Video gaming has become a huge and still rapidly growing industry with amazing potential yet to be realized. It owes so much to the early pioneers, who are not well-known beyond the industry, like so many other pioneers of micro-computing, communications, information and electronic information. With so much happening in the industry some will say that “history is history, so lets move on”, missing the many lessons from the past that benefit the future. Fortunately, the author has written a comprehensive account of those pioneers in a very readable book that is of course also available as an eBook. This is a book that all video gamers should read, but it also contains so much that will interest an even wider audience.
NAME: Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers FILE: R2333 AUTHOR: Andrew Hewson PUBLISHER: Hewson Consultants BINDING: soft back PAGES: 251 PRICE: £14.39 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: Spectrum, Commodore, 16-bit, console, processor, pioneer, over-clocking, trends, capacity, memory, pioneering, speed, gaming, electronic gaming, publishing ISBN: 978-1-84499-136-5 IMAGE: B2333.jpg BUYNOW: LINKS: http://tinyurl.com/glqm437 DESCRIPTION: Video gaming has become a huge and still rapidly growing industry with amazing potential yet to be realized. It owes so much to the early pioneers, who are not well-known beyond the industry, like so many other pioneers of micro-computing, communications, information and electronic information. With so much happening in the industry some will say that “history is history, so lets move on”, missing the many lessons from the past that benefit the future. Fortunately, the author has written a comprehensive account of those pioneers in a very readable book that is of course also available as an eBook. This is a book that all video gamers should read, but it also contains so much that will interest an even wider audience. Video gaming started with the dawn of the computer age. Initially it had a very serious purpose when the users of the first electronic computers, built in Britain for the vital code breaking at Bletchley Park, were used to present patterns in encrypted communications and 'scripts' which were created to trick the Germans into providing clues to assist in breaking their codes. In 1946, a new Government decided to break up the development teams and destroy the early computers in a program of Luddite socialism. Fortunately, Churchill had ordered that information on the developments at Bletchley Park be shared with the US and tons of drawings, and documents were shipped to New York from 1940 to Bill Stephenson and his office that was responsible for working with US intelligence agencies, the military and US industry. Where the British turned their backs on a hugely important new industry it was eagerly adopted in the US and the secrecy, maintained for decades by the heroes of Bletchley Park, meant that the world knew nothing of these first gaming pioneers. Fortunately for British intelligence parts of the program was maintained by Station X and CESG, including some of the fantastic technology. With the formation of the CIA, a close working relationship was maintained and Britain continued to pioneer the electronic information processing technology. However, what could have been a world leading British industry was lost, to be taken over by US developers to the enormous advantage of the US. It became just one depressing part of the British politicians' obsession with deliberately managing the decline of Britain, that was only briefly slowed by the Thatcher years and may be reversed by BREXIT. Early electronic computers were very large and very costly. They were a mainframe technology that crunched numbers very well and were to slowly develop into the host/terminal environment where an increasing number of people were able to directly enter data from electronic terminals and demand information that could be displayed on CRT screens and even locally printed. What it did not yet permit was true video capabilities. The closest mainframes got was to display crude images composed with Xs on a green screen. Data admin teams often spent hours playing with their expensive charges and sending the crude images at very low speed to colleagues in distant locations. The development of mainframe front ends allowed users outside the machine halls to create less crude images on increasingly intelligent terminals and transmit them at increasing speeds. It was not an entirely popular activity with senior management, if they found out, but it did perform a valuable service in keeping pioneering alive and benefiting the more serious corporate use of information. Then the real breakthrough of micro-computers supported an immensely important new stage of computer development. It began to bring computing to the masses and expanding the use of computers as financial, scientific and military technology into home computing and entertainment. For those who were born after the dawn of this new age, it is difficult to appreciate the delight of users who were playing 'space invader' and 'tank-pong' games on the first gaming computers. The video display was not much different from the early pioneers' crude X images on mainframe computer terminals but it was excitingly new for the early home computer games users. The introduction of personal computers, with their rapidly increasing performance, really opened up the video gaming industry and the performance of gaming optimised PCs, with their over-clocked processors and water cooling has provided a fantastic advance. The ability to house more than 11 very powerful disk drives, communicate at super broadband speeds and enable communities of gamers to participate in hugely complex international games produces an environment that the gaming pioneers could only vaguely imagine. For that reason, those pioneers have received limited recognition, but their work has made possible the most advanced virtual reality super- gaming machines. The author has written a charming account of those who worked to produce affordable gaming products that would become widely used and to continue to develop the quality of those products. The author himself has been a part of that development. The only thing that has been missed out is how some computer staff continued to develop their covert use of corporate computer assets and produced advances that eventually leaked into the commercial video gaming industry. In one example, a group of senior US Navy officers visited a defence contractor to be briefed on a very important USN project being developed. As was common at the time, the contractor had housed the computing systems behind a glass wall to impress visitors. On the way out an Admiral was impressed by the level of activity behind the glass wall at was a late hour. He asked if he could enter the machine hall, meet the personnel who were so actively engaged in activity, and to thank them for their contribution to the USN project. That was the point where he and his hosts discovered that computer staff were engaged in a golf tournament played on a virtual electronic golf course by people using corporate super computers in many US locations. In many companies, such a discovery might have resulted in people being sacked for misuse of corporate assets, but this event had a happy ending because a senior manager saw potential for the technology on upcoming US DoD projects. In much the same way as the anecdote above, this book provides a very good view of how the pioneers operated and will inspire readers to try thinking outside the box. Exposure of history can be surprisingly productive in shaping the future. For those of us who lived through the early pioneering years, this will be a great nostalgic trip. For those who missed these exciting years, it will provide a new perspective and may help some to better use modern technology. One of the factors of the development of gaming is that there is always a need for speed, to have greater memory, greater CPU performance, faster and more powerful video cards, greater communications bandwidth. We are now coming close the limits of development of the basic silicon technologies in the form that they have empowered performance growth during the last thirty odd years. Some of the future generations of new potential technologies are beginning to be used. They promise much, but some will prove to be blind alleys, like bubble memory that promised much in the 1970s, but never delivered. This continues to make economic use of resources important. Many readers, learning from this book of a past they knew very little about, may come to appreciate that layering products and applying more patches than a quilt is not the best way to go and the sprawling products that make use of what has been ever cheaper and more powerful components does not produce a product that is easy or cost effective to maintain. This is a great story that has been well told – enjoy.