History: March 2008 Archive Page

Information Week:

The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong "Au Clair De La Lune" on April 9, 1860.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a "phonautograph" to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper covered in black smoke from an oil lamp. He never intended to play the sounds. Instead, he archived the recording and patented a method for understanding sound. Researchers recently unearthed the recording at the Academy of Sciences (French) in Paris.

Audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the informal collaborative group First Sounds created high-resolution, high-grade scans of Scott's phonautogram, converted the images into digital form, and played the sounds on a computer with a virtual stylus. Then they evened out speed fluctuations and tweaked the tracks to pull the voice forward.

When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my five-year-old. Today I was browsing on the book-sale table at the Latrobe library, when the very book I was looking for jumped out at me:



A few minutes with Google revealed something I never knew... apparently there really was such a little lighthouse that was scheduled for demolition, but when this book was published in the 40s, it proved so popular that the authorities decided to preserve the little lighthouse instead. (Photo by The Insider.)

There's even a Little Red Lighthouse Festival!

Scotsman:

"I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn't have fired. Not at him." -- 88-year-old Luftwaffe veteran Horst Rippert, speaking of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator and author of The Little Prince.

The Independent has a good tribute to Gary Gygax.

If D&D is a nerd's pastime, then there are a lot of nerds around. Guesstimate calculations - it's impossible to reach a precise total - suggest that Dungeons & Dragons has about 25 million regular players worldwide. Certainly Gygax made more than $1bn in sales since he invented it in 1974, a figure which he claimed surprised him, saying he thought he would have made about $50,000. And the game's legacy has been massive. "Interactive fiction" - the first commercial example being Infocom's Zork of 1981 - occupies the same landscape of abandoned mine-workings, semi-medieval villages, mysterious strangers and supernatural monsters as D&D, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the Infocom trilogy of Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. Sophisticated graphic games such as World of Warcraft, Quake and Doom draw so heavily on the D&D mindset that it's hard to imagine them without it. MMUDs - "Massive Multi-Player Online Dungeons" - make their debt clear in the name, and you might even view Second Life as a D&D game without a quest. D&D reanimated the fantasy genre of fiction, whether straight or, as in the case of Terry Pratchett (whose first Discworld novel appeared in 1983), comic; geeks, after all, notoriously love intricate jokes. From the sublime - the Armoured Bears in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - to Xena, Warrior Princess, the culture is rich in material which seems to link back to Gygax.

It's not true that Zork was the first commercial interactive fiction -- Scott Adams founded Adventure International in 1979. While the Scott Adams games were very minimalistic, "Adventureland" (1978 or 9) seems to have the honor of being the first commercial computer game for home PCs.

Wired:

Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, and went on to create the Dangerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventure RPGs, as well as a number of board games. He also wrote several fantasy novels.

"I don't think I've really grokked it yet," said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. "He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers."