software (including software written for the very first Apple II in Integer BASIC), but also supported 16-bit software running under a new OS first called ProDOS 16 and later called GS/OS. The new OS eventually included a Finder that could be used for managing disks and files and opening documents and applications, along with desk accessories — just like the Macintosh. The 16-bit operating system would automatically switch to the text display and downshift to 8-bit mode to run legacy software, while offering a consistent, Macintosh-like graphical interface for native 16-bit applications. Eventually the IIGS gained the ability to read and write Macintosh disks and, through third-party software, even multitasking (both cooperative and preemptive, the latter in the form of a Unix-type shell), outline TrueType font support, and in one case, even real-time 3D gaming using texture mapping.

Final years

Apple’s Macintosh product line finally eclipsed the Apple II in the early 1990s. Even after the Macintosh’s introduction, the Apple II had remained the company’s primary revenue source for years. The computer was the first to attract a loyal user community and many outspoken Apple II fans were bitter that the company had invested its Apple II profits into the Macintosh rather than using them to further the Apple II series.

Apple continued to sell Apple II systems alongside the Macintosh until terminating the IIGS in December, 1992 and the IIe in November, 1993.

Legacy

Today, emulators for various Apple II models are available to run Apple II software on Mac OS X, Linux, Microsoft Windows, homebrew enabled Nintendo DS and other operating systems. Numerous disk images of Apple II software are available free over the Internet for use with these emulators. AppleWin and MESS are among the best emulators compatible with most Apple II images. The MESS emulator supports recording and playing back of Apple II emulation sessions. The Home Action Replay Page (aka HARP) allows Apple II users to archive their favorite play sessions of the Apple II system and its games. However, many emulators cannot run software on copy-protected media, or can run only software employing fairly simple protection schemes, unless it is "cracked" (copy restrictions removed). Cracked software was widely pirated in the Apple II’s heyday (with commercial cracking software such as the popular Copy II+ program being sold in stores with the purpose of creating legitimate back-ups of protected software). Although creating back-ups was legitimate under copyright law of the time, the use of such software today is of questionable legality in the United States (see DMCA). For those who prefer to obtain their old software legally, the Lost Classics Project has the goal of convincing copyright holders of classic Apple II software to officially allow unrestricted free distribution of their software and has "freed" a number of programs.

In addition, an active retrocomputing community of vintage Apple II collectors and users, continue to restore, maintain and develop hardware and software for daily use of these original computers. Numerous websites and support groups exist for these enthusiasts who engage in the trade and purchase for their collections, increasingly rare parts and systems. Hardly a dead platform, the Apple II has a worldwide network of kindred spirits actively engaged in preserving this otherwise outdated technology and indeed regularly attracts, new younger members who continue to keep the platform alive long after it was discontinued by Apple.

References:

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: ARPANet… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet

Wikipedia: Apple II Series…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series

Wikipedia: Apple, Inc…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer

Web Sites and Blogs:

Washington Apple Pi IFAQ: Famous Computer (mostly) Quotes…
http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/famousquotes.html

by Gerald Boerner

When inventors of the late 19th century are discussed, two names immediately come to mind: Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Bell developed the first practical telephone in 1876. He continued to innovate and invent throughout his life, with a special focus on the needs of the deaf/hard of hearing, of which his mother was one. He maintained a life-long interest in sound and its transmission. How many of us today could get along without a telephone, especially our cellular phones?  GLB

“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“Neither the Army nor the Navy is of any protection, or very little protection, against aerial raids.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.”
— Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell: The Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 – 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.

Bell’s father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell’s life’s work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876. In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.

Many other inventions marked Bell’s later life, including groundbreaking work in optical telecommunications, hydrofoils and aeronautics. In 1888, Alexander Graham Bell became one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society.

Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1847. The family home was at 16 South Charlotte Street, and now has a commemorative marker at the doorstep, marking it as Alexander Graham Bell’s birthplace. He had two brothers: Melville James Bell (1845–1870) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–1867). Both of his brothers died of tuberculosis. His father was Professor Alexander Melville Bell, and his mother was Eliza Grace (née Symonds). Although he was born "Alexander", at age ten, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two brothers. For his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the middle name "Graham", chosen out of admiration for Alexander Graham, a Canadian being treated by his father and boarder who had become a family friend. To close relatives and friends he remained "Aleck" which his father continued to call him into later life.

First invention

As a child, young Alexander Graham Bell displayed a natural curiosity about his world, resulting in gathering botanical specimens as well as experimenting even at an early age. His best friend was Ben Herdman, a neighbour whose family operated a flour mill, the scene of many forays. Young Aleck asked what needed to be done at the mill. He was told wheat had to be dehusked through a laborious process and at the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine that was put into operation and used steadily for a number of years. In return, John Herdman gave both boys the run of a small workshop within which to "invent".

From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art, poetry and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family’s pianist. Despite being normally quiet and introspective, he reveled in mimicry and "voice tricks" akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits. Bell was also deeply affected by his mother’s gradual deafness, (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour. He also developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother’s forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell’s preoccupation with his mother’s deafness led him to study acoustics.

His family was long associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather, Alexander Bell, in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, in Edinburgh, were all elocutionists. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his The Standard Elocutionist (1860), which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone. In this treatise, his father explains his methods of how to instruct deaf-mutes (as they were then known) to articulate words and read other people’s lip movements to decipher meaning. Aleck’s father taught him and his brothers not only to write Visible Speech but also to identify any symbol and its accompanying sound. Aleck became so proficient that he became a part of his father’s public demonstrations and astounded audiences with his abilities in deciphering Latin, Gaelic and even Sanskrit symbols.

Education

As a young child, Bell, like his brothers, received his early schooling at home from his father. At an early age, however, he was enrolled at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, Scotland, which he left at age 15, completing only the first four forms. His school record was undistinguished, marked by absenteeism and lacklustre grades. His main interest remained in the sciences, especially biology, while he treated other school subjects with indifference, to the dismay of his demanding father. Upon leaving school, Bell travelled to London to live with his grandfather, Alexander Bell. During the year he spent with his grandfather, a love of learning was born, with long hours spent in serious discussion and study. The elder Bell took great efforts to have his young pupil learn to speak clearly and with conviction, the attributes that his pupil would need to become a teacher himself. At age 16, Bell secured a position as a "pupil-teacher" of elocution and music, in Weston House Academy, at Elgin, Moray, Scotland. Although he was enrolled as a student in Latin and Greek, he instructed classes himself in return for board and £10 per session. The following year, he attended the University of Edinburgh; joining his older brother Melville who had enrolled there the previous year.

First experiments with sound

Bell’s father encouraged Aleck’s interest in speech and, in 1863, took his sons to see a unique automaton, developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone based on the earlier work of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. The rudimentary "mechanical man" simulated a human voice. Aleck was fascinated by the machine and after he obtained a copy of von Kempelen’s book, published in German, and had laboriously translated it, he and his older brother Melville built their own automaton head. Their father, highly interested in their project, offered to pay for any supplies and spurred the boys on with the enticement of a "big prize" if they were successful. While his brother constructed the throat and larynx, Aleck tackled the more difficult task of recreating a realistic skull. His efforts resulted in a remarkably lifelike head that could "speak", albeit only a few words. The boys would carefully adjust the "lips" and when a bellows forced air through the windpipe, a very recognizable "Mama" ensued, to the delight of neighbors who came to see the Bell invention.

Intrigued by the results of the automaton, Bell continued to experiment with a live subject, the family’s Skye Terrier, "Trouve". After he taught it to growl continuously, Aleck would reach into its mouth and manipulate the dog’s lips and vocal cords to produce a crude-sounding "Ow ah oo ga ma ma." With little convincing, visitors believed his dog could articulate "How are you grandma?" More indicative of his playful nature, his experiments convinced onlookers that they saw a "talking dog." However, these initial forays into experimentation with sound led Bell to undertake his first serious work on the transmission of sound, using tuning forks to explore resonance.

At the age of 19, he wrote a report on his work and sent it to philologist Alexander Ellis, a colleague of his father (who would later be portrayed as Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion). Ellis immediately wrote back indicating that the experiments were similar to existing work in Germany. Dismayed to find that groundbreaking work had already been undertaken by Hermann von Helmholtz who had conveyed vowel sounds by means of a similar tuning fork "contraption", he pored over the German scientist’s book, Sensations of Tone. Working from his own errant mistranslation of the original German edition, Aleck fortuitously then made a deduction that would be the underpinning of all his future work on transmitting sound, reporting: "Without knowing much about the subject, it seemed to me that if vowel sounds could be produced by electrical means so could consonants, so could articulate speech", and also later remarking: "I thought that Helmhotz had done it … and that my failure was due only to my ignorance of electricity. It was a valuable blunder … If I had been able to read German in those days, I might never have commenced my experiments!"

Telephone

By 1874, Bell’s initial work on the harmonic telegraph had entered a formative stage with progress it made both at his new Boston "laboratory" (a rented facility) as well as at his family home in Canada a big success. While working that summer in Brantford, Bell experimented with a "phonautograph," a pen-like machine that could draw shapes of sound waves on smoked glass by tracing their vibrations. Bell thought it might be possible to generate undulating electrical currents that corresponded to sound waves. Bell also thought that multiple metal reeds tuned to different frequencies like a harp would be able to convert the undulatory currents back into sound. But he had no working model to demonstrate the feasibility of these ideas.

 Bell speaking into prototype
model of the telephone

In 1874, telegraph message traffic was rapidly expanding and in the words of Western Union President William Orton, had become "the nervous system of commerce". Orton had contracted with inventors Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray to find a way to send multiple telegraph messages on each telegraph line to avoid the great cost of constructing new lines. When Bell mentioned to Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders that he was working on a method of sending multiple tones on a telegraph wire using a multi-reed device, the two wealthy patrons began to financially support Bell’s experiments. Patent matters would be handled by Hubbard’s patent attorney, Anthony Pollok.

In March 1875, Bell and Pollok visited the famous scientist Joseph Henry, who was then director of the Smithsonian Institution, and asked Henry’s advice on the electrical multi-reed apparatus that Bell hoped would transmit the human voice by telegraph. Henry replied that Bell had "the germ of a great invention". When Bell said that he did not have the necessary knowledge, Henry replied, "Get it!" That declaration greatly encouraged Bell to keep trying, even though he did not have the equipment needed to continue his experiments, nor the ability to create a working model of his ideas. However, a chance meeting in 1874 between Bell and Thomas A. Watson, an experienced electrical designer and mechanic at the electrical machine shop of Charles Williams, changed all that.

With financial support from Sanders and Hubbard, Bell was able to hire Thomas Watson as his assistant and the two of them experimented with acoustic telegraphy. On 2 June 1875, Watson accidentally plucked one of the reeds and Bell, at the receiving end of the wire, heard the overtones of the reed; overtones that would be necessary for transmitting speech. That demonstrated to Bell that only one reed or armature was necessary, not multiple reeds. This led to the "gallows" sound-powered telephone, which was able to transmit indistinct, voice-like sounds, but not clear speech.

The race to the patent office

 Alexander Graham Bell, his wife
Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, and
their daughters Elsie (left) and
Marian c.1885

In 1875, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph and drew up a patent application for it. Since he had agreed to share U.S. profits with his investors Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, Bell requested that an associate in Ontario, George Brown, attempt to patent it in Britain, instructing his lawyers to apply for a patent in the U.S. only after they received word from Britain (Britain would issue patents only for discoveries not previously patented elsewhere).

Meanwhile, Elisha Gray was also experimenting with acoustic telegraphy and thought of a way to transmit speech using a water transmitter. On February 14, 1876, Gray filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office for a telephone design that used a water transmitter. That same morning, Bell’s lawyer filed Bell’s application with the patent office. There is considerable debate about who arrived first and Gray later challenged the primacy of Bell’s patent. Bell was in Boston on February 14, 1876.

