Before the personal computer...
before the hobbyist computer...
there was the Intel 8008 microprocessor
running at 2 MHz... 1000 times slower than today's chips
My roommate, Mike Burns, knew digital electronics
and I was a machinist... so we built our first computer with an 8008.
The chip cost $100 at the time.
There were no floppy disks.
You loaded the program a byte at a time with front panel switches.
If we had owned a garage we would be billionaires by now.
Mike programmed it to generate random Bach fugues.
I built a plotter to draw pictures.
I had to tell it everything... step right... wait... step down...
pick up the pen... put down the pen.
Moving along a diagonal was a program in itself,
but it could cover a 24x30-inch canvas
and do all of the drawings for my Phd thesis.
I still have the drawings that I made for art's sake.
Lines and circles... yin and yang... watercolor on good paper
Interesting... certainly difficult to create
but in the end... not enough.
Anything that can be drawn with a few lines of code
does not have enough information in it
to hold the mind for long.
The plotter arm that I built, however,
to carry the pen that drew the lines
still moves me.