Iterative

The Tools That Built Doom is a lovely short doco about the technologies and techniques id Software employed to make everybody’s favourite 3D-ish shooter. DOS-based compilers, NEXT workstations, clay models - a lot of stuff went into the making of DOOM in a very short time.

Last week Brendan Leonard published a lovely essay titled Is It Just Music? about how foundational the music we listened to as teenagers was, about listening outside of the mainstream, about how we collect, discover, and listen to music has changed, and about dropping a very large amount of cash for the raddest boombox on the planet. I loved the essay and it got me browsing TradeMe, where I found someone is selling a slightly dinged raddest boombox ever for a very large amount of cash less than 10km from me! The Promax Super Jumbo may well be the Seneca of tape decks but I kindof really want one.

Here’s a YouTube clip of the Super Jumbo in action

Here’s the boombox battle from Do The Right Thing that made the system famous.

Of course there’s a wiki devoted to boomboxes. Super Jumbo entry.

I rewatched Bret Victor’s 2013 talk The Future of Programming (from 1973).

Victor frames the talk as a presentation in 1973 discussing all the different approaches to computing that were being explored at the time and the kinds of tools and languages that came out of them, almost all abandoned or left as curiosities: concepts like spatial representations, constraint-based systems, concurrent programming models, and direct manipulation and software like Smalltalk, Sketchpad and Planner.

It’s interesting to consider all the paths that computing didn’t go down - possibly for good reasons. But what did we lose along the path? What are we re-discovering now?

This retrospective on the making of the original Fallout is worth watching even just for the part about the hoop jumping required to get Windows 95 certification

The Seneca: First Edition mechanical keyboard by Norbauer & Co starts at USD$3,600 and there is a 6-9 month waitlist to get one. It’s the first midlife crisis purchase that I could seriously get behind.

The Seneca is the product of one industrial designer’s obsession to build the perfect keyboard. One that looks, sounds, and feels exactly how Ryan Norbauer wants a keyboard to be.

In this Friday Video Adam Savage visits Norbauer and they dive deep into space bar stabilisers. And by deep, I mean way further into the rabbit hole that you’d think possible. It’s a wonderful interview.

And I really want one of those keyboards.