Moonbase Studios

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

While I would have loved to have continued on with the tales of my interactions with various computers over the years, I needed to make money. In this economy, when a job comes a long, you take it. Commerce vs. art—the battle rages on.

I’ve been very busy since November. There’s been projects for the City of Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, California, a large pharmaceutical company (more on this in a bit) and a major broadcast network.

I’m in the process of reworking the pharmaceutical piece, which was a show opener for an international corporate pow-wow. After I remove all their trademarks, I’ll be able to post the piece online. It was a cel animated short, created in 1080p/23.976 fps using Toon Boom Animate, Lightwave 3D (for backdrops) and stitched together with After Effects CS4 and Final Cut Pro. Here’s a few stills (click on the thumbnail to see the full image):

John Lotshaw Animation

After getting caught using the computer for (horrors!) word processing, Dad realized that I wasn’t going to learn COBOL. After five months of trying to get me and my sister to wrap our brains around the sublime delights of the PICture clause, I had only advanced to about chapter three in the book. This was exactly three chapter farther than my sister, who displayed precisely zero interest in COBOL, had gotten. Deciding to pick his battles, he let me use the TI Professional for whatever I wanted to use it for.

This only served to let me do at home what I was already doing at school. A few of the departments had gotten their own TRS-80s (they were now using the all-in-one Model III, instead of the Model I), and I, along with a few other of my friends, would connive to get out of doing algebra by using the Math Department computer to “solve the equations”. Of course, we were pouring over the source code for improved versions of “Super Star Trek”, not solving quadratic equations.

At one point, I talked our band director into letting me write a program that would let him create the charts that were used to create the half-time shows that were performed at football games. I wrote an animated demo that showed, using the clunky graphics of the TRS-80, how the charts could be laid out. Naturally, I had no idea how to write a real application like that, and after working on it for the rest of the school year, I had to abandon it when summer vacation started. That was my first dog-and-pony show (complete with smoke and mirrors)!

My senior year, I dropped out of marching band to be the editor of the school newspaper. In those days, we did the paper with IBM Selectric typewriters (still the finest writing machine ever devised), layout sheets and rubber cement. I wanted to move into the computer age (as well as not have to justify text manually), and since I had to produce the first issue myself (I was the sole staff member), I did it at home with our TI Professional and our printer’s enhanced mode. I only did one issue—a special issue to commemorate our first-ever football victory over our hated rivals at Dalton High—but it was enough to convince me that this was the way I needed to produce the paper for the rest of the year, once the journalism class started and there was actually a staff.

I convinced Coach Gray, the computer instructor, to let me use his new Morrow Micro Decision I CP/M computer and WordStar 3.3 to produce the copy for the paper. I still had to type everything in by hand, but the computer took care of the formatting for me. Plus, he had a near-letter-quality printer hooked up to it, so I was off to the races. This wasn’t exactly desktop publishing. It was more like “desktop typesetting”.

Ironically, this was pretty much the exact same method used to produce a lot of publications in those days, using phototypesetters that poured out streams of text that were then hot glued onto a layout board to create camera-ready art. I didn’t know that at the time, and when I got to the University of Georgia and show how they were producing The Red and Black, I was astounded to see they were using a method I’d cobbled together on my own!

Coach Gray had another really cool computer. It was the TRS-80 Model 4P. This was a portable version of the pinnacle of the eight-bit TRS-80 line.

Well, I say “portable”. That’s kind of a relative term, isn’t it? I mean, it had a handle!

This was a fun computer. I remember taking the Pascal class during the last quarter of my senior year (I already had all the credits I needed to graduate, so I was goofing off, academically speaking). This is the machine I learned my first language other than BASIC on, and it was a fun machine to work with. It still had the same clunky graphics, but now on a 80×24 screeen, instead of 64×16. And the tube had a green phosphor instead of white—just the thing to make it look professional!

Off to UGA

Graduating in 1984, I entered the University of Georgia and schlepped off to Athens. I had hoped to get a computer for my high school graduation, but I ended up with a typewriter (and not even a Selectic at that! It was a Royal and had this daisy-wheel print mechanism and the most unsatisfying keyboard I’d see until the adoption of membrane-based keyboards by the computer industry). The machine I’d had my eye on was a TI Portable Professional Computer (again, handle on the case = “portable”). That’s it in the foreground of the picture to the right.

In Athens, I found myself surrounded by all sorts of computers. There were microcomputer labs all over campus, and some were in the most unlikely places. The music reference library had an original IBM PC (complete with PC-DOS 2.0) and two original Commodore PET 2001 computers—the ones with the funky calculator keyboard. The Education School had several labs filled with PCs, Apple II+ (the black ones from Bell & Howell), Apple IIes, and a Lisa 2 that had been converted to being a Macintosh XL (with a LaserWriter, to boot). The coolest lab, however, was Denmark Hall.