Bell’s patent 174,465, was issued to Bell on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell’s patent covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound"

Bell returned to Boston the same day and the next day resumed work, drawing in his notebook a diagram similar to that in Gray’s patent caveat.

On March 10, 1876, three days after his patent was issued, Bell succeeded in getting his telephone to work, using a liquid transmitter similar to Gray’s design. Vibration of the diaphragm caused a needle to vibrate in the water, varying the electrical resistance in the circuit. When Bell spoke the famous sentence "Mr Watson—Come here—I want to see you" into the liquid transmitter,^[58] Watson, listening at the receiving end in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly.^[59]

Although Bell was accused, and is still accused, of stealing the telephone from Gray, Bell used Gray’s water transmitter design only after Bell’s patent was granted and only as a proof of concept scientific experiment to prove to his own satisfaction that intelligible "articulate speech" (Bell’s words) could be electrically transmitted. After March 1876, Bell focused on improving the electromagnetic telephone and never used Gray’s liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use.

The patent examiner, Zenas Fisk Wilber, later stated in a sworn affidavit that he was an alcoholic who was much in debt to Bell’s lawyer, Marcellus Bailey, with whom he had served in the Civil War. He claimed he showed Gray’s patent caveat to Bailey. Wilber also claimed (after Bell arrived in Washington D.C. from Boston) that he showed Gray’s caveat to Bell and that Bell paid him $100. Bell claimed they discussed the patent only in general terms, although in a letter to Gray, Bell admitted that he learned some of the technical details. Bell denied in a sworn affidavit that he ever gave Wilber any money.

Later Inventions

Although Alexander Graham Bell is most often associated with the invention of the telephone, his interests were extremely varied. According to one of his biographers, Charlotte Gray, Bell’s work ranged "unfettered across the scientific landscape" and he often went to bed voraciously reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, scouring it for new areas of interest. The range of Bell’s inventive genius is represented only in part by the 18 patents granted in his name alone and the 12 he shared with his collaborators. These included 14 for the telephone and telegraph, four for the photophone, one for the phonograph, five for aerial vehicles, four for "hydroairplanes" and two for selenium cells. Bell’s inventions spanned a wide range of interests and included a metal jacket to assist in breathing, the audiometer to detect minor hearing problems, a device to locate icebergs, investigations on how to separate salt from seawater, and work on finding alternative fuels.

Bell worked extensively in medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. During his Volta Laboratory period, Bell and his associates considered impressing a magnetic field on a record as a means of reproducing sound. Although the trio briefly experimented with the concept, they were unable to develop a workable prototype. They abandoned the idea, never realizing they had glimpsed a basic principle which would one day find its application in the tape recorder, the hard disc and floppy disc drive and other magnetic media.

Bell’s own home used a primitive form of air conditioning, in which fans blew currents of air across great blocks of ice. He also anticipated modern concerns with fuel shortages and industrial pollution. Methane gas, he reasoned, could be produced from the waste of farms and factories. At his Canadian estate in Nova Scotia, he experimented with composting toilets and devices to capture water from the atmosphere. In a magazine interview published shortly before his death, he reflected on the possibility of using solar panels to heat houses.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1785…
  Thomas Jefferson is appointed minister to France, succeeding Benjamin Franklin.

• In 1864…
  Abraham Lincoln promotes Ulysses S. Grant to commander of all Union armies.

• In 1876…
  Alexander Graham Bell succeeds in sending words over a telephone wire.

• In 2000…
  The NASDAQ Composite closes at 5048.62, an all-time closing high that precedes the end of the dot.com boom of the 1990s.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Alexander Graham Bell… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

Brainy Quote: Alexander Graham Bell Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/alexander_graham_bell.html

by Gerald Boerner

Pete Turner is one of the gurus of color photography. He was fortunate to have been assigned to the Army’s color processing lab for his military service following graduation from Rochester Institute of Technology. He was members of a distinguished group of world class photographers. His color photos were brilliant both in terms of his use of color and composition. His creative eye and feel for the emotional use of color yields some incredible photos.  GLB

“The photos look like gems on the wall…”
— Pete Turner, in Digital PhotoPro magazine

“It’s all about change. The real change in color photography is that this stuff is going to last—finally!”
— Pete Turner, in Digital PhotoPro magazine

“I’ve never done collages before,” says Turner. “But I wanted to try it out. I think you should try something different all the time.”
— Pete Turner, in Digital PhotoPro magazine

“Ultimately, simplicity is the goal – in every art, and achieving simplicity is one of the hardest things to do. Yet it’s easily the most essential.”
— Pete Turner

“A photographers work is given shape and style by his personal vision. It is not simply technique, but the way he looks at life and the world around him.”
— Pete Turner

“Looking at photographs, like taking them, can be joyful, sensuous pleasure. Looking at photographs of quality can only increase that pleasure.”
— Pete Turner

“If photography has developed a special language it should be welcomed as an extension of our senses and seen for what it is – the first faulting steps of an infant medium towards maturity.”
— Pete Turner

“What have I done wrong? Nothing, I think. I am steadily surprised that there are so many photographers that reject manipulating reality, as if that was wrong. Change reality! If you don’t find it, invent it!”
— Pete Turner

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation site, PhotoQuotes.com, which does not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting were obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Wikipedia.com web site which did not state any restrictions on their use. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

Pete Turner (Born: 1934)

Pete Turner is an American photographer. He is perhaps best known as one of the first masters of color photography. PDN voted him as one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time and in 1981 the A.S.M.P. awarded him the prestigious Outstanding Achievement in Photography honor.

Noted critic A. D. Coleman described the work of Pete Turner as having "A dramatist’s sense of event, intense and saturated coloration, and a distinct if indescribable otherness are omnipresent in Turner’s images".

He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1956 along with fellow classmates Bruce Davidson and Jerry Uelsmann.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the MEP in Paris, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and ICP in New York. The George Eastman House in Rochester is the depository of Turner’s life’s work and where his retrospective exhibit, “Pete Turner: Empowered by Color”, opened in 2007.

What are the odds against the United States Army turning out a photographer as quintessentially hip as Pete Turner? Though the Rochester Institute of Technology provided his formal training, Turner credits a postwar stint at an Army color print lab in Long Island City, Queens, for precious experience in the medium that made him famous. Pictures from his five-decade career, with their stunning colors and abstract compositions, have appeared in magazines like Esquire and Look, but his work might be best known to an audience with a different focus: jazz…

Citing Turner’s color-manipulated photo of a giraffe galloping across a saturated purple plain beneath an impossibly red sky, Creed Taylor’s afterword catches the spirit of their collaboration: “Antonio Carlos Jobim had played me an unfinished composition he called ‘Wave.’ … Normally with a title like that, the cover image would be literal, like the Japanese print of a standing wave. I thought, anything but that. When I saw Pete’s photo, I instantly knew that this was the right graphic for the cover. The idea of a giraffe running and floating across the desert … illustrated a wave just as well.”

Shuttlebug Magazine, in their interview with Turner, revealed the following look into his fascination with color. Some excerpts are included below. See the References section for the detailed reference.

Chris/Larry: We read somewhere that there were some famous people in your Corp in the military.

Pete: In the Army Pictorial Center, yes. There were some celebrity types because they got into pictorial center. I was lucky. I was stationed in Indianapolis as a photographer on the base. One of my assignments was to photograph a General over there next to a sculpture. And he really loved the shot, called me over to his office, and said you should meet this Major Briarley over at the pictorial center in Long Island City. In fact, you should be working over there, not out of here. He picks up the phone and calls his buddy in the Marines and the next thing I know, I’m on a train going to New York. The Army Pictorial Center was unique. We were in the Second Signal Combat Team, which was joint services. That meant we could work with the Marines or the Army. They could use us on an as needed basis. I got to run a type C color lab when it had just got invented. So I’m making all these prints and its part of my on the job training. My assignments would be to take a subway ride into New York, shoot a lot of pictures, come back and print them to keep the mechanism going. Meanwhile I’m building a heck of a portfolio.

Chris/Larry: That sounds like a tremendous opportunity to work in color when color was very expensive and pretty rare really.

Pete: Incredibly rare at agencies. They only got to deal with dye transfers. Here comes a kid who walks into an advertising agency with 120 color prints under his arm. That got some attention…

Chris/Larry: That’s certainly starting at the top.

Pete: Well, when I was a kid my father always said, ‘don’t be afraid to aim high, you can always aim low’. So I knocked on some doors that I thought were pretty high. Some of them I got kicked out and others I got embraced. I was really lucky to meet Harold Hayes and be invited to work for Esquire Magazine. He was one great editor. You wouldn’t have dared go off on a shoot and not come back with something spectacular.

Chris/Larry: When you did your Africa journey in 1959, you certainly came back with some spectacular things from that. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got that assignment? It sounds like a real plum.

"Smiling Woman"

Pete: Well, it was really the big break, the seminal break of a lifetime. I was a kid who had just gotten out of the Army and I was approached by the people from Airstream Trailer. I had been doing some stock work through FPG at the time, the Freelance Photographers Guild, with Arthur and Hennrietta Brackmen. They introduced me to Pat Terry of Airstream. They said ‘here is this kid, he just got out of the Army. He doesn’t mind about going to Africa for half a year. That would be fun for him. He doesn’t have anything to hold him back’. It’s true. When you get out of the Army after a couple of years of living in barracks with fifty or a hundred people mopping toilets and whatever, it’s not a big deal to get in a trailer. So when I got approached it was good deal and I said, gee, I’m gonna get wonderful subject material. I really got excited and I guess my excitement caught on because the next thing I knew I got hired. When I got that assignment I went to Geographic and told them what I was about to do so they assigned me to do a story to shoot some of the natives. The funny thing is the story never ran, but they offered me staff afterwards…

Chris/Larry: It’s interesting to see the how strong and clean your technique was in 59. You had a real grasp of using the material because I think either image would be comparable to anything anyone with skills could create today. I think the combination of seeing how you approached it in both ways is very instructive. Speaking of other things that you shot in Africa, that was still very formative point in your career. In the book you speak of an epiphany, a moment when you discovered the difference between finding a photograph and making one. You specifically mention your Rolling Ball photograph.

"Rolling Ball"

Pete: That’s as clear as yesterday to me. It happened in the middle of the Nubian Desert, where there isn’t much to shoot. You go on and on and there’s little shiny black rocks and sand, and little textures when the wind blows. And I had seen this hut with a triangular roof on it and thought, oh gee, that would be great to shoot because it was something where there’s endless nothing. So around 4:00 in the afternoon, sunset would be around seven. It was still about three hours early I stopped there. I said, well I’m going to set up here. This is where I’ll hang out tonight. And I’m going to shoot this place cause it looked kind of graphic and nice. The story is in the book. I walked around it and as I walked around it at different distances I realized that the sphere of the sun as it was setting would move. I could make it move visually along the edge of the triangle of the roof. And all of a sudden it was like the birth of an idea. I mean it was so simple. All of a sudden I’m saying whoa, I mean I’m not just finding things, I’m now making the photograph different by moving backwards and forwards. I was using a 105 lens, and positioning the sun in different ways and it’s something I had been doing intuitively but I hadn’t really realized it. But this evening when I was working I realized that this for me was the way to go. I don’t have to just say, well OK this is it, and walk away, that there’s always the opportunity to develop the idea further and make photographs better in my mind…

Chris/Larry: In the past you’ve done some intriguing in camera double exposure work. The image you took of the Statue of Liberty with the aircraft in 1962 comes to mind.

"Statue of Liberty Double Exposure"

Pete: I used to do a lot of in-camera multiple exposing and I used to use different filters when I was doing that. Like maybe trying a red filter, a blue filter, an orange filter. And maybe making two or three exposures on the same frame. Marty Forsher was a really good camera repair person and he had created this device where I could make double exposures on my Nikons before they built that feature in. What I liked about it was that I could do it after the fact in a duplicating machine. But I really liked the idea of the surprise when you got the film back (laughs). Lets say there was a lot of risk involved but there was really a thrill involved at the same time because you never really had it nailed down like after the fact in post where you can use grids and you can position things absolutely where you want. I did have some tricks though. Sometimes I’d run the roll through the camera a couple of times, and sometimes I’d do it on a frame by frame basis. But one of the things I’d do, like with the Statue of Liberty, is go in tight on one exposure and then pull back and go wide on another so that allowed these different color fields to build up on each other.

