IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.
I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.
Technology didn't just go, clunk. It was this early disease, starting with a plow, I guess, or something like that, the first tool that made it so you could do more things. The first domesticated animal, or the first wheel.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Compunet was fantastic. You could upload these little demos of what you'd been working on, and it was a really nice social scene - years before the Internet.
I remember feeling that technology was like trying to draw with your foot. In a ski boot. It was the most indirect way to work imaginable, but the potential had us all excited. I started in stop motion.
In a way, digital cameras were like very early personal computers such as the Commodore 64 - clunky and able to do only a few things.
I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.
In the early days of picture-taking, the exposure shutter had to stay open for a long time, so you had to stay really still.
What are the most brilliant of our chymical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?
The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.