Denmark Hall, on UGA’s North Campus, was home to the Environmental Design school. In the basement, however, was a small computer lab with about eight computers. It was quiet, it was hidden, and it had a quirky assortment of computers. I remember an Apple IIe, on which I ran a Applesoft program I’d written that generated NPCs for a weekly D&D game we played in my dorm; a DEC Rainbow 100, which ran a funky version of CP/M-86 and required custom formatted floppies; and several TI Professional Computers, which meant I could run software I brought with me from Dalton. I also got a TI PC version of TurboPascal 2 and remember using Samna Word III.

The art school set up a lab of Macintosh computers that I used to frequent as well. They were all Mac 128 and 512s, hooked up to ImageWriter I printers. If you gave the attendant your student ID, you could check out a copy of MacWrite or MacPaint. If you were lucky, you got to use one of the Mac 512s, all of which had the external floppy. No more floppy shuffle (and if you only had 128K of RAM with MacOS System 1, you did the floppy shuffle. A lot.)

My sophomore year, I was able to convince one of the Journalism School professors to let me take an advanced class on broadcasting management. The late Barry Sherman (He later became the head of prestigous Peabody Awards and was always amused by the Peabody-Sherman connection) was very interested in computers and offered to give anyone a bonus of a full letter upgrade on their final project’s grade if they used a computer. Today, that’d be kind of silly, since everyone would use a computer to put together their project, but in 1986, this was uncharted territory. Not only did I use the Macs at the Art School (which had been upgraded to include a MacPlus and a LaserWriter) to create and typeset our report, but I also dragged an IBM PC into the oral examination so I could do what-if simulations on our team’s numbers with Lotus 1-2-3.

This would have been impressive if we hadn’t received a B (which would have been a C without the computer bonus).

About this time, Scott Cochran, my dormmate, showed me an ad in The Red and Black promising a new computer that could produce “Disney-style animation”. I had started to make plans to purchase an Apple IIe over the summer and was more than a little bit skeptical at this claim. However, I allowed him to drag me down to Athens Microcomputer Center on Broad Street for the demo.

Things were never the same after that.

John Lotshaw Computers, General, Hardware, Software

I was thinking the other day about the eclectic assortment of computers that I’ve used over the years. I then realized that not only had I grown up around computers, but next year will mark 30 years that I have actively been using these infernal contraptions!

That’s thirty years out of forty-three. To quote Ferris Bueller, “how’s that for being born under a bad sign?”

In the beginning, there was the mainframe

My first exposure to computers was with beasts like this. This monster is one of the last of the once-common IBM System/360 mainframe computers. On display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA, it is no longer functional, but at one time, this machine and thousands like it ran American business.

My father was a COBOL slinger (no jokes, please). He first worked as an operator on an IBM 1401 (which the Museum has operational) for Package Products, Inc. in Charlotte NC. He later became a programmer there when they got a 360. He kept a COBOL compiler on every computer he owned (more on that later), and used terms that are now out-of-date, like calling the hard drive a “Winchester” or referring to RAM as “core”.

I remember as a child, going to see Dad at the office and walking into the computer room. It was always a thrill for me. Seeing those huge (well, to a four-year-old) machines like the card sorters and the line printers was thrilling. I remember one time, he asked me to draw a picture of Charlie Brown (I was in my “copying Peanuts out of the newspaper” phase). I did, and he came back with a calendar the computer had printed of Charlie Brown using the ASCII (sorry… it was IBM… EBCDIC) characters. Okay, it wasn’t my drawing of Charlie Brown, but be fair… it’s not like they had a flatbed scanner or anything like that back there!

I never got to use these computers, but I include it here because it was, after all, my first exposure to a computer. Compared to machines of today, they were appallingly slow, frighteningly small and horrifyingly primitive. I can remember discussing computers with my father, and he reminisced about how excited all the programmers at Package Products were because they were getting a memory expansion for the computer. They were upgrading from 4 kilobytes to 16! He said they were all scratching their heads, wondering “What are we going to do with all that room?”

Of course, adding “19″ to all their two-digit year fields didn’t even occur to them.

Taking out the trash

In 1980, I started high school. By this time, we were living in Dalton GA. Dad, having spent time with E.T. Barwick and Shaw Industries, was now working as a systems analyst for Dalton Computer Services, which sold Texas Instruments minicomputers to the carpet industry and to local governments.