Chris/Larry: And then when you were working in this way, when you were doing sequences and trying it, it must have been pretty exciting to see the stuff on the lightbox afterwards. That must have been the point of discovery right there.

Pete: It was total experimentation without any guides or grids. Just instinctive feeling that, well if I make the Statue of Liberty in this part of the exposure, and make the next exposure smaller, and positioned… I did drawings actually. I had a rectangular notepad with me and I make notations.

In 1986, Turner published his first monograph, Pete Turner Photographs (Abrams). His second book, Pete Turner African Journey (Graphis, 2001), documents Turner’s many adventures in Africa, beginning with his trek in 1959 from Cape Town to Cairo with Wally Byam’s famous Airstream caravan. The Color of Jazz (Rizzoli, 2006) is a comprehensive collection of his provocative album covers for CTI Records among many others.

Tribute by Digital PhotoPro

Digital PhotoPro, in reviewing the latest book by Turner, made the following tribute to Turner’s skills with color. Check out the full article found in the Reference section below.

Turner, whose name is synonymous with color photography, has a long and distinguished career creating images for commercial, editorial and artistic purposes, including dozens of album covers. His new book, The Color of Jazz (Rizzoli, 2006), is a collection of photographs that appeared on jazz albums from the ’50s through the ’70s. His cover art was bold and daring, using interpretive rather than literal images at a time when most covers just had portraits of the musicians on them…

The Innovator

What distinguishes Pete Turner in the world of photography is that he’s constantly innovating. In 1956, he graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology as part of the first class to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography. He helped steer album covers away from traditional portraits and into the realm of conceptual images. He experimented with color in the ’50s, a time when only black-and-white photography was really considered art…

Embracing Digital

More recently, Turner welcomed the advent of digital photography with open arms and was quick to adopt the newest technology in photography and printing. His home studio is equipped with the 131-pound Epson Stylus Pro 7800, a smaller Epson Stylus Pro 4800 and the latest addition to his collection (and his personal favorite), the desktop Epson Stylus Pro 3800. Turner likes that it uses sheet paper as opposed to roll paper, and he has become an aficionado of the Epson UltraChrome K3 inks and Epson’s Premium Luster photo paper.

Obviously, Turner has developed a good relationship with Epson, but that’s not simply a matter of a corporation looking for an endorsement. The company regularly sends him beta versions of its products to test-drive, and it actively solicits his opinion on what it should be doing with its professional photo printers. He admits to being vocal about what he likes and dislikes, which is exactly what Epson needs from him. No one understands color better than Pete Turner, and Epson relies on his expertise to refine its color printing technology.

Turner isn’t just an expert at seeing color, he’s an expert craftsman who has embraced the onslaught of digital technology with a child’s enthusiasm. Instead of being overwhelmed and flustered by how quickly technology is changing, Turner is at the forefront of such change at the age of 72…

Considering Turner began his career by printing his own photos in the military, he has now come full circle. In 1957, he was experimenting with the then-new Type-C color materials. Now, in 2006, he’s test-driving Epson’s wide-format printers and pigment inks. Turner’s tools may have changed over the years, but his appeal has not. And what makes his work so alluring is that it’s always fresh and innovative.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Pete Turner… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Turner_%28photographer%29

Also see…

PDN Legends Online: Pete Turner…
http://www.pdngallery.com/legends/legends11/menu.html

PhotoQuotes.com on Pete Turner…
http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=43&name=Turner,Pete

Shutterbug Magazine: The Pete Turner Interview…
http://bermangraphics.com/press/peteturner.htm

Digital PhotoPro: Pete Turner — The Dr. No of Photography…
http://www.digitalphotopro.com/profiles/pete-turner-the-dr-no-of-photography.html

The New York Times: Holiday Books — Jazz…
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/books/Coates.t.html?_r=2&fta=y

by Gerald Boerner

In the late 1980s, three companies produced computers primarily for the hobbyist and home user: Apple, TRS-80, and the Commodore. Commodore was the “low priced” alternative that became popular, especially when they introduced the VIC-20 (my first computer). These computers introduced many children to the computer and allowed them to play games and perform basic tasks. They also produced the Commodore 64/128 that became the most popular game computer. Unfortunately, Commodore failed to compete with the IBM PC and Macintosh computers. It was resurrected in 2005, but has not had a major impact upon the microcomputer industry.  GLB

“Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.”
— Jean Rostand

“To err is human – and to blame it on a computer is even more so.”
— Robert Orben

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
— Sydney J. Harris

“Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.”
— Clifford Stoll

“What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?”
— Walter F. Mondale

“Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?”
— Clifford Stoll

“The Internet is not just one thing, it’s a collection of things – of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.”
— Jim Clark

“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”
— Isaac Asimov

Wizards of the Internet: Commodore Computers

Commodore, the commonly used name for Commodore International, was a US electronics company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania which played a vital role in the development of the home–personal computer industry in the 1980s. The company is also known under the name of its R&D operation, Commodore Business Machines (CBM). Commodore developed and marketed the world’s best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64 (1982). The company declared bankruptcy in 1994, but since then, there have been several attempts to revive its Amiga systems. The company revived in 2005 after a few mergers with Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc., SATXS Communications BV, and Tulip Computers.

Founding and early years

The company that would become Commodore International was started in 1954 in Toronto as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. He was already running a small business repairing typewriters for a few years while living in New York and driving a taxicab, but managed to sign a deal with a Czechoslovakian company to manufacture their designs in Canada, and moved to Toronto to start production. By the late 1950s a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies out of business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines.

In 1955 the company was formally incorporated as Commodore Business Machines in Canada (CBM). In 1962 Commodore went public at New York stock exchange under the name of Commodore International Limited. In the late 1960s history repeated itself when Japanese firms started producing and exporting adding machines. The company’s main investor and chairman, Irving Gould, suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to understand how to compete. Instead, he returned with the new idea to produce electronic calculators, which were just coming on the market.

Commodore soon had a profitable calculator line and was one of the more popular brands in the early 1970s, producing both consumer as well as scientific/programmable calculators. However, in 1975, Texas Instruments, the main supplier of calculator parts, entered the market directly and put out a line of machines priced at less than Commodore’s cost of the parts. Commodore had to be rescued once again by an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc., in order to assure his supply. He agreed to buy MOS, which was having troubles of its own, only on the condition that its chip designer Chuck Peddle join Commodore directly as head of engineering.

In December 2007 when Tramiel was visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, he was asked why he called his company Commodore, he had this to say: "I wanted to call my company General, but there’s so many Generals in the U.S.: General Electric, General Motors. Then I went to Admiral, but that was taken. So I wind up in Berlin, Germany, with my wife, and we were in a cab, and the cab made a short stop, and in front of us was an Opel Commodore." Tramiel said that in many interviews, but Opel’s Commodore didn’t debut until 1968, years after the company had been named.

"Computers for the masses, not the classes"

 Commodore PET 2001 (1977)

Once Chuck Peddle had taken over engineering at Commodore, he convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were already a dead end and that they should turn their attention to home computers. Peddle packaged his existing KIM-1 single-board computer design in a metal case, along with a full-travel QWERTY keyboard, monochrome monitor, and tape recorder for program and data storage, to produce the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor). From PET’s 1977 debut, Commodore would be a computer company.

Commodore had been reorganized the year before into Commodore International, Ltd., moving its financial headquarters to the Bahamas and its operational headquarters to West Chester, Pennsylvania, near to the MOS Technology site. The operational headquarters, where research and development of new products occurred, retained the name Commodore Business Machines, Inc.

The PET computer line was used primarily in schools, due to its tough all-metal construction (some models were labeled "Teacher’s PET"), but did not compete well in the home setting where graphics and sound were important. This was addressed with the introduction of the VIC-20 in 1981, which was introduced at a cost of US$299 and sold in retail stores. Commodore took out aggressive ads featuring William Shatner asking consumers "Why buy just a video game?" The strategy worked and the VIC-20 became the first computer to ship more than one million units. A total of 2.5 million units were sold over the machine’s lifetime.

Commodore 64 (1982)

In 1982, Commodore introduced the Commodore 64 as the successor to the VIC-20. Thanks to a well-designed set of chips designed by MOS Technology, the C64 possessed remarkably capable sound and graphics for its time and is often credited with starting the computer demo scene. Its US$595 price was high compared with that of the VIC-20, but it was still much less expensive than any other 64K computer on the market. Early C64 ads boasted, "You can’t buy a better computer at twice the price."
Australian ads used a tune speaking the words "# Are you keeping up with the commodore? Because the commodore is keeping up with you. #"

In 1983 Tramiel decided to focus on market share and cut the price of the VIC-20 and C64 dramatically, starting what would be called the "home computer war." TI responded by cutting prices on its TI-99/4A, which had been introduced in 1981. Soon there was an all-out price war involving Commodore, TI, Atari and practically every vendor other than Apple Computer. This price war likely contributed to the video game crash of 1983. By the end of this conflict, Commodore had shipped somewhere around 22 million C64s—making the C64 the best selling computer of all time—and in the process, drove TI out of the home-computer market, almost destroyed Atari, bankrupted most smaller companies, and wiped out its own savings. Tramiel’s motto, "Business is war," had taken its toll.

Tramiel Quits; The Amiga vs. ST Battle

Commodore’s board of directors were as impacted as anyone else by the price spiral and decided they wanted out. An internal power struggle resulted; in January 1984, Tramiel resigned. He founded a new company, Tramel Technology (spelled differently so people would pronounce it correctly), and hired away a number of Commodore engineers to begin work on a next-generation computer design.

Now it was left to the remaining Commodore management to salvage the company’s fortunes and plan for the future. It did so by buying a small startup company called Amiga Corporation in August 1984, which became a subsidiary of Commodore, called Commodore-Amiga, Inc. Commodore brought this new 16-bit computer design (initially codenamed "Lorraine", later dubbed the Amiga 1000) to market in the fall of 1985 for US $1295.

But Tramiel had beaten Commodore to the punch. His design was 95% completed by June (which only fueled speculation that his engineers had taken technology with them from Commodore). In July 1984 he bought the consumer side of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications which allowed him to strike back and release the Atari ST earlier in 1985 for about $800.

During development in 1983, Amiga had exhausted venture capital and was desperate for more financing. Jay Miner and company had approached former employer Atari, and the "Warner owned" Atari had paid Amiga to continue development work. In return Atari was to get one-year exclusive use of the design as a video game console. After one year Atari would have the right to add a keyboard and market the complete Amiga computer. The Atari Museum has acquired the Atari-Amiga contract and Atari engineering logs revealing that the Atari Amiga was originally designated as the 1850XLD. As Atari was heavily involved with Disney at the time, it was later code-named "Mickey", and the 256K memory expansion board was codenamed "Minnie".

The following year, Tramiel discovered that Warner Communications wanted to sell Atari, which was rumored to be losing about $10,000 a day. Interested in Atari’s overseas manufacturing and worldwide distribution network for his new computer, he approached Atari and entered negotiations. After several on-again/off-again talks with Atari in May and June 1984, Tramiel had secured his funding and bought Atari’s Consumer Division (which included the console and home computer departments) in July.

As more execs and researchers left Commodore to join up with Tramiel’s new company Atari Corp. after the announcement, Commodore followed by filing lawsuits against four former engineers for theft of trade secrets in late July. This was intended, in effect, to bar Tramiel from releasing his new computer.

One of Tramiel’s first acts after forming Atari Corp. was to fire most of Atari’s remaining staff, and to cancel almost all ongoing projects, in order to review their continued viability. In late July/early August, Tramiel representatives discovered the original Amiga contract from the previous fall. Seeing a chance to gain some leverage, Tramiel immediately used the contract to counter-sue Commodore through its new subsidiary, Amiga, on August 13.

The Amiga crew, still suffering serious financial problems, had sought more monetary support from investors that entire spring. At around the same time that Tramiel was in negotiations with Atari, Amiga entered into discussions with Commodore. The discussions ultimately led to Commodore’s intentions to purchase Amiga outright, which would (from Commodore’s viewpoint) cancel any outstanding contracts – including Atari Inc.’s. This "interpretation" is what Tramiel used to counter-sue, and sought damages and an injunction to bar Amiga (and effectively Commodore) from producing any resembling technology. This was an attempt to render Commodore’s new acquisition (and the source for its next generation of computers) useless. The resulting court case lasted for several years, with both companies releasing their respective products. By March 1987 they had settled out of court, with all suits against Tramiel’s engineers dropped. His "Business is War" tactics had succeeded again.

Amiga 500 (1987)

Throughout the life of the ST and Amiga platforms, a ferocious Atari-Commodore rivalry raged. While this rivalry was in many ways a holdover from the days when the Commodore 64 had first challenged the Atari 800 (among others) in a series of scathing television commercials, the events leading to the launch of the ST and Amiga only served to further alienate fans of each computer, who fought vitriolic holy wars on the question of which platform was superior. This was reflected in sales numbers for the two platforms until the release of the Amiga 500 in 1987 which led the Amiga sales to exceed the ST by about 1.5 to 1, despite reaching the market later. However, the battle was vain as neither platform captured a significant share of the world computer market and only the Apple Macintosh would survive the industry-wide shift to Microsoft Windows running on PC clones.

Demise and Bankruptcy

In the 1970s and early 80s, the computer press had often sought Commodore (one of the industry’s leading players), and its colorful management for information. The VIC-20 and C64, although aggressively marketed, were arguably more successful because of their price than their marketing. After Tramiel’s departure, Commodore executives shied away from mass advertising and other marketing ploys, fearful of repeating past mistakes. Commodore also retreated from its earlier strategy of selling its computers to discount outlets and toy stores, and now favored authorized dealers.

By the late 1980s, the personal computer market had become dominated by the IBM PC compatible and Apple Macintosh platforms. Commodore’s marketing efforts for the Amiga were less competitive and seemed half-hearted and unfocused. The company also concentrated on consumer products that would not see a demand for another few years—including a digital TV system called CDTV.

In the early 1990s, CBM continued selling Amigas with 7–14 MHz 68000-family CPUs (even though Amiga 3000 with 25 MHz 68030 was in the market by that time), when PCs with 33 MHz 486s, high-color graphics cards and SoundBlaster (or compatible) sound cards offered comparable, and eventually higher, performance, albeit at higher prices. By way of contrast, when introduced in 1985, the Amiga had competed favorably against 286-based systems with EGA graphics and rudimentary sound capabilities that frequently cost 2–3 times as much.

In 1992, the production of the A600 seemed like a backward move; it replaced the A500, yet it removed the numeric keypad, Zorro expansion slot, SCSI capability, and other functionality in favor of PCMCIA and a theoretically cost-reduced design. It was basically non-expandable and lasted less than a year. Productivity developers moved to PC and Macintosh, while the console wars took over the gaming market. David Pleasance, managing director of Commodore UK, described the A600 as a ‘complete and utter screw-up’. (Smith, 1994)

In late 1992, Amiga hardware began to reach parity with PCs with the release of the A4000 and A1200 computers, which featured an improved graphics chipset, the AGA. By this point, both the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh had a much larger market share than the Amiga platform. As software developers shifted to these platforms, the Amiga lost value for mainstream consumers. The custom-designed and custom-built AGA chipset also cost Commodore considerably more than the commodity chips used in IBM PCs, further reducing Commodore’s profit margins. Common wisdom was that even though the AGA clearly improved upon the original chipset (OCS), it never returned to Amiga the clear dominance of multimedia computing that it once promised.

Software piracy has often been given by trade publications and user groups as the reason for the Amiga’s demise, but this view is controversial. For information on the specific challenges in the Amiga market of the time, see the Amiga Software article.

In 1994, the ‘make or break’ system, according to Pleasance, was the 32-bit CD-ROM-based game console: the CD32, but it was not sufficiently profitable to put Commodore back in the black.

In the early 90’s, all servicing and warranty repairs were outsourced to Wang Laboratories. By 1994, only its operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable. Commodore declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, and its assets were liquidated. The former site of Commodore’s operational headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, now houses the headquarters and broadcast studios of leading cable retailer QVC, Inc. (On November 26, 2004, QVC became the first retailer to sell the DTV, a "C64 in a joystick" designed by Jeri Ellsworth.)

The company’s computer systems, especially the C64 and Amiga series, retain a cult-following among their users years after its demise.

Jack Tramiel, Founder

Jack Tramiel (Born: 1928) is a businessman, best known for founding Commodore International – manufacturer of the Commodore PET, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga, and other Commodore models of home computers. He is known for his hard-driving style and cutthroat deal-making.

After the Nazi invasion in 1939 his family was transported to the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, where he worked in a garment factory. When the ghettos were liquidated his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was examined by Dr. Mengele and selected for a work party, after which he and his father were sent to the labor camp Ahlem near Hanover, while his mother remained at Auschwitz. Like many other inmates, his father was reported to have died of Typhus in the work camp; however, Tramiel believes he was killed by an injection of gasoline. Tramiel was rescued from the labor camp in April 1945 by the 84th Infantry Division.

In November 1947, Tramiel emigrated to the United States. He soon joined the army, where he learned how to repair office equipment, including typewriters.

"Commodore’s high point was the Amiga 1000 (1985). The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody–including Commodore’s marketing department–could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, it’s obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas.”
–Byte Magazine, August 1994

References:

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: ARPANet… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet

Wikipedia: Commodore International…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_computer

Wikipedia: Jack Tramiel…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Tramiel

Web Sites and Blogs:

Brainy Quote: Computer Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_computers2.html

by Gerald Boerner

One of the battles that most of us remember in the American Civil War, apart from Gettysburg, is the naval battle between the first metal-encrusted ships: the ironclads USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (which we knew as the Merrimac). These ships meet in the Battle of Hampton Roads. While the actual battle was somewhat anticlimactic, it did start a trend that resulted in the demise of the wooden ship. The whole concept of a navy was changed.   GLB

“We hit the Virginia yet the shots did absolutely nothing. They fired back at us, but their shots did absolutely nothing.”
— U.S. Navy Lt. John Worden, Commander of the Monitor

“The Monitor’s purpose is now clear, to stop the Merrimac. Hopefully, the ship is ready to face the attack that it might have to endure.”
— U.S. Navy Lt. John Worden, Commander of the Monitor

“That the Monitor, after her engagement with the Merrimac (Virginia), on the 9^th of March, never again dared encounter her though offered frequent opportunities…”
— House Committee Chairman Mr. Ballentine

“That so much doubt existed in the minds of the Federal authorities as to her power to meet the Merrimac (Virginia) that orders were given her commander not to fight her voluntarily…”
— House Committee Chairman Mr. Ballentine

“That the Merrimac (Virginia), so far from being seriously injured in her engagement, efficiently protected the approaches to Norfolk and Richmond until Norfolk was evacuated…”
— House Committee Chairman Mr. Ballentine

“That the Merrimac could not have gotten to Washington or Baltimore in her normal condition…”
— House Committee Chairman Mr. Ballentine

“When we saw that our fire made no impression on the Monitor, we determined to run into her, if possible, which we found a very difficult feat. … The Monitor received the blow in such a manner as to weaken its effect, and the damage to her was trifling.”
— C.S. Capt. Catesby Jones, Commander of the Virginia

“[The Virginia] unquestionably revolutionized the naval warfare of the world, and, while many improvements have since been made, the real inventor of ironclads was the modest gentleman and great scientist, Capt. John M. Brooke, who planned the Virginia. There can be little doubt that the great battleships of today are planned after the model of Brooke’s Virginia, and not after Ericsson’s Monitor.”
— Dr. J.W. Jones

Battle of the Ironclads: Monitor v. Virginia

The Battle of Hampton Roads, often referred to as the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack (or Merrimac), was the most noted and arguably most important naval battle of the American Civil War from the standpoint of the development of navies. It was fought over two days, March 8-9, 1862, in Hampton Roads, a roadstead in Virginia where the Elizabeth and Nansemond Rivers meet the James River just before it enters Chesapeake Bay. The battle was a part of the effort of the Confederacy to break the Union blockade, which had cut off Virginia’s largest cities, Norfolk and Richmond, from international trade.

The major significance of the battle is that it was the first meeting in combat of ironclad warships. The Confederate fleet consisted of the ironclad ram CSS Virginia (the Merrimack) and several supporting vessels. On the first day of battle, they were opposed by several conventional, wooden-hulled ships of the Union Navy. On that day, Virginia was able to destroy two ships of the Federal flotilla and threaten a third, USS Minnesota which had run aground. The action was halted by darkness and falling tide, so Virginia retired to take care of her few wounded — which included her captain, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan — and repair her minimal battle damage.

Determined to complete the destruction of Minnesota, Catesby ap Roger Jones, acting as captain in Buchanan’s absence, returned the ship to the fray the next morning, March 9. During the night, however, the ironclad USS Monitor had arrived and had taken a position to defend Minnesota. When Virginia approached, Monitor intercepted her. The two ironclads fought for about three hours, with neither being able to inflict significant damage on the other. The duel ended indecisively, Virginia returning to her home at the Gosport Navy Yard for repairs and strengthening, and Monitor to her station defending Minnesota. The ships did not fight again, and the blockade remained in place.

The battle received worldwide attention, and it had immediate effects on all navies. The preeminent naval powers, Great Britain and France, halted further construction of wooden-hulled ships, and they were copied by many others. A new type of warship was produced, the monitor, based on the principle of the original. The use of a small number of very heavy guns, mounted so that they could fire in all directions, first demonstrated by Monitor, soon became standard in warships of all types. Shipbuilders also incorporated rams into the designs of warship hulls for the rest of the century.

The Blockade at Norfolk

On April 19, 1861, shortly after the outbreak of hostilities at Charleston Harbor, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of all ports in the seceded states. On April 27, after Virginia and North Carolina had also passed ordinances of secession, the blockade was extended to include their ports also. Even before the extension, local troops seized Norfolk and threatened the Gosport Navy Yard. The commandant there, Captain Charles S. McCauley, though loyal to the Union, was immobilized by advice he received from his subordinate officers, most of whom were in favor of secession. Although he had orders from (Union) Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to move his ships to Northern ports, he refused to act until April 20, when he gave orders to scuttle the ships in the yard and destroy its facilities. Nine ships were burned, among them the screw frigate USS Merrimack. One (the old frigate Cumberland) was towed away successfully. Merrimack burned only to the waterline, however, and her engines were more or less intact. The destruction of the navy yard was mostly ineffective; in particular, the large drydock there was relatively undamaged and soon could be restored. Without firing a shot, the advocates of secession had gained for the South its largest navy yard, as well as the hull and engines of what would be in time its most famous warship. They had also seized more than a thousand heavy guns, plus gun carriages and large quantities of gunpowder.

With Norfolk and its navy yard, the Confederacy controlled the southern side of Hampton Roads. To prevent Union warships from attacking the yard, they set up batteries at Sewell’s Point and Craney Island, at the juncture of the Elizabeth River with the James. (See map.) The Union retained possession of Fort Monroe, at Old Point Comfort on the Peninsula. They also held a small man-made island known as the Rip Raps, on the far side of the channel opposite Fort Monroe, and on this island they completed another fort, named Fort Wool. With Fort Monroe went control of the lower Peninsula as far as Newport News.

Forts Monroe and Wool gave the Union forces control of the entrance to Hampton Roads. The blockade, initiated on April 30, 1861, cut off Norfolk and Richmond almost completely. To further the blockade, the Union Navy stationed some of its most powerful warships in the roadstead. There, they were under the shelter of the shore-based guns of Fort Monroe and the batteries at Hampton and Newport News and out of the range of the guns at Sewell’s Point and Craney Island. For most of the first year of the war, the Confederacy could do little to oppose them.

