Nine times out of ten, when I receive an email link that says "did you know about this?! It looks perfect for your dissertation!" I do indeed already "know about this". As I'm sure many academics can sympathize with, it's a familiarity that comes with the level of specialization--if a piece of documentation is out in the open enough for anyone to find it with a quick google search, chances are I already have, too. But sometimes that self-assured academic attitude gets proven wrong. And it feels amazing to be wrong. 

Case in point: a month or so ago, Raiford (my advisor) passed me a link to something he turned up while roaming Atari Age. It wasn't entirely clear to me what I was looking at--was this a newspaper clipping? an article? an essay from a book? The site sourced it to a book called Digital Deli, and like the good cyberscholar that I am, I found a $2 copy on amazon and ordered away. 

The book finally arrived and may I just say...wow, just WOW. Digital Deli was compiled by a crew called "The Lunch Group"--essentially, a group of NYC journalists and writers who started meeting in the early 1980s to share food, conversation, and computer chat. Steve Ditlea, primary editor of Digital Deli and author of the introduction, wrote: "The Lunch Group began inauspiciously enough on July 29, 1982, over a Mexican lunch on Manhattan's West 44 Street. Of the quintet of New York journalists, three had used personal computers for more than a month, two actually owned their machines, and one later confessed to having been totally intimidated by the rather simplistic conversation" (xi). But July 1982 was the cusp of the mainstreaming of home computing--it's amazing to imagine these folks gathered around a table with like minds, sharing common interests, intensely aware that "something is brewing", that the culture might shift, and yet just living life and trying to make sense of the world, as we all do.

The title Digital Deli grew from the groups own practice of organizing their meetings around food. The table of contents is offered as a menu: there are "Appetizers", "Soup and Crackers", "Word Salad", "Just Desserts" and a half dozen more bad culinary riffs. It appears that the pieces are all original--written by or commissioned by members of "The Lunch Group". Indeed, many of these were pieces specially commissioned for this collection, as the range of authors far outstrips the original group of early 1980s tech writers. Digital Deli is a verifiable trove of the 1980s Who's Who in computing, gaming and computer journalism, with articles by Steven Levy, Stephen Wozniak, J. Presper Eckert, Ted Nelson, Nolan Bushnell, Marc Blank, Bill Gates, William F. Buckley, Jr., and dozens of other names I'm not even familiar enough with the recognize the importance of. And there is a substantial showing of women authors as well.

What's most phenomenal about Digital Deli, for my purposes, is the content. While there is the obligatory "computing timeline", and other information documenting or commenting upon the mainstream research-military history of the computer, most of this book is on personal computing. And not just technical information--human interest stories, advice columns, top ten lists, humor...topics related to computing include education, music, art, romance, and more. There's an entire piece about how a family spends their day with their computer. It's full of trivia and oddities and offers a remarkable glimpse into how people were effortfully relating to, living with and working on computers. I've include pictures of just 2 of what must be over 100+ pieces here. This book is really a marvel, and a must own for anyone working on the personal computing era.

I've written in a previous post about my work with the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection. However, this past year's acquisition of a Seed grant, which supports initiatives between Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Labs, has enabled the WHGSC to finance a documentary on the creation and re-production of Tennis for Two, the 1958 analog tennis game that is one of the earliest computer games. 

Tennis for Two (or, T42) has a cumbersome history. It was a one-off game--built by the Instrumentation Division for a Brookhaven National Labs Visitor's Day (all the rage at government institutions during the Cold War!), played at various Vistor's Days through 1959, and then dismantled. The game was all analog technology--it ran no "program" so to speak. Its physical wires and relays were the program, and you could hear the click of the relays switching back and forth during play, a material sonic progenitor of the later digitized bleeps and blips of computer sound. (For more info on Higinbotham and T42, click here) The amazing Peter Takacs, a BNL physicist, is leading an effort at Brookhaven to rebuilt T42 from authentic parts gleaned from Ebay and other sources. Peter even hauled the whole beast down to the Museum of the Moving Image last fall for a special event on the origins of video games (the pictures provided are from this event). We set the thing up, vacuum tubes and analog Donner computer and a rat's nest of wires and all, but couldn't get it to work properly. There's some unresolved issues somewhere in the design that causes the ball to drop below the X-axis of the ground line--not that anyone cared. Attendees had a great time just standing in the presence of such a machine, and clearly enjoy fiddling with it, even if they couldn't have a proper "match".

But all this will be covered in the documentary! I'm operating as a production assistant for the project. Raiford (my advisor) and I met with the film production company, Vladar Company,  yesterday afternoon, and I'll be co-writing the treatment with Raiford over the next week. After that, I anticipate ceaseless emailing to organize schedules, scripting questions for the interviews, being on deck for the day-long shoot later this month, and then having input on post-production. I'm looking forward to all the new skills and experience I'll garner from this, and hope to put them into action for my own documentary project one day (I'm keeping it under my hat for now!). 

I really admire the intentions of this project: one of the larger services of the documentary is to provide museums, archives and other cultural institutions with something they can show as part of their game history collections. Most game history exhibitions start with Ralph Baer's Brown Box Odyssey. That very fact as alot to do with all the footwork Baer has done establishing himself as the de facto "Father of Video Games" and building Brown Box replicas for just about every institution that wants one. Baer has certainly made laudable contributions to game history, but thoughtful history also shouldn't be hung up on the idea of "origins", "firsts" or "beginnings". Part of the goal of the T42 documentary is to acknowledge the multiple, manifold histories of games, the many beginnings that contribute to a varied and diverse game culture. You can see then how this project fits quite cleanly into my research interests--even though I don't write about T42, I also have a passion for getting at the histories, experiences, affects and objects that get left out of the all-too-trite video game "timeline".