Timeline Analog 3. John Buck

and Bruce Irvine, were determined to create a different kind of personal computer. They raised $4m in investment to create the Mindset Corporation in Silicon Valley. The startup focused on computer products for what it called ‘the productivity/creativity market’. The new PC was to be built by a dozen ex-Atari marketing and engineering staff including engineer Ajay Chopra:

       A long time before Windows, we wanted to create a fast platform to run graphical applications like games (which we understood from Atari) on one hand but also graphic arts, what Photoshop is today and also CadCam applications.

      The Mindset team worked to create custom chips for an IBM compatible PC platform that it believed was able to run applications at a speed 50 times faster than that of its MS-DOS competitors.

      WEBER, UBILLOS & EDELMAN

      Commodore Computer released the Commodore 64. Charlie White recalls:

       The Commodore 64 (gave) real computer power to those who only had about $500 to spend on such things. For video, though, in those days about the only thing the contraptions were good for was sorting various (EDL) lists. Looking for even more ways to use the things, I encouraged a few enterprising programmers to write a program called "Shot Sheets," which was designed to take a list of shots for music production and sort them into individual lists for camera people to follow during the performance.

       It worked, saved the director some time and got us into the whole computer thing. Someday, maybe we could actually edit video on it??

      Having grown up in a family of artists, Markus Weber was intrigued by the C 64.

       The C64 offered an unbelievable 64kB of memory and a graphics card that could display 320x240 pixels in 32 colors. It was the graphics capabilities that aroused my interest.

      Weber convinced his mother to finance a C64 purchase for him.

       Then I virtually disappeared into my room for half a year. First I had to master the BASIC programming language of the machine, only to discover that you could not simply program graphics on this machine.

       You first had to understand how the processor worked, then you had to master some much more advanced programming technique called Assembler programming, that let you directly control the registers of the CPU, which you then used to actually develop “machine language subroutines” for printing a point (a pixel), a line (a number of pixels) or a circle (a curved number of pixels) on your graphics screen.

       Only once you had mastered these primitives, could you start looking for doing more advanced stuff in “high-level” BASIC. There was absolutely nothing available on how to create such a 3D grid, how to mathematically program the rotations, how to “project” the abstract model to the screen and how to remove hidden lines (or to be more precise, how to avoid painting them, because removing them might remove visible lines as well). So I holed-up with my 2 years of math majors and worked it all out for myself over the course of 3 months.

      Weber contacted other geeks and built a small library of graphics-based computer games.

       Today you would call it a social network, for us it was just a way of getting new games for free by ways of trading. What we didn’t know, what no one knew by the time, these things made you addicts and I became one of the worst.I would get up, have some coffee, then get in front of the machine to figure out my 3D stuff, barely stopping for food once in a while and then switching to gaming by 6pm, to continue hunting the latest high-score until 3am the next day. My god, was my mother mad at me.

      Randy Ubillos was studying computer engineering at the University of Miami. He continued to write and sell programs for Commodore computers in his spare time.

       I only lasted three years at college because I was just so bored and not at all challenged and although my parents were freaked out at first, I left college and went into the software business full-time.

      Ubillos started Computer Applications Inc. with Steve Pierce in Raleigh, NC to handle contract programming. With a team that included David Dixon and Emilio Sotolongo, they created the Key-Quest 64 and Super Black Belt Karate C64 games.

       The programs and projects that I was doing with our business were way more advanced than anything I was learning at school.

      Steve Edelman studied electrical engineering at Cornell University located in Ithaca, New York. He poured over hobbyist computers and the fledgling PC industry’s newsletters.

       I built my own CPU. It had a hand etched PC board, a hand-bent metal case, a hand-wired transformer, a block of aluminum I machined to make a paper-tape reader, and 1K of memory. By the spring of my senior year in college it finally ran. I was hooked.

      Edelman started his own personal computer company, Ithaca Intersystems, shortly after graduating. He and fellow Cornell alum worked in a small rented space in the Collegetown neighborhood where they had a moderate success with a Zilog Z80-based computer.

      Zilog had been founded by Federico Faggin who had led the design and development of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004,

      John Markhoff explained in a New York Times profile:

       Just as Steve Jobs had phoned David Packard, then chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, to ask for parts for the original Apple computer, Edelman called Mr. Faggin to ask him for a microprocessor chip to help get him started.

      Ithaca Intersystems moved to larger offices outside of town and released a Z8002-based machine at almost the same time as the microcomputer industry fizzled out. Edelman spent several years flying around the world as a messenger for courier services before returning to the US.

      RUXTO-CUE

      Andy Maltz had worked through the previous summer at Ruxton’s facility in Burbank before he returned to complete his university degree on the East coast. Maltz was in the process of interviewing with IBM and Hughes for possible job openings after graduation when he received a call from Bill Hogan.

       Bill spoke about Ruxton's plans for the future and he mentioned an editing system that he was involved with and how he needed a systems engineer for the company. I thought, well I could go to IBM and become an expert in one chip, or I could go to Hollywood! Pretty easy decision to make and my feeling was that there probably weren't many degree'd engineers in Hollywood, so I could probably have an impact. I moved West.

      Maltz worked on Ruxton’s Dubner CBG-2 and the company’s award winning video/film system. Then a new task was added to his roster:

       I met the legendary Adrian Ettlinger as Bill explained the venture that he and Adrian had formed to develop a new editing system. With Adrian's previous product being the AutoCue and Bill's company being Ruxton, it then became known as the Ruxto-Cue editing system.

      Adrian Ettlinger recalls:

      With the Ruxto-Cue, Andy was tasked with completing the hardware design, the systems engineering, including the low level disc controller software and the ability to create an edit list generator for a system written in Z80 Assembly language. We had some unique challenges, like how do you put an 8-inch floppy based RT-11 file system on an industrial computing platform, how do you create CMX lists while using a very low level code base. Essentially, all of the edit data sat on top of the Script Mimic, which was the key innovation of the system and it made for some long nights and intricate software development work.

      Patrick Gregston was working in a telecine booking at Ruxton when Bill Hogan called him in to see a demonstration of a new video editing system.

       "You gotta see this", Bill said. I hadn't even heard of Adrian (Ettlinger)