Birth of the ironclads

When steam propulsion began to be applied to warships, naval constructors renewed their interest in armor for their vessels. Experiments had been tried with armor during the Crimean war, just prior to the American Civil War, and the British and French navies had each built armored ships and were planning to build others. In 1860, the French Navy commissioned La Gloire, the world’s first ocean-going ironclad warship. Great Britain followed a year later with HMS Warrior. The use of armor remained controversial, however, and the United States Navy was generally reluctant to embrace the new technology.

CSS Virginia

CSS Virginia (ex-USS Merrimack)

When the Civil War broke out, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory was an early enthusiast for the advantages of armor. As he saw it, the Confederacy could not match the industrial North in numbers of ships at sea, so they would have to compete by building vessels that would be individually superior to those of the Union. The edge would be provided by armor. Mallory gathered about himself a group of men who were able to put his vision into practice, among them John M. Brooke, John L. Porter, and William P. Williamson.

When Mallory’s men searched the South for factories that could build engines to drive the heavy ships that he wanted, they found no place to do it immediately. At the best facility, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, building engines from scratch would take at least a year. Upon learning this, Williamson suggested taking the engines from the hulk of Merrimack, recently raised from the bed of the Elizabeth River. His colleagues promptly accepted his suggestion and expanded it, proposing that the design of their projected ironclad be adapted to the hull. Porter produced the revised plans, which were submitted to Mallory for approval. On July 11, 1861, the new design was accepted, and work began almost immediately. The burned-out hull was towed into the graving dock that the Union Navy had failed to destroy. During the subsequent conversion process, the plans were further modified to incorporate an iron ram fitted to the prow. Her offense in addition to the ram consisted of 10 guns: six 9 in (230 mm) smooth-bore Dahlgrens, and two 6.4 in (160 mm) and two 7 in (180 mm) Brooke rifles. The armor plating, originally meant to be 1 in (25 mm) thick, was replaced by double plates, each 2 in (51 mm) thick, backed by 24 in (61 cm) of iron and pine. The armor was pierced for 14 gunports: four on each broadside, three forward, and three aft. The revisions, together with the usual problems associated with the transportation system of the South, resulted in delays that pushed back the launch date until February 3, 1862, and she was not commissioned until February 17, bearing the name CSS Virginia.

USS Monitor

USS Monitor

Federal Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles waited for Congress to meet until he asked them for permission to consider building armored vessels; Congress gave the permission he asked on August 3, 1861. Welles appointed a commission, which came to be known as the Ironclad Board, of three senior naval officers to choose among several designs that were submitted for consideration. The three men were Captains Joseph Smith and Hiram Paulding, and Commander Charles Henry Davis. The board considered seventeen designs, and chose to support three. First of the three to be completed, even though she was by far the most radical in design, was Swedish engineer and inventor John Ericsson’s USS Monitor.

Ericsson’s Monitor, which was built at Ericsson’s yard on the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, incorporated many new and striking design features, the most significant of which were her armor and armament. Instead of the large numbers of guns of rather small bore that had characterized warships in the past, Ericsson opted for only two guns of large caliber; he wanted to use 12 in (300 mm) guns, but had to settle for 11 in (280 mm) guns when the larger size were unavailable. These were mounted in a cylindrical turret, 20 ft (6.1 m) in diameter, 9 ft (2.7 m) high, covered with iron 8 in (200 mm) thick. The whole rotated on a central spindle, and was moved by a steam engine that could be controlled by one man. A serious flaw in the design was the pilot house from which the ship would be conned, a small structure forward of the turret on the main deck. Its presence meant that the guns could not fire directly forward, and it was isolated from other activities on the ship. Despite the late start and the novelty of construction, Monitor was actually completed a few days before her counterpart Virginia, but Virginia was activated first.

Battle

Command

The Confederate chain of command was anomalous. Lieutenant Catesby Roger Jones had directed much of the conversion of Merrimack to Virginia, and he was disappointed when he was not named her captain. Jones was retained aboard Virginia, but only as her executive officer. Ordinarily, the ship would have been led by a captain of the Confederate States Navy, to be determined by the rigid seniority system that was in place. Secretary Mallory wanted the aggressive Franklin Buchanan, but at least two other captains had greater seniority and had applied for the post. Mallory evaded the issue by appointing Franklin, head of the Office of Orders and Detail, flag officer in charge of the defenses of Norfolk and the James River. As such, he could control the movements of Virginia. Technically, therefore, the ship went into the battle without a captain.

Sinking of Cumberland by
the ironclad Virginia

On the Union side, command of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron was held by Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough. He had devised a plan for his frigates to engage Virginia, hoping to trap her in their crossfire. In the event, his plan broke down completely when four of the ships ran aground (one of them intentionally) in the confined waters of the roadstead. On the day of battle, Goldsborough was absent with the ships cooperating with the Burnside Expedition in North Carolina. In his absence, leadership fell to his second in command, Captain John Marston of USS Roanoke. As Roanoke was one of the ships that ran aground, Marston was unable to materially influence the battle, and his participation is often disregarded. Most accounts emphasize the contribution of the captain of Monitor, John L. Worden, to the neglect of others.

March 9: Monitor engages Virginia

Ironclads engaged in terrific
combat by Currier and Ives

Both sides used the respite to prepare for the next day. Virginia put her wounded ashore and underwent temporary repairs. Captain Buchanan was among the wounded, so command on the second day fell to his executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones. Jones proved to be no less aggressive than the man he replaced. While Virginia was being prepared for renewal of the battle, and while Congress was still ablaze, Monitor, commanded by Lieutenant John L. Worden, arrived in Hampton Roads. The Union ironclad had been rushed to Hampton Roads in hopes of protecting the Union fleet and preventing Virginia from threatening Union cities. Captain Worden was informed that his primary task was to protect Minnesota, so Monitor took up a position near the grounded Minnesota and waited.

The next morning, at dawn on March 9, 1862, Virginia left her anchorage at Sewell’s Point and moved to attack Minnesota, still aground. She was followed by the three ships of the James River Squadron. They found their course blocked, however, by the newly arrived Monitor. At first, Jones believed the strange craft to be a boiler being towed from the Minnesota, not realizing the nature of his opponent. Soon, however, it was apparent that he had no choice but to fight her.

After fighting for hours, mostly at close range, neither could overcome the other. The armor of both ships proved adequate. In part, this was because each was handicapped in her offensive capabilities. Buchanan, in Virginia, had not expected to fight another armored vessel, so his guns were supplied only with shell rather than armor-piercing shot. Monitor’s guns were used with the standard service charge of only 15 lb (6.8 kg) of powder, which did not give the projectile sufficient momentum to penetrate her opponent’s armor. Tests conducted after the battle showed that the Dahlgren guns could be operated safely and efficiently with charges of as much as 30 lb (14 kg).

The battle finally ceased when a chance shell from Virginia struck the pilot house of Monitor and exploded, driving fragments through the viewing slits into Worden’s eyes and temporarily blinding him. As no one else could see to conn the ship, Monitor was forced to draw off. The executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, took over, and Monitor returned to the fight. In the period of command confusion, however, the crew of Virginia believed that their opponent had withdrawn. Although Minnesota was still aground, the falling tide meant that she was out of reach. Furthermore, Virginia had suffered some damage that would require extensive repair. Convinced that his ship had won the day, Jones ordered her back to Norfolk. At about this time, Monitor returned, only to discover her opponent apparently giving up the fight. Convinced that Virginia was quitting, with orders only to protect Minnesota and not to risk his ship unnecessarily, Greene did not pursue. Thus, each side misinterpreted the moves of the other, and as a result each claimed victory.

First Battle of Iron Ships of War
by Henry Bill.

Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory wrote to Confederate President Davis of the action:

The conduct of the Officers and men of the squadron … reflects unfading honor upon themselves and upon the Navy. The report will be read with deep interest, and its details will not fail to rouse the ardor and nerve the arms of our gallant seamen. It will be remembered that the Virginia was a novelty in naval architecture, wholly unlike any ship that ever floated; that her heaviest guns were equal novelties in ordnance; that her motive power and obedience to her helm were untried, and her officers and crew strangers, comparatively, to the ship and to each other; and yet, under all these disadvantages, the dashing courage and consummate professional ability of Flag Officer Buchanan and his associates achieved the most remarkable victory which naval annals record.

In Washington, belief that Monitor had vanquished Virginia was so strong that Worden and his men were awarded the Thanks of Congress:

Resolved . . . That the thanks of Congress and the American people are due and are hereby tendered to Lieutenant J. L. Worden, of the United States Navy, and to the officers and men of the ironclad gunboat Monitor, under his command, for the skill and gallantry exhibited by them in the remarkable battle between the Monitor and the rebel ironclad steamer Merrimack.

Spring 1862 — A Standoff at Hampton Roads

Virginia remained in drydock for almost a month, getting repairs for battle damage as well as some minor modifications to improve her performance. On April 4, she was able to leave drydock. Buchanan, still recovering from his wound, had hoped that Catesby Jones would be picked to succeed him, and most observers believed that Jones’s performance during the battle was outstanding. The seniority system for promotion in the Navy scuttled his chances, however, and the post went to the 67-year old Commodore Josiah Tattnall. Monitor, not severely damaged, remained on duty. Like his antagonist Jones, Greene was deemed too young to be kept as captain, so he was replaced. The day after the battle, he was relieved by Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge; two days later, Selfridge was in turn relieved by Lieutenant William Nicholson Jeffers.

Each side considered how best to eliminate the threat posed by its opponent, and after Virginia returned each side tried to goad the other into attacking under unfavorable circumstances. Both captains declined the opportunity to fight in water not of their own choosing; Jeffers in particular was under positive orders not to risk his ship. Consequently, each vessel spent the next month in what amounted to posturing. Not only did the two ships not fight each other, neither ship ever fought again after that day.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1847…
  U.S. forces land near Vera Cruz and lay siege to the city during the Mexican War.

• In 1862…
  The first battle between two ironclad ships, the Union Monitor and the Confederate Virginia (formerly the Merrimack), takes place at Hampton Roads, Virginia.

• In 1916…
  Mexican raiders led by Pancho Villa attack Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 people.

• In 1945…
  U.S. bombers drop incendiary bombs on Tokyo, engulfing much of the city in a firestorm.

• In 1964…
  The Ford Motor Company produces the first Mustang.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Battle of Hampton Roads… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Ironclads

Critical History: Duel of the Ironclads…
http://www.criticalhistory.info/html/duel_of_ironclads.html

by Gerald Boerner

Aaron Siskind was a photographer who had a very creaive eye. He photographed not “reality”, but his perception of reality. He sought out the different, the images that expressed an abstraction of reality, which became a new reality. He was an educator and passed his view of the world on to a new generation of photographer. After his death, his estate set up a foundation to grant awards to help photographers pursue their own view of the world..  GLB

“The only nature I’m interested in is my own nature.”
— Aaron Siskind

“When I make a photograph, I want it to be an altogehter new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.”
— Aaron Siskind

“To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.”
— Aaron Siskind

“As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.”
— Aaron Siskind

“The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience that brings them together.”
— Aaron Siskind

“As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that’s your picture.”
— Aaron Siskind

“I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.”
— Aaron Siskind

“Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews – talking, and listening, and looking, looking. … And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.”
— Aaron Siskind

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation site, PhotoQuotes.com, which does not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting were obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Wikipedia.com web site which did not state any restrictions on their use. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

Aaron Siskind (1903 – 1991)

Aaron Siskind was an American abstract expressionist photographer. In his biography he wrote that he began his foray into photography when he received a camera for a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. He quickly realized the artistic potential this offered. He worked in both New York City and Chicago.

Siskind’s work focuses on the details of nature and architecture. He presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image out of them, which, he claimed, stands independent of the original subject.

Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League. Working with that group, Siskind produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s. Among them the "Harlem Document" remains the most famous. He originally was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System.

“As the saying goes, we see in terms of our education. We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect. And indeed it is socially useful that we agree on the function of objects. But, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that’s your picture.”

In 1950 Siskind met Harry Callahan when both were teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer. Later, Callahan persuaded Siskind to join him as part of the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus). In 1971 he followed Callahan (who had left in 1961) to teach for the rest of his life at the Rhode Island School of Design.

A major character in the film One Hour Photo (about a disturbed photograph developer who stalks what he sees as the perfect family) is named after Siskind. It should be noted that the character of Mr. Siskind is not the main (psychologically disturbed) character, nor is the film in any way modeled after the life and works of Aaron Siskind.

“The start of a photograph is from a previous picture. There is no preconception, rather predisposition (which predisposition includes the camera, lenses and the film with me at the time). I will usually return to a familiar place or one that seems familiar. I stand still or move slowly, feeling things like the impulse of shapes, the direction of lines, the quality of surfaces. I frame with my eye (sometimes with my hands) as the ground glass would frame. Nothing that one could reasonably call thinking is taking place al this stage. The condition is total absorption; the decision (a picture) is spontaneous … Ambiguity may be the clue, there is the material. and there am I intruding my private intent. I know the imminence of the world and experience it with full sensuality; at the same time I am involved with projection of myself as idea. Strong tensions are inevitable, pleasurable and disturbing. Is not the aesthetic optimum order with the tensions continuing?”

The Aaron Siskind Foundation was set up to honor is work and provide grants to young photographers. The following is from the Foundation’s web site (see References section for link).

Photographer and educator Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) holds a preeminent place in the history of American photography. Beginning his photographic career in the 1930’s as a social documentarian with the New York Photo League, he ultimately radicalized the medium by emphasizing the photograph as an abstract form of expression and an aesthetic end in itself. Siskind taught in New York City’s public schools for 25 years before becoming recognized as a photographer and then a gifted pioneer of photographic education. His vision and methods have and will continue to inspire and instruct future generations of artists and teachers.

Siskind directed that his estate become a resource that would support contemporary photography and reward and encourage excellence in its practitioners. Since his death in 1991, the Aaron Siskind Foundation has been one of the few American organizations providing cash grants to individual photographic artists on a yearly basis. The Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (IPF) review panel examines the work of upwards of 700 applicants each year, awarding a varying number of grants in amounts of up to $5,000.

Eligible work must be based on the idea of the lens-based still image, but grant recipients work in forms as diverse as digital imagery, installations, documentary projects and photo-generated print media. Whether they are established achievers or emerging talents, the foundation recognizes each recipient’s potential to contribute to the medium in its largest sense.

IPF recipients are encouraged to contribute one of their works to a permanent archive founded in 1993 in conjunction with the Art Museum at Princeton University. The Aaron Siskind  Foundation Fellows Collection is a lasting reminder of a generous spirit and an evolving record of historical and cultural change. It will serve as a resource for the training of future historians and curators and the enjoyment and education of the public.

The foundation falls into the smallest category of American private foundations. Within the limits of its resources, it also works to preserve and protect Aaron’s artistic legacy, and foster knowledge of and appreciation for his art through new books, exhibits, educational events and scholarly research. It seeks to support contemporary photographic art and art-making through a variety of projects, events and collaborations.

References

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Aaron Siskind… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Siskind

Web Sites and Blogs:

Aaron Siskind Foundation: Foundation…
http://www.aaronsiskind.org/found.html

PhotoQuotes.com on Aaron Siskind…
http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=102&name=Siskind,Aaron

by Gerald Boerner

Tandy, the owner of the Radio Shack stores in the U.S., introduced a low-end, home computer in the late 1980s. While it only displayed black and white text, not hi-res graphics like the Apple II, it took off because of the price. The initial Model 1 could be expanded to handle floppy disk drives, the basic 4 KB version could be used with a cassette recorder to play basic games. When the Model III was introduced, it became a mainstay of K-12 education.

When it tried to move into business computers, the proprietary schema for distributing software and peripherals led to a loss of market share. It rebounded when it started to produce IBM-PC clones, but eventually moved out of the marketplace. But, none the less, its pioneering work with the TRS-80 moved the fledgling microcomputer industry forward.  GLB

“Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.”
— Nicholas Negroponte

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
— Pablo Picasso

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”
— Emo Philips

“Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.”
— Larry Ellison

“Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.”
— Andy Rooney

“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.”
— Clifford Stoll

“Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.”
— Louis Gerstner

“Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.”
— Doug Larson

Wizards of the Internet: Tandy TRS-80 Computer

TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation’s desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy’s Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The line won popularity with hobbyists, home users, and small-businesses. Tandy Corporation’s leading position in what Byte Magazine called the "1977 Trinity" (Apple, Commodore and Tandy) had much to with Tandy’s retailing the computer through more than 3000 of its Radio Shack (Tandy in Europe) storefronts. Notable features of the original TRS-80 included its full-stroke QWERTY keyboard, small size, its Floating Point BASIC programming language, an included monitor, and a starting price of $600. The pre-release price was $500 and a $50 deposit was required, with a money back guarantee at time of delivery. One major drawback of the original system was the massive RF interference it caused in surrounding electronics. This became a problem when it was determined to violate FCC regulations, leading to the Model I’s phase out in favor of the new Model III.

By 1979, the TRS-80 had the largest available selection of software in the microcomputer market.

Early Z80-based home systems: History

Announced at a press conference on August 3, 1977 by Tandy Corporation, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Microcomputer (later re-designated the Model I) was Tandy’s entry into the home computer market, meant to compete head-on against the Commodore PET 2001 and the Apple II. At $599 for a complete package including computer, keyboard, video monitor, and cassette storage, the computer was the most expensive single product Tandy’s Radio Shack chain of electronics stores had ever offered. After the first demonstration of the wire wrapped version of the computer to Charles Tandy, there was a discussion as to the quantity that could be sold. The TRS-80’s creators Don French and Steve Leininger both suggested that 50,000 could be sold. They were laughed at. It was decided that the initial production run would be 1,000. Several months later the Company management was still unsure of the computer’s market appeal, but raised the initial production run to 3,500, because in Radio Shack President Lew Kornfield’s words "When the product fails, we can use it in the stores for inventory control and other purposes." Even on introduction day the planned production run was still 3,500.

Tandy ended up selling over 10,000 TRS-80s in its first month of sales, and an additional 55,000 in the next 4 months. Before its January 1981 discontinuation, Tandy sold more than 250,000 Model Is. By the end of its lifetime, the computer had become affectionately known by its users (and snidely referred to by its detractors) as the "Trash-80".

TRS-80: Hardware

The Model I combined the mainboard and keyboard into one unit, in what was to be a common case design trend throughout the 8-bit microcomputer era, although it had a separate power supply unit. It used a Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 1.77 MHz (later models were shipped with a Z80A). The basic model originally shipped with 4 KB of RAM, and later 16 KB.

TRS-80: Keyboard

The transfer of information about what keys were being pressed was unusual, in that instead of transferring data via an I/O device or chip, the hardware mapped the keyboard to pre-defined locations in memory, i.e., there was no ‘real’ memory at this location, but performing a read from the keyboard area of the memory map would return the state of a particular set of keys.

A version of the computer was produced which replaced the nameplate with a numeric keypad.

Many users complained about the TRS-80 keyboards, which used mechanical switches and suffered from "Keyboard Bounce", resulting in multiple letters being typed accidentally. A Keyboard De-Bounce tape was distributed to compensate, which both ignored key contact closures if they were detected within a short time of a contact opening, and slowed down polling of the keyboard. Eventually, this was added to a later ROM revision. The keyboard hardware was also changed to be less vulnerable to bounce.

TRS-80: Video

The TRS-80 was accompanied by a white-on-black display, which was a modified RCA XL-100 black and white television. The actual color of the system was light bluish (the standard "P4" phosphor used in black-and white televisions), and green and amber filters or replacement tubes (to make the display easier on the eyes) were a common aftermarket item.

Later models came with a green-on-black display.

Because of bandwidth problems in the interface card that replaced the TV’s tuner, the display would lose horizontal sync if large areas of white were displayed; a simple hardware fix (involving less than half an hour’s work) could be applied to correct that.

The video hardware could only display text at 64 or 32 characters wide by 16 lines of resolution. This was because the video memory system used a single kilobyte of video memory. Seven of the bits of each byte were used to display ASCII characters, with the eighth bit used to differentiate between text and "semigraphics" characters.

Primitive graphics ("text semigraphics," rather than a true bitmap) could be displayed because the upper 64 characters of the 128 character set displayed as a grid of 2×3 blocks (very similar to Teletext). BASIC routines were provided which could write directly to this virtual 128×48 grid.

The original TRS-80 Model I could differentiate between upper and lower characters in memory, but lower case characters were not displayed on the video display. In order to display the lower case properly on the Model I, one had to solder or clip an eighth memory chip onto the back of one of the existing seven video RAM chips, and then bend up a pin to tap an address line off the system bus. This modification became a popular third-party add-on.

Later models came with the hardware allowing the lowercase character set to be displayed with descenders. The software, however, remained unchanged, and when using standard BASIC programming, no lower case characters could be displayed. A small keyboard driver written in machine language could overcome this shortcoming.

Any access to the screen memory, either by writing to it using the BASIC statement PRINT or accessing the screen memory directly, caused "flicker" on the screen. The bus arbitration logic would block video display while access was given to the CPU, causing a short black line. This had little effect on normal BASIC programs, but fast programs made in assembly language could be affected if the programmer didn’t take it into consideration. Many software authors were able to minimize this effect. Notwithstanding this primitive display hardware, many arcade-style games were available for the Tandy TRS-80.

TRS-80: Cassette tape drive

User data was originally stored on cassette tape. A standard monaural audio cassette deck (Radio Shack model CTR-41) was included with the machine. The cassette tape interface was sensitive to audio volume changes, and the machine only gave the very crudest indication as to whether the correct volume was set, via a blinking character on screen when data was actually being loaded – to find the correct volume, one would sometimes have to attempt to load a program once adjusting volume until the machine picked up the data, then reset the machine, rewind the tape and attempt the load again. Users quickly learned to save a file three or more times in hopes that one copy would prove to be readable.

Automatic gain control or indicator circuits could be constructed to compensate for this (fortunately the owner’s manual provided complete circuit diagrams for the whole machine, including the peripheral interfaces, with notes on operation), and there was also an alternative tape interface that one could build in order to receive transmissions from the BBC’s Chip Shop programme in the UK, an experiment in transmitting free software for several different BASIC home microcomputers, in a common tape format, over the radio. A special program (loaded using the conventional tape interface) was needed to access the custom interface over the expansion port and then load the recorded software. Tandy eventually replaced the CTR-41 unit with the CTR-80 which had built-in AGC circuitry (and no volume control). This helped the situation, but tape operation was still unreliable.

TRS-80s with Level I BASIC read and wrote tapes at 250 bits per second (25 bytes per second); Level II BASIC doubled this to 500 bits per second (50 bytes per second).

Some programmers wrote machine language programs that would increase the speed to up to 1500 bits per second without loss in reliability.

For loading and storing data, no hardware controller existed. Instead, the processor created the sound itself by switching the output voltage from minus to plus and back, thus creating a click for every 1 and silence for every 0 in the bit stream.

The first models of the Model I also had problems reading from the cassette drives. Tandy eventually offered a small board which was installed in a service center to correct earlier models. The ROMs in later models were modified to correct this.

TRS-80: Expansion interface

An optional (and expensive) Expansion Interface (E/I) provided several important features – the ability to expand up to 48K of RAM, a floppy disk controller, a real-time clock, a second cassette port, a RS-232 port (as an option) and a Centronics parallel printer port.

Originally, one could not print from the Model I without purchasing an Expansion Interface. However, Tandy Corp. soon sold a printer-only Interface for the Model I for approx. 300 Deutschmark in Germany.

