Homer and Associates was really
one of a kind kinda of company. Founded by Peter Conn, originally I got
hired to program Homer II, a visual realtime mixing console. Homer I is
another whole story, but before my time.
Homer II consisted of 16 slide projectors, 4 movie projectors,
a 4 track tape recorder, 24 visual channels (each with its own Z80) touch
sensitive sliders, a master Z80 S100 bus system and featuring "the
joy stick bumper " control, which looked liked the gear shift right
out of a 1964 mustang convertible.
The idea was that you would program a visual sequence, then play the
sequence in sync with the sound track on the joystick, including cascades,
bumps, cuts, etc. The whole thing would be recorded, and if you wanted
to, like an audio mixer, go back and do over dubs, making corrections.
Then once you had the perfect "hero" recording, you take the
8" floppy disc with the hero recording and the trays of slides to
the optical printer, and record it to motion picture film, making multiple
passes, one tray at a time. Now that I think about it, it was a crazy
idea. We actually got the whole thing to work. And it worked great!
Forth & Charles Moore
We hired Forth, Inc. and got Charles Moore, the inventor of FORTH to program
the console host computer. I learned FORTH and worked with Charles. I
programmed the 2K byte EPROM in each visual channels. On the Master Z80
system we ran PolyForth a multi tasking system in 32K bytes. We had an
extra 16K RAM for buffers and things. If I remember right, the system
ran four tasks, but that was 20 years ago, my memory may be hazy.
Anyway, I learn not only FORTH from Charles Moore, but also how to factor
code in to small reusable routines, WORDs they're called in FORTH. I learned
Object Oriented Programming without knowing it. Also a lot of use of vectors.
Its a cool language. Charles Moore was a great inspiration to me, and
really taught me a great deal that they never taught me in computer programming
school.
CAT-700
After we got the basic Homer II working and were able to record on the
optical printer, Peter had another idea. He wanted to be able to see the
movement of the optical printer, and see a prior frame compared to the
current frame. We already had a video assist on the Fries Mitchell 35mm.
What we needed was a Frame Buffer. We heard of S100 video board called
the CAT-100, which was 1-bit frame buffer, good enough for what we needed.
Somehow we never found a 1-bit version, but we found 7-bit version in
the recycler!
We flew to Reno, rented a car and drove to a log cabin up in the hills
of Truckie California. We got a demo of the thing. The guys were super
secret and didn't want us to see the controlling program. It worked, so
we bought it, and then flew onto Palo-Alto and met the French guy who
designed it. They checked it out and it was OK. This was the days before
computer designed boards, and all the traces on the board were curvy,
kinda like a Vango painting. We learned that it was 7-bit (CAT-700) because
it would of been an 8-bit, but they could not get the 8th bit to work.
We spent the night in Palo Alto with a Stanford friend of peters working
on a crazy secret Apple project, the Lisa.
32KByte Paint System
So I got the CAT-700 frame buffer to work, programmed in FORTH. So in that
32K we had an optical printer control system, and a paint system, all in
one. (Also the OS, compiler, debugger, etc.) We later hooked up a Summigraphic
Bitpad (before the Watcom tablet) and were able to draw on top of digitized
frames. It got to the point where we needed TWO optical printers, one to
digitize from film, and the other to record to film. Rube Goldberg is not
strong enough descriptive to describe the system, with the filter wheels
and all on stepper motors, it made music. The first use of the system was
effects for Steve Miller Music Video, Abracadabra. I also remember using
it on the George Clinton Video, Atomic Dog.
This photo was taken right after we got the system to work. I had hooked
up a analog slider box, which controlled things like color. There were
4 color maps we could switch between instantly We did a lot of work in
planes, using 2 planes for the original image to be rotoscoped, and the
other 5 planes to draw onto. This photo was taken for a article in Millimeter
Magazine. The photo ended up being a two page color spread, and I think
Peter was pissed, cause I got premier exposure.
TTL logic
At Homer and Assoc. I also learned TTL logic and designed a number of computer boards
for the S100 bus. One that controlled stepper motors with a timer chip
(Motorola 6840). Another to control the Slide Projectors also using the
same Motorola timer chip to control the lamp triacs. My favorite thing,
about the system, was the use of the cassette storage interface as a cheap
timecode reader/writer.
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