As a freshman at Northwest Whitfield High, my main activity (and opportunity for social interaction) was in the alto saxophone section of the band. Every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we practiced after school, starting at 3:05. One day, while rushing to practice, I noticed that the door to the computer lab was open and there were students in there, pounding away at the computers. A light went on inside my head, and I rushed to tell my friends Hoyt and Jeff about this. There were computers in the school… and we could use them!

Well, I say there were computers… I mean, just barely computers. The computer lab was full of these:

Yup. The Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.

Go ahead and shudder. I won’t stop you.

This beauty has it all: RCA black-and-white television (with the tuner stripped out) for the monitor, cassette drive for program and data storage, blazing fast 1.77 MHz Zilog Z-80 processor, Palo Alto TinyBASIC in ROM, 128×48 pixel graphics, 64×16 character mode and a whopping 4 kilobytes of RAM. Even by 1980, this was outdated. The instructor had a souped-up version of this machine, with the Expansion Interface, Level II BASIC (from Microsoft, no less!) and two 140K floppy drives. There was even a disk-based operating system (TRSDOS) and a network controller.

It may have been outdated, but to us, it was heaven. As soon as the bell would ring to end classes at 3:05, my friends and I would rush to the bandroom, grab our partially assembled instruments, and then scurry to the computer room. We’d plop down in front of one of the machines, and begin the laborious process of loading whatever program we were working on in from tape. If we were lucky, it would finally load, then we’d have maybe fifteen minutes to slam out whatever code we’d scribbled down in our notebooks, run it, note whatever errors popped up, then save the program back off to tape. If all went well, we had three minutes to grab our stuff and run down to the parking lot, assembling our horns as we ran down the stairs. We eventually got things timed out to where we could get there just as the whistle blew and we were to be in place and at attention.

One day, my father came to my room to tell me that it was time for dinner and he noticed the BASIC code I had strewn all across the floor. I told him about my daily treks to the computer room and why it caused me to have to stay after band practice for what we called “Sunset Squad”—extra marching because of various infractions, including being late for practice. At that point, he began making plans for us to have a computer at home.

A CPU of our own

Personally, I’d have been happy with any of the fine computers below:

The only one of these computers I had any kind of a shot at was the IBM PC. The others—the TRS-80, the Apple II, the Commodore—weren’t real computers. The IBM… it was a real computer. I mean, it was from IBM, right? After all, no one ever got fired for buying IBM.

Problem was, the IBM was pretty new, and extremely expensive. So, the first computer we tried to get ended up being one of these:

Amazing what you can find on the Internet, isn’t? That is a Texas Instruments DS-990 Model 1 minicomputer. It was a single user version of the minicomputers that Dalton Computer Services sold. It had a 16-bit TMS 99000 microprocessor in it (the same chip later used in the TI 99/4a) and it had a multitasking operating system. It included compilers for COBOL, Pascal and BASIC. It also had no floppy drives. Think of it as a forerunner of the original iMac.

It also was louder than a backfiring dump truck and consumed more power than several counties in South Georgia. It was also vetoed by my mother, who wasn’t having anything like that in the house.

Fortunately, TI decided to get into the nascent personal computer game with an entry of their own. This was to be my “first” computer.

Nothing “Personal”, just “Professional”

Shortly after the release of the IBM Personal Computer, there were a flood of MS-DOS computers that weren’t 100% compatible with the IBM version. While Microsoft had cagily worked a deal with IBM that allowed them to license the OS to other computers, the IBM PC had an IBM-specific BIOS chip. Without that, your computer was just another MS-DOS machine. What no one realized at that time was how important IBM compatibility was to become. It would take the release of the Compaq to usher in the era of true compatibles. However, that’s a story for someone else to tell.

The Texas Instruments Professional Computer was, for it’s day, a marvel of microcomputing. It sported an Intel 8086 running at 5MHz, instead of the IBM’s 8088. It also had quad density floppy drives (720K per disk) and a really nice keyboard. Graphics were very high resolution, with 3 bit planes and up to 720×300 resolution. As you can see from the photo, there were versions of Lotus 1-2-3 custom made for it, as well as all of Microsoft’s apps and compilers. There was even a version of TurboPascal for it!

I still remember when Dad brought this baby home. We had just finished out some rooms in the basement of our house, with one of them designated as “the office”. He and I set up the machine, along with the TI Model 850 printer (the one in the photo is a Model 880, with the font ROM cartridges).

It was a really slick system. Dual floppy drives, 256K of RAM (!), dot matrix printer… it was a screamer.

Problem was, I wasn’t allowed to touch it.

Not immediately, anyway.