The Expansion Interface was the most troublesome part of the TRS-80 system. It went through several revisions (a pre-production version is said to have looked completely different, and to have had a card cage) before on-board buffering of the bus connector lines cured its chronic problems with random lockups and crashes. Its edge card connectors tended to oxidise due to the use of two different metals in the contacts, and required periodic cleaning with a pencil eraser. The unit required a second power supply, identical to that of the TRS-80, and was designed with an interior recess which held both power supplies.

Since the cable connecting the expansion interface carried the system bus, it was kept short (about two inches). This meant that the user had no choice but to place it directly behind the computer with the monitor on top of it. This caused problems if one owned a monitor whose case did not fit the mounting holes. Also, the loose friction fit of the edge connector on the already short interconnect cable created the precarious possibility of disconnecting the system bus from the CPU if either unit happened to be moved during operation.

TRS-80: Floppy disk drives

To use the Model I with a disk operating system, one had to buy the Expansion Interface, which included a single density floppy disk interface. This was based on a Western Digital 1771 single density floppy disk controller chip, but since it lacked a separate external data separator, it was very unreliable in practice.

Much of the unreliability was due to bugs in Radio Shack’s early version(s) of TRS-DOS. The 1771 could not report its status for a short interval (several instruction cycles) after it received a command. A common method of handling this was to issue a command to the 1771, perform several "NOP" instructions, then query the 1771 for command status. Early TRS-DOS neglected to use the required wait period, instead querying the chip immediately after issuing a command, and thus false status was often returned to the OS, causing various errors and crashes. If the 1771 was handled correctly by the OS, it was actually fairly reliable.

TRS-80: Hard Drive

Radio Shack introduced a 5MB hard-drive unit for the TRS-80. The physical size of the unit was about the same as a modern desk-top computer enclosure. The unit had a retail price of approximately $1500, although it could be purchased for a bit less from some of the non-corporate stores.

TRS-80: Printers

One unusual peripheral offered was a "screen printer": an electrostatic rotary printer that scanned the video memory through the same bus connector used for the E/I, and printed an image of the screen onto aluminum-coated paper in about a second. Unfortunately, it was incompatible with both the final, buffered version of the E/I, and with the "heartbeat" interrupt used for the real-time clock under Disk BASIC. This could be overcome by using special cabling, and by doing a "dummy" write to the cassette port while triggering the printer.

Two other printers were offered: one for 57 mm metal coated paper, selling for approximately 600 Deutschmark in Germany, and one built by Centronics for normal paper, costing at first 3000 Deutschmark, later sold at approximately 1500 Deutschmark in some stores. It had only 7 pins, so letters with descenders such as lowercase "g" did not reach under the baseline, but were elevated within the normal line.

TRS-80: BASIC

Two versions of the BASIC programming language were produced for the Model I. Level I BASIC fit in 4 KB of ROM, and Level II BASIC fit into 12 KB of ROM. Level I was single precision only and had a smaller set of commands. Level II introduced double precision floating point support and had a much wider set of commands. Level II was further enhanced when a disk system was added, allowing for the loading of Disk BASIC.

Level I Basic was based on Li-Chen Wang’s free Tiny BASIC, additional functions added by Radio Shack. It achieved a measure of noteworthiness due in large part to its outstanding manual, written by David Lien, which presented lessons on programming with text and humorous graphics, making the subjects very easy to understand. It had only two string variables (A$ and B$), 26 numeric variables (A – Z) and one array, A(). Code for functions like SIN(), COS() and TAN() was not included in ROM but printed at the end of the book. The only error messages were: "WHAT?" for syntax errors, "HOW?" for arithmetic errors such as division by zero, and "SORRY" for out of memory errors.

Level I BASIC was not tokenized—reserved words were stored literally. In order to maximize the code that could be crammed into 4K of memory users could enter abbreviations for reserved words. For example, writing "P." instead of "PRINT" thus saving 3 bytes.

Level II BASIC was licensed from Microsoft. It was a cut-down version of the 16 KB Extended BASIC, since the Model I had 12 KB of ROM space. The accompanying manual was not nearly as colorful and suited for beginning programmers as the Level I BASIC manual. Original Level I BASIC-equipped machines could be retrofitted to Level II through a ROM replacement performed by Radio Shack for a fee (originally $199 in 1978 dollars). Users with Level I BASIC programs stored on cassette had to convert these to the non-tokenized Level II BASIC before use. A utility for this was provided with the Level II ROMS.

The Disk Based BASIC added the ability to perform disk I/O, and in some cases (NewDos/80, MultiDOS, DosPlus, LDOS) added powerful sorting, searching, full screen editing, and other features. Level II BASIC recognized some of these commands and issued a "?L3 ERROR", suggesting that a behind-the-scenes change of direction intervened between the recording of the Level II ROMs and the introduction of Disk BASIC, which Radio Shack didn’t call Level III.

Microsoft also marketed a tape-cassette based enhanced BASIC called Level III BASIC. This added most of the functions in the full 16 KB version of BASIC.

TRS-80: Software applications

A wide range of software applications were available for the TRS-80. Many leading developers, and independent software companies such as Big Five, produced unlicensed versions of popular arcade hits like Namco’s Pac-Man and Galaxian, Atari’s Centipede, Sega’s Zaxxon and Stern Electronics’ Berzerk (with digitized speech). Some companies ported games from other home computers of the era, such as the original Zork adventure game. There were also many games unique to the TRS-80, including shooters like Cosmic Fighter and Defence Command and strange experimental programs such as Dancing Demon, which was not strictly speaking a game but did have significant entertainment value.

A full suite of office applications were also available, including the VisiCalc and As-Easy-As spreadsheets and the Lazy Writer, Electric Pencil and Scripsit word processors.

Utility software such as Stewart Software’s Toolkit offered the first sorted directory, decoding or reset of passwords, and the ability to eliminate parts of TRS-DOS that were not needed in order to free up floppy disk space. They also produced the On-Line 80 BBS, a TRS-DOS based Bulletin Board System.

TRS-DOS—Radio Shack’s operating system for its TRS-80 computers—had significant limitations, opening the market for various alternative OSes, including NewDOS, a third-party rival sold by a company called Apparat Personal Computers, which went out of business in 1987. Others included DoubleDOS, DOSPlus, LDOS, MicroDOS, NEWDOS/80, UltraDOS, later called Multidos, and VTOS. The last versions (6.x) of TRSDOS were actually re-named LS-DOS (aka, LDOS).

References:

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: ARPANet… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet

Wikipedia: TRS-80…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

Web Sites and Blogs:

Brainy Quote: Computer Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_computers.html

by Gerald Boerner

Helen Keller is one of the most inspirational stories in our country’s history. She was both deaf and blind, a condition that would have normally assign her to a life in an institution. But with the assistance of her coach, Anne Sullivan, she was able to learn to speak and write; she graduated from Ratcliff College. She became a vocal advocate for women’s and worker’s issues. We owe her a debt of gratitude for her courage, hard work, and example to us all.  GLB

“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”
— Helen Keller

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
— Helen Keller

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
— Helen Keller

“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
— Helen Keller

“As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.”
— Helen Keller

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
— Helen Keller

“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”
— Helen Keller

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
— Helen Keller

Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (1880 – 1968) was an American author, political activist and lecturer. She was the first deaf/blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.

A prolific author, Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes.

Early Childhood and Illness

Keller with Anne Sullivan vacationing
at Cape Cod in July 1888

Helen Adams Keller was born on a plantation called Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams Keller, a cousin of Robert E. Lee and daughter of Charles W. Adams, a former Confederate general. The Keller family originates from Switzerland. Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family. According to Soviet blind-deaf psychologist A. Meshcheryakov, Martha’s friendship and teaching was crucial for Helen’s later development.

In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens’ American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind child, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. He subsequently put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anaganos, the school’s director, asked former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and only 20 years old, to become Keller’s instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, evolving into governess and then eventual companion.

Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller’s house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with d-o-l-l for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller’s big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas for "medical and cosmetic reasons".

Formal Education

Keller and Sullivan in 1898

Starting in May, 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Companions

Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thompson was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who didn’t have experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.

Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens together with Anne and John, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of American Foundation for the Blind.

After Anne died in 1936, Keller and Thompson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funding for the blind. Thompson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960.

Winnie Corbally, a nurse who was originally brought in to care for Polly Thompson in 1957, stayed on after Thompson’s death and was Keller’s companion for the rest of her life.

Political Activities

Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities amid numerous other causes. She was a suffragette, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical Socialist, and a birth control supporter. In 1915, she and George Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller and Sullivan traveled to over 39 countries, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every US President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, and Mark Twain.

Helen Keller sitting holding a
magnolia flower, circa 1920

Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency.

Keller and her friend Mark Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed over in popular perception. Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:

“At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him…Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”

Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (known as the IWW or the Wobblies) in 1912, saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an IWW, Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:

“I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.”

The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the latter a leading cause of blindness.

Later Life

Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.

On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States’ highest two civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair.

Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968 at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Westport, Connecticut. A service was held in her honor at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. and her ashes were placed there next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thompson.

Helen Keller Honored at U.S. Capitol

Other Events on this Day

• In 1796…
  The U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of a congressional act for the first time when it upholds a carriage tax in Hylton v United States.

• In 1817…
  The New York Stock Exchange is formally chartered.

• In 1965…
  The first U.S. combat troops arrive in South Vietnam when Marines land near Da Nang to secure an air base.

• In 1983…
  In a speech in Florida, President Ronald Reagan refers to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” signaling that he is determined to stand fast against Communist totalitarianism.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Helen Keller… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller

Brainy Quote: Helen Keller Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/helen_keller.html

Democracy Now!: As Helen Keller Honored at US Capitol, Lifelong Radical Politics Go Ignored…
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/8/
as_helen_keller_honored_with_statue

by Gerald Boerner

Macro photography, the photography of objects in their original size (1:1), has produced many incredible images. This has been especially useful in nature photography, but also has been used in product shots for advertising. This technique requires special equipment, preferably a special macro lens. These lenses are capable of focusing at distances shorter than normal because of the internal lens arrangement. But the price paid for this closer focus is a decrease in the depth of field. We have included tips for taking close-up (macro-like) images with your point and shoot camera; these lessons are also applicable to SLR/dSLR cameras with special lenses.  GLB

“A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.”
— Galen Rowell

“And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.”
— Galen Rowell

“I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.”
— Galen Rowell

“I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.”
— Galen Rowell

“I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I’ve ever done. It’s a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.”
— Galen Rowell

“I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn’t have a personal vision or doesn’t communicate emotion fails.”
— Galen Rowell

“Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.”
— Galen Rowell

“I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a ‘record shot’. My first thought is always of light.”
— Galen Rowell

Focal Concept: Macro Photography and Lenses

A photographic lens (also known as objective lens or photographic objective) is an optical lens or assembly of lenses used in conjunction with a camera body and mechanism to make images of objects either on photographic film or on other media capable of storing an image chemically or electronically.

While in principle a simple convex lens will suffice, in practice a compound lens made up of a number of optical lens elements is required to correct (as much as possible) the many optical aberrations that arise. Some aberrations will be present in any lens system. It is the job of the lens designer to balance these out and produce a design that is suitable for photographic use and possibly mass production.

There is no major difference in principle between a lens used for a camera, a telescope, a microscope, or other apparatus, but the detailed design and construction are different.

A lens may be permanently fixed to a camera, or it may be interchangeable with lenses of different focal lengths, apertures, and other properties.

Macro Photography

Macro photography is close-up photography. The classical definition is that the image projected on the "film plane" (i.e., film or a digital sensor) is close to the same size as the subject. On 35 mm film (for example), the lens is typically optimized to focus sharply on a small area approaching the size of the film frame. Most 35mm format macro lenses achieve at least 1:2, that is to say, the image on the film is 1/2 the size of the object being photographed. Many 35mm macro lenses are 1:1, meaning the image on the film is the same size as the object being photographed. Another important distinction is that lenses designed for macro are usually at their sharpest at macro focus distances and are not quite as sharp at other focus distances.

