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The King of Comedy

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jkottke

A collection of photos of 80s video arcades

From Timeline, a collection of photos of video arcades in the 80s.

The years between 1978 and 1983 are generally considered the golden age of video games. Most recognize Space Invaders as the original, arcade game to reach mass audiences, quickly followed by Asteroids (1979), Centipede (1980), and Pac-Man (1980). Space Invaders was such a hit it was rumored that Japan suffered a shortage of ¥100 coins in its wake. But Pac-Man was the real game changer. Stateside, reception of the ground breaking character-driven game was ravenous, and by the end of the 20th century it was estimated that Pac-Man’s total gross consumer revenue had hit $2.5 billion (or 10 billion quarters).

I have an odd nostalgia for video arcades. They were very present in the media when I was a kid, but growing up in a small town, I never had the opportunity to actually visit a proper arcade in their heyday, aside from the one tucked into a corner of roller skating rink in a slightly larger nearby town. The best we had was a single Ms. Pac-Man machine in the entrance way of our local grocery store and the occasional Donkey Kong or Mr. Do machine we stumbled across in pizza places when we travelled later in the 80s. I was an arcade-era kid who had to wait for the Nintendo and Game Boy.

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Johnny Thunders

Photo by Bob Gruen

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Ryuichi Sakamoto explains the Fairlight CMI

vintagecomputers

Borland Turbo Debugger

Turbo Debugger (TD) was a machine-level debugger for MS-DOS executables, intended mainly for debugging Borland Turbo Pascal (TP), and later Turbo C (TC) programs, sold by Borland. This tool was a full-screen debugger displaying both TP or TC source and corresponding assembly-language instructions, with powerful capabilities for setting breakpoints, watching the execution of instructions, monitoring machine registers, etc. TD could be used for programs not generated by Borland compilers, but without showing source statements; it was by no means the only debugger available for non-Borland executables, and not a significant general-purpose debugger.

1984 Finals.

Hell’s Angels Present Big Brother and the Holding Company / Youngbloods - Carousel Ballroom Concert Poster (1968)

vintagecomputers

Image: Virtual Reality System at Chilton Computing, July 1995.

SGI Onyx

The SGI Onyx, code named Eveready (deskside models) and Terminator (rackmount models), is a series of visualization systems designed and manufactured by SGI, introduced in 1993.The Onyx’s basic system architecture is based on the SGI Challenge servers, but with the notable inclusion of graphics hardware.The Onyx was employed in early 1995 for development kits used to produce software for the Nintendo 64 and, because the technology was so new, the Onyx was noted as the major factor for the impressive price of US$100,000 –US$250,000 for such kits ($157,999 - $394,998 in 2016).

The Onyx was succeeded by the Onyx2 in 1996 and was discontinued on March 31, 1999.The deskside variant can take one CPU board, and the rackmount variant can take up to six CPU boards. Both models originally used the IP19 CPU board with one, two or four MIPS R4400 microprocessors, initially with 100 and 150 MHz options, later increased to 200 and 250 MHz. Later, the IP21 CPU board was introduced, with one or two R8000 microprocessors at 75 or 90 MHz; machines with this board were referred to as POWER Onyx. Finally, SGI introduced the IP25 board with one, two or four R10000 microprocessors at 195 MHz.

The Onyx initially used the RealityEngine2 or VTX graphics subsystems, and later, InfiniteReality, which was introduced in 1995. RealityEngine refers to a 3D graphics hardware architecture and a family of graphics systems that implemented the aforementioned hardware architecture that was developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics during the early to mid 1990s. The RealityEngine was positioned as Silicon Graphics’s high-end visualization hardware for their MIPS/IRIX platform and was used exclusively in their Crimson and Onyx family of visualization systems, which are sometimes referred to as “graphics supercomputers” or “visualization supercomputers”.

The RealityEngine was marketed to and used by large organizations such as companies and universities that are involved in computer simulation, digital content creation, engineering and research.

danielclowesreader

Death-Ray Covers

Here’s a color pencil sketch for an unused cover of Eightball #23, which Daniel Clowes drew sometime in 2003.

After drawing, inking, and coloring the finished version of this illustration, Clowes decided it wasn’t right for the issue, wanting something bolder. Here’s another cover sketch: