Presented by Bruce Damer, bruce@damer.com30 July 2008

The Digibarn Computer Museum

Developing a Practice of Digital IP Archaeology

Canadian, USC Grad (1986), wrote some of first graphical user interfaces for Xerox on PC for Elixir Technologies

Established Contact Consortium in 1995, held first conferences on avatars (Earth to Avatars, Oct 1996)

Wrote “Avatars!” in 1997. Hosted and supported nine conferences until 2003 on various aspects of virtual worlds (AVATARS Conferences, VLearn3D, Digital Biota)

Founded DigitalSpace in 1995, produced 3D worlds Adobe (Atmosphere), NASA (Digital Spaces, open source 3D worlds for design simulation of space exploration)

Digibarn Computer Museum (collection begun in 1987, Barn opened to public in July, 2002)

Virtual Worlds Timeline project (2006-present) with Stanford University, Library of Congress, Internet Archive

EvoGrid: Artificial Life Grid, SmartLab/London (2008).

See more at www.damer.com

Introducing The Digibarn Project Purposes Brief tour of the physical and cyber-

collection Who visits and who covers the project

Case DigiBarn IP Archaeology Project: Maze War: The First First Person Shooter

Candidate “IP Digs” Macintosh Business Plan & the Xerox Connection The LINC (1962) – Paradigm Shift for the

Industry Mockingbird – First Screen-Based Music System Origins of Wordstar & Birth of Word Processing The First Portable Musical Computer The Woz Wonderbook & Origins of the Apple ][ Xerox Star: An In-depth GUI history

Lessons Learned from IP Archaeology Is it Time for an IP Art Bank venture?

The Digibarn Computer MuseumPurpose: to capture and share the stories and

artifactsof the birth and evolution of personal,

interactivecomputing and the digital lifestyle.

Time Frame: covering those years in the 20th Century

which created the promethean inventionthat defines our world in the 21st

Brief Tours of the Physical and Cyber Collection…

Housed in 5,000 sq ft barn on 19th Century Farmstead

in the Bear Creek Valley near Boulder CreekSanta Cruz Mountains, California

Start and Finish: Calculators, Computing Devices, PDAs

Lineage of Personal Computers: 1975-90

Magazines, Books, T-Shirts, Documents, Manuals, Business Plans

The Story of Xerox – A Specialty

Running Systems – Hallmark of the Collection

Some Large Systems – Cray 1, Q2, LINC, TR-48, S-100 Multi

Cyber Collection – Web Site with 500,000 Objects:documents, images, video, audio, community sourced, Creative Commons NC-SA licensed

Who’s Visiting – Some Interesting Personalities

Who’s covering – Media Exposure

Maze War was the first multiplayer 3D first-person shooter.

Players were represented as Avatars (vector drawn names at first, 3D

eyeballs in Xerox Alto version, late 70’s). Displayed maps of the levels. Player positions shown on map. Originally written by Steve Colley

in 1973-1974 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

Case Digital IP Archaeology: Maze War @ 30

1972 Imlac PDS-1D Restoration(Tom Uban - Indiana)

PDS-1D CPU Front CPU Left PDS-1D CPU Back CPU Right

15” Monitor Right

NASA/Ames Imlac Maze summer 1973

Started with Steve Colley experimentingwith display of 3D images on the Imlac Sketched out at Togo’s sandwich shop Rotating wire-frame hidden-line-removed 3D cube

Then idea of a 16x16 array of bits defining a maze Absence of bits defines corridors Steve worked out how to display perspective view

Howard Palmer and Steve developed single player Maze Adding ability to move through the maze Simple game: Try to find exit out of the Maze

Howard and Greg developed initial multi-player version Two Imlacs connected with serial links Soon the idea of shooting each other was added

Top-down view of original Maze (16 x

32)

MIT Imlac PDS-1next to E&S LDS displays

Imlac PDS-1 at NASA/Ames

Maze Moves from NASA Ames to MIT and out onto the ARPAnet

J.C.R. Licklider & Al Vezza

Maze spanned across the Arpanet with players at USC and Stanford In use at:

BBN, Case,MIT, Mitre,NASA/Ames, SRI-ARC/NIC,Stanford AI,UCLA, UCSB,Univ. of Illinois,and elsewhere

“Legend has it that at one point during that period, MazeWar was banned by DARPA from the Arpanet because half of all the packets in a given month were MazeWar packets flying between Stanford and MIT.”

Digibarn anniversary event, November 2004:

Happy 30th Birthday Maze War!

Panel of original creators of Maze

Close-up view of Maze Game in action with bot non-player characters and other human powered “avatars”

Maze War in Action at event

Maze War in Action

Maze War Film Clip

Legal Maze of multi-player patentsSitrick vs. Electronic Arts in 2000, Sony 2005 Initiated the un-earthing of Maze history Received an e-mail in March 2000

from Charles Frankston at Microsoft Attorneys

looking toidentifynetworkedmulti-playergamesprior-art< 1982

Case wassettled outof court

Prior art from Maze@30 on DigiBarn site in 2004, Sony cases

Some other candidate IP Archaeological “Digs”

Macintosh Business Plan & the Xerox PARC Connection

The LINC (1962) – A Paradigm Shift for the Industry

Mockingbird – First Screen-Based Music Composition System (1980)

Origins of Wordstar & Birth of Word Processing (Rob Barnaby)

The First Portable Musical Computer (Daniel Kottke, 1980)

The Woz Wonderbook & Origins of the Apple ][ (Steve Wozniak 1977)

Xerox Star: An In-depth GUI history (Norm Cox, 1979-80)

Lessons Learned from IP Archaeology

It is time consuming but affordable (5-20K budgets) It is time-limited (aging, health of original practitioners) Practitioners are keen to have their legacies recognized

and stories told and are willing to contribute significantly

A rich variety of assets are generated (running systems, oral histories, slides, video, images, document scans, running code)

Deeds of Gift and agreement for artifacts, copyrights licensing is important also (Creative Commons is sufficient?)

A huge area remains to be “dug up” (beyond computing/tech: biotech, mechanical & electrical engineering, pharma, communications, etc, etc).

Your thoughts?

IPArtBank.comIs it Time for an IP Art Bank venture?