In recent years, the term macro has been used in marketing material to mean being able to focus on a subject close e nough so that when a regular 6×4 inch (15×10 cm) print is made, the image is life-size or larger. With 35mm film this requires a magnification ratio of only approximately 1:4, which demands a lower lens quality than 1:1. With digital cameras the actual image size is rarely stated, so that the magnification ratio is largely irrelevant; cameras instead advertise their closest focusing distance.

Macroscopy competes with the digital microscope where a small camera tube can be attached directly to a computer, usually via USB port. Macroscopy also competes with photomicroscopy, and it is much less expensive to achieve high quality images. However, high magnification images are more difficult using macroscopy.

The method is especially useful in forensic work, where small details at crime or accident scenes may often be significant. Trace evidence such as fingerprints and skid marks is especially important, and easily recorded using macroscopy. Fracture surfaces from broken products are very revealing using fractography, especially when photographed using glancing light to highlight surface details.

Equipment

Techniques for making a well-lit image of the required size include:

• Macro Lens:
  Using a lens specifically designed for close work and with a long barrel for close focusing, called a macro lens. Some manufacturers call it a micro, which might actually be scientifically more accurate, but can be confusing, since it goes against the established convention. A macro lens might be optimized to provide its best performance at a magnification of 1:1. Some macro lenses, such as the Canon MP-E 65 mm f/2.8, can achieve higher magnification – up to 5:1 macro, enabling photography of the structure of small insect eyes, snowflakes, and other minuscule but detailed objects. However, "standard" (1:1) macro lenses are more common. There are different categories of macro lenses, depending on the focal length:
  • 50–60mm range
    typically used for product photography and small objects
  • 90–105mm range
    the standard focal range used for insects, flowers, small objects
  • 150–200mm range
    gives more working distance — typically used for insects and other small animals
  • Macro Zoom
    a few zooms provide a macro option, but they generally do not allow a 1:1 magnification
• Extension Tubes:
  Extending the distance between the lens and the film or sensor by inserting either extension tubes or a continuously adjustable bellows, with no optical components; between the camera body and the lens. The further the lens is from the film or sensor, the closer the focusing distance, the greater the magnification, and the darker the image for the same aperture. Tubes of various lengths can be stacked, decreasing lens-to-subject distance and increasing magnification. Bellows or tubes must be removed for normal working at longer distances. They can be used in conjunction with some other techniques (e.g., reversing the lens).
• Close-Up Lens:
  Placing an auxiliary close-up lens in front of the camera’s taking lens. Inexpensive screw-in or slip-on attachments provide close focusing at very low cost. The quality is variable, with some two-element versions being excellent while many inexpensive single element lenses exhibit chromatic aberration and reduced sharpness of the resulting image. This method works with cameras that have fixed lenses, and is commonly used with bridge cameras. These lenses add diopters to the optical power of the lens, decreasing the minimum focusing distance, and allowing the camera to get closer to the subject.
• Tilt-Shift Lenses:
  Employing the Scheimpflug principle to change the plane of focus at the image plane relative to the subject plane, thereby increasing effect depth-of-field for a given lens aperture. Requires use of a specialized lens that allows the optical section to be pivoted off center. Examples are TS lenses from Nikon, Canon, and other manufacturers, and products like the LensBaby and Zoerk Multi Focus System. Traditional view cameras with bellows systems and / or tilting backs also permit plane-of-focus adjustment. Because of the very narrow depth-of-field available in macro photography, and the consequent need to stop down the lens as far as possible to obtain adequate depth-of-field, employing the Scheimpflug effect allows both increased depth-of-field and the ability to make more use of existing lighting conditions. The ability to work at a relatively larger aperture and control depth-of-field, is one potential benefit of this equipment and technique.
• Teleconverter:
  Attaching a telephoto extender between the camera body and the lens. A 1.4× or 2× teleconverter gives a larger image, adding macro capabilities. As with an extension tube, less light will reach the film or sensor, and a longer exposure time will be needed. However, working distance remains the same as without the teleconverter. While this adapter can gain additional magnification, it does so with some degregation of the image due to the presence of additional lenses in the unit. These optics may not be as “sharp” as those in a good lens.
• Reversing the Lens:
  Reversing the lens using a "reversing ring". This special adapter attaches to the filter thread on the front of a lens and makes it possible to attach the lens in reverse. Excellent quality results up to 4x lifesize magnification using fairly cheap, "standard" (not specially designed for macro) lenses can be produced. For cameras with all-electronic communications between the lens and the camera body, such as Canon EOS, reversing rings are available which allow all camera functions, including open aperture metering, to be used. When used with extension tubes or bellows a relatively cheap but highly versatile macro system can be assembled.
• Lighting the Macro Object:
  Depth of field is extremely small when focusing on close objects; a small aperture (high f-number) is often required to ensure sufficient depth of field. This requires either a slow shutter speed or bright lighting for correct exposure; in all but the brightest natural lighting if a prolonged exposure is not advisable, auxiliary lighting (such as from a flash unit) is required. Uniform lighting can be difficult with subjects very close to the lens; a ring flash mounted on the front of the lens can provide even illumination. Good results can also be obtained by using a flash diffuser, which can be made of inexpensive Styrofoam.

Depth of field

 Shallow depth of field

Limited depth of field is an important consideration in macro photography. This makes it essential to focus critically on the most important part of the subject, as elements that are even a millimetre closer or farther from the focal plane might be noticeably blurred. Due to this, the use of a microscope stage is highly recommended for precise focus with large magnification such as photographing skin cells. Alternatively, more shots of the same subject can be made with slightly different focusing lengths and joined afterwards with specialized focus stacking software which picks out the sharpest parts of every image, artificially increasing depth of field.

Japanese Anenome
(Anemone hupehensis
var. japonica)

Compact digital cameras and small-sensor bridge cameras have an incidental advantage in macro photography due to their inherently higher working distance. For instance, some popular bridge cameras produce the equivalent magnification of a 420 mm lens on 35 mm format but only use a lens of actual focal length 89 mm (1/1.8″-type CCD) or 72 mm (1/2.5″-type CCD). (See crop factor.) Since depth of field appears to decrease with the actual focal length of the lens, not the equivalent focal length, these bridge cameras can achieve the magnification of a 420 mm lens with the greater depth of field of a much shorter lens. High-quality auxiliary close-up lenses can be used to achieve the needed close focus; they function identically to reading glasses. This effect makes it possible to achieve very high quality macrophotographs with relatively inexpensive equipment, since auxiliary closeup lenses are cheaper than dedicated SLR macro lenses.

Lighting

The problem of sufficiently and evenly lighting the subject can be difficult to overcome. Some cameras can focus on subjects so close that they touch the front of the lens. It is impossible to place a light between the camera and a subject that close, making extreme close-up photography impractical. A normal-focal-length macro lens (50 mm on a 35 mm camera) can focus so close that lighting remains difficult. To avoid this problem, many photographers use telephoto macro lenses, typically with focal lengths from about 100 to 200 mm. These are popular as they permit sufficient distance for lighting between the camera and the subject.

Ring flashes, with flash tubes arranged in a circle around the front of the lens, can be helpful in lighting at close distances. Ring lights have emerged, using white LEDs to provide a continuous light source for macrophotography.

Homemade flash diffusers made out of white Styrofoam or plastic attached to a camera’s built-in flash can also yield surprisingly good results by diffusing and softening the light, eliminating specular reflections and providing more even lighting.

Putting a Macro Lens into Use

The Digital Photography School web site has an excellent guide for taking macro photos for beginners using point and shoot cameras. For the more advanced photographer, most of these tips still apply, but will involve using macro lenses or other equipment discussed above. We are including the key points here from their article, but we urge you to use the link in the References section to take a look at this article and other on the topic.

Much has been written on the topic of Macro photography for those photographers fortunate enough to own a DSLR with macro lenses – but what about if you own a compact point and shoot camera? Can you get great macro shots too?

While the results achievable with a point and shoot camera in macro mode probably won’t compare with a DSLR with a purpose built macro lens I’ve still seen some remarkably good shots with compact cameras (all three shots in this post were taken with compact cameras). Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of yours:

• Select Macro Mode:
  This is a fairly obvious first step but I’m always surprised by how many digital camera owners haven’t explored the shooting modes that their camera has. Macro mode is generally symbolized with a little flower and when selected it will tell your camera that you want to focus on a subject closer to your lens than normal (the minimum distance allowed will vary from camera to camera – consult your instruction manual to find yours). Macro mode will also usually tell your camera to choose a large aperture so that your subject is in focus but the background is not.
• Use a Tripod: 
  In macro photography a tripod can be particularly useful, even if you’re just shooting with a compact camera. Keeping your camera still not only improves your shots (getting rid of camera shake) but it allows you to play around with different settings without losing your composition.
• Aperture: 
  Once in macro mode some cameras will not allow you to make many other adjustments but if you are able to play with your aperture settings it can be well worthwhile to do so. As we’ve covered in our Aperture tutorials, the main thing that aperture impacts is the depth of field of your shots. Choose a small aperture (big number) if you want a large depth of field with everything in focus or a large aperture if you just want your main subject in focus. In macro photography you’ll probably want a shallow depth of field so select the largest aperture available.
• Focusing: 
  I find that in macro photography it is helpful to have full control over focusing – especially when you have shallow depth of fields where it is all the more important to make sure the right part of your shot is in focus. If your camera allows manual focusing select this option and manually focus on the part of our subject that is the main point of interest.
• Composition: 
  Rremember some of the basic rules of composition like the Rule of Thirds. Make sure your image has a main point of interest and place that focal point in a smart position in your image in order to draw the eye of your viewer. Try to select a non cluttered or simple background for your main subject so as it doesn’t compete with it visually.
• Flash: 
  In many macro shots having some artificial light is important. The challenge with compact cameras is that most give you limited control of your flash. As a result choosing a good time of day when there is plenty of available light is probably your best bet. If you do need more light check to see if your camera allows you to pull back the level that your flash fires at. Alternatively you might like to try diffusing it in some way (tissue paper or cellotape over the flash for example). Another option might be to use some other source of artificial light or to invest in a reflector to help make the most of available light. Experiment with different methods of lighting your subject.
• Take Your Shot: 
  Once you have your shot lined up and in focus take your shot. Make sure once you’ve taken it to take a good look at it on your LCD, zooming in to make sure that your focusing is sharp. Try shooting at slightly different apertures, with different compositions and focusing on different points of your subject to see what works best.
• Macro Lens Attachments: 
  Some compact cameras actually have accessories available to help with macro/close up photography. These will enable you to enlarge your subject and/or decrease your minimum focal length. These might be worth investing in if you intend on doing a lot of macro work.
• Self Timer:
  When using my DSLR for Macro work I tend to use a shutter cable release and tripod to make sure my shots are completely still (to eliminate the small amount of camera shake from pressing the shutter). Most compact cameras don’t have cable releases but a simple way around this is to use your camera’s self timer on it’s shortest time setting which will similarly mean you have no movement of your camera when taking your shot (if you’re taking notice of the ‘use a tripod’ tip above).

PS: I’ve used the term ‘macro photography fairly loosely here. Technically ‘macro photography’ is actually when you produce an image where your subject is captured on your image sensor at life size (or bigger) with a 1:1 ratio.

References:

Barbara London, Jim Stone, & John Upton. (2008) Photography. Pearson, Prentice-Hall

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: The Camera… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera

Wikipedia: Photographic Lens…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_lens

Wikipedia: Macro Photography…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_lens

Web Sites and Blogs: 

YouTube: Macro Photography Tips for Beginners…
http://www.youtube.com/v/v9wcm1BMc0U

Digital Photography School: Macro Photography Tips for Point and Shoot Cameras…
http://digital-photography-school.com/macro-photography-tips-for-compact-digital-camera-users

Brainy Quote: Galen Rowell Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/galen_rowell.html