John V. Blankenbaker, born in 1929 to a farming family in Oklahoma, is best known as the man who made the world’s first personal computer. His Kenbak-1 machine first went on sale in 1971—some five years before Steve Wozniak released Apple I. When Blankenbaker was a freshman at Oregon State College in 1949, he started the design of a computing device. By 1957, he had envisioned a simple computer, which he described in a paper, “Logically Micro-Programmed Computers,” published in Computer Transactions. In 1970, he began the design of Kenbak-1 as a private endeavor in his Los Angeles garage. The next year he founded Kenbak Corporation and built and sold about 40 Kenbak-1 digital computers, mainly to schools, before selling out to CTI Educational Products and shuttering his company entirely in 1973. Blankenbaker retired in 1985 and currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Steve Wozniak (born August 11, 1950), nicknamed “Woz,” is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer and technology entrepreneur who co-founded Apple Inc. He is known as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Wozniak single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, which was the computer that launched Apple. He primarily designed the 1977 Apple II, while Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply. In 1990, Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of the organization’s initial funding. Wozniak’s favorite video game is Tetris, and he has the condition prosopagnosia (or face-blindness).
I thought being character No. 1001 would be appropriate for a computing pioneer like Woz. Here are 14 other characters I chose to honor numerically: No. 88 (Doc Emmett Brown), No. 100 (Benjamin Franklin), No. 200 (Johnny Cash), No. 300 (Leonidas I), No. 400 (Charles Darwin), No. 500 (William Gibson), No. 600 (Jeff Mangum), No. 666 (Nero), No. 700 (J. D. Salinger), No. 800 (Niall Ó Glacáin), No. 888 (Bernie Sanders), No. 900 (Don Hertzfeldt), No. 999 (Edward Snowden), No. 1000 (Alan Turing). As I was compiling this short list, I realized all 14 were male. Sorry, ladies. The patriarchy’s role in gender inequality and my personal focus on political leaders, artists, popular athletes and technology innovators are certainly reflected in the characters I’ve selected. My 8-bit characters are almost exactly 80% male and 20% female, which isn’t very equitable, but I have been making efforts to discover and celebrate a greater proportion of female characters with ongoing series like women in STEM. Modern cultures and our history books are still pretty awful at acknowledging the contributions of women, especially women artists and scientists, but I’m trying to be better.
Alan Turing was a pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war, he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts, when such behavior was still a criminal act in the UK. He accepted treatment with DES (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He was born on June 23, 1912 and died on June 7, 1954 from cyanide poisoning.
No. 1000. I finally hit four figures. Over the past five years, I have created an encyclopedia/journal of 1000 playable 8-bit characters for Mascot Mashup: Gorillas, my remake/mashup of the classic QBasic Gorillas artillery game. With this milestone reached—and with my second child due in less than three weeks—I will probably abandon my weekly schedule of primitive pixel art sometime this summer and reduce my commitment to whenever I feel like it. No matter what I do in the future, I am amazed that I stuck with this project for so long.
Edward Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former contractor for the U.S. government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 without prior authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property. Russian authorities granted him one-year asylum, which was later extended to three years.
Note: Edward Snowden’s principled whistleblowing has fueled important debates over mass surveillance and government secrecy. It’s been three years now. Snowden is still in Russia, but since September 2015 has been an essential voice on Twitter. Check out this Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) article: “3 Years Later, the Snowden Leaks Have Changed How the World Sees NSA Surveillance.”
Geronimo was a prominent leader from the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe. He led his people’s defense of their homeland against the United States military. Born on June 16, 1829 in Mexico, Geronimo continued the tradition of the Apaches resisting white colonization of their homeland in the Southwest, participating in raids in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora. Geronimo’s raids and related combat actions were a part of the prolonged period of the Apache-American conflict, that started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848. After years of war Geronimo finally surrendered to U.S. troops in 1886. While he became a celebrity, he spent the last two decades of his life as a prisoner of war. He died of pneumonia on February 17, 1909, as a prisoner at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
David Bazan (born January 22, 1976) is an indie rock singer-songwriter from Seattle, Washington. Bazan was the lead singer and creative force behind the band Pedro the Lion and was the lead singer of Headphones. In early 2006, he began performing and recording under his own name. Bazan’s solo ablums include Curse Your Branches (2009), Strange Negotiations (2011) and last month’s Blanco (May 13, 2016). Blanco is made up of remixed and updated songs that were previously available in a limited series called Bazan Monthly: Volume 1 (2014) and Bazan Monthly: Volume 2 (2015). Even more recently, on Twitter, Bazan and TW Walsh (former Pedro the Lion bandmate) announced their new rock band, Lo Tom, with Jason Martin and Trey Many.
I’ve been listening to Pedro the Lion for many years, but I also really enjoy David Bazan’s new music. Three of the first four songs on Bazan Monthly: Volume 1 (“Impermanent Record,” “Deny Myself” and “Sparkling Water”) are particularly amazing—as well as “Oblivion” (which appears on both Volume 2 and Blanco). I’d like to make it to one of Bazan’s summer tour dates in Washington or Idaho—especially one of the shows with Laura Gibson, who is fantastic. The June 16 show (happening in two days) in Boise, Idaho has become the only possibility now because work commitments conflicted with the Washington dates. However, since my wife is 36-weeks pregnant with our second child, I am thinking hard about traveling to Idaho this week—though yesterday she told me to go as a Father’s Day present. (So I’m probably going.) On March 21, 2016, I was able see David Bazan play an acoustic house show in Eugene, Oregon, and I am grateful for that; it was an ideal mix of solo, Pedro the Lion and Headphones songs. But I still want to see Bazan and Laura Gibson on tour together.
Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world’s leading expert. Wilson is known for his scientific career, his role as “the father of sociobiology” and “the father of biodiversity,” his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. Among his greatest contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography, which he developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur. Island biogeography is seen as the foundation of the development of conservation area design, as well as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity of Stephen P. Hubbell.
Tim Berners-Lee (born June 8, 1955) is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year. Berners-Lee is the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Note: In today’s New York Times article, “The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It,” Tim Berners-Lee discussed how the modern web’s corporate control and government surveillance “completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.” On that note, Berners-Lee will give a live-streamed keynote address, “Re-decentralizing the web – some strategic questions,” today at the Decentralized Web Summit at 9:45 a.m. PT. The theme of the summit is “locking the web open.” Happy birthday to Tim.
Douglas Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human-computer interaction, which resulted in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers and precursors to graphical user interfaces (bitmapped screens). These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. The underlying technologies of the demonstration influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Engelbart’s Law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, and graduated from Oregon State College in Corvallis in 1948. As someone who has worked at Oregon State University for over 11 years now, I can say that Engelbart is considered one of the luminaries of the institution; he’s up there with Linus Pauling. The OSU Alumni Association has a nice story on Engelbart: “Up Close and Personal: Inventor of the Computer Mouse.”
Steve Wozniak – No. 1001
Steve Wozniak (born August 11, 1950), nicknamed “Woz,” is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer and technology entrepreneur who co-founded Apple Inc. He is known as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Wozniak single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, which was the computer that launched Apple. He primarily designed the 1977 Apple II, while Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply. In 1990, Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of the organization’s initial funding. Wozniak’s favorite video game is Tetris, and he has the condition prosopagnosia (or face-blindness).
I thought being character No. 1001 would be appropriate for a computing pioneer like Woz. Here are 14 other characters I chose to honor numerically: No. 88 (Doc Emmett Brown), No. 100 (Benjamin Franklin), No. 200 (Johnny Cash), No. 300 (Leonidas I), No. 400 (Charles Darwin), No. 500 (William Gibson), No. 600 (Jeff Mangum), No. 666 (Nero), No. 700 (J. D. Salinger), No. 800 (Niall Ó Glacáin), No. 888 (Bernie Sanders), No. 900 (Don Hertzfeldt), No. 999 (Edward Snowden), No. 1000 (Alan Turing). As I was compiling this short list, I realized all 14 were male. Sorry, ladies. The patriarchy’s role in gender inequality and my personal focus on political leaders, artists, popular athletes and technology innovators are certainly reflected in the characters I’ve selected. My 8-bit characters are almost exactly 80% male and 20% female, which isn’t very equitable, but I have been making efforts to discover and celebrate a greater proportion of female characters with ongoing series like women in STEM. Modern cultures and our history books are still pretty awful at acknowledging the contributions of women, especially women artists and scientists, but I’m trying to be better.