Remember, Dad came from the world of data processing. Not “information technology”, not “IT”—data processing. He didn’t see a computer as creative tool. It was a machine for running numbers. Data in, data out. That’s what it was for. And how did you do that?

Yup, here it comes.

COBOL.

The edict came down: my sister and I were not allowed to touch the computer, until we had completed a workbook that he got for us about structured COBOL. In fact, that was the title: “Structured COBOL”. I think still have that blasted thing around here somewhere, lurking the bottom of a box of other half-remembered stuff from almost thirty years ago. (That’s not the cover, although if O’Reilly had been publishing books about COBOL in 1982, I daresay that’s what the cover would look like.)

Meanwhile, my friends were learning all they could about computers. We were the first “computer generation”. My friends were experimenting with Commodore 64s and the TRS-80s at school. What was I doing at the time?

This:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. KILL-ME-PLEASE.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'My name is John.'.
DISPLAY 'I am being forced to learn COBOL.'.
DISPLAY 'Shoot me before I create another PICture clause!'.
STOP RUN.

It was enough to make my ears bleed. However, I gave it the old college try, but soon realized that I had as much patience for learning COBOL as I do for just about anything else in this world: none whatsoever. It sickened my soul to know that the tools I needed to express myself in new ways were sitting unused in the basement, and only because I couldn’t muster up so much as a molecule of concern about ISAM indexed files. This state of affairs was intolerable, and I was resolved to do whatever I could to resolve the situation in my favor. Of course, this meant sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to use the computer when I should have been sleeping, but I wasn’t letting that stop me.

At least, not until I was discovered.

John Lotshaw Computers, General, Hardware, Software

It’s been a busy summer for Moonbase. Since the last update to this blog:

• Anthrocon in Pittsburgh and DragonCon in Atlanta were successful from a sales viewpoint. Right now, Moonbase lives and dies by sales of books, and things haven’t been friendly for those kinds of sales for the first part of the year. Let’s face it: “comic books” are a textbook definition of “discretionary spending”, and everyone’s wallets were welded shut for the first part of the year. However, things seemed to go a lot smoother at these later cons, which I hope means improvement over last year’s non-existent Christmas sales.
• Top secret meeting in New York. Can’t say what it’s about, or I’d hafta kill ya. But it’s big.
• General Protection Fault launches and ships. In spite of a last-minute printer change (less said about the better… suffice to say, it’s for the better), Jeffery T. Darlington’s General Protection Fault returns to print under the Moonbase Press aegis with “$ which spoon /usr/bin/which: no spoon in $PATH”, the fifth GPF collection and the first from Moonbase Press.
• Accidental Centaurs prepares to relaunch. My webcomic, Accidental Centaurs will return to the web on Janaury 15, 2010. This is the eighth anniversary of the strip’s original launch. The new version will be a reboot of the feature, and will concentrate on telling the story of Alex and Sam in a linear fashion. Also, the new site will be set up using the ComicsPress mods to WordPress.

John Lotshaw Accidental Centaurs, Accidental Centaurs, Bill Holbrook, Comics, Conventions, General, General Protection Fault, Project Announcements, Webcomics

My animation and graphics production blog is on Facebook, as well as on Twitter. The twitter feed is “MoonbaseStudios”…

John Lotshaw Uncategorized

I have been slightly remiss in my blogging. Horrors!

Anyhoo, Moonbase Studios is now on Twitter… Woo!

John Lotshaw Uncategorized

… you know,  about not wanting to belong to any organization that would have me as a member?

This time, I’m going to have to make an exception to that. I’ve just been informed that I have been accepted into the National Cartoonists’ Society.

I remember the first time I ever heard of the NCS. I was at North Whitfield Middle School in the library, reading an article about Charles Schulz, in which he mentioned the NCS. I remember thinking, “Wow… a organization made up of nothing but cartoonists! I’d love to be a part of that!”

The NCS has been described as “a drinking club with a drawing problem”. I have no problem with that, as I went to the University of Georgia, a drinking school with a education problem. I am looking forward to going to the Reuben Awards (which I’m trying to pull together) and meeting a lot of the people who’s work I’ve admired over the years.

Being in the NCS puts me in such heady company as Scott Adams, Stephan Pastis and Gary Trudeau (some living members you may have heard of), as well as deceased members like Charles Schulz, Walt Kelly and Rube Goldberg, It’s a honor just to be considered.

John Lotshaw Comics, Fanboy, Uncategorized

I’ve been wanting to give the Cintiq a real work out and see what it can do. I’d done some coloring, but I wanted to try it out with a full page of comic art, as this one was really one of the two reasons I bought it.

Accidental Centaurs had been put on hiatus and left in the lurch back in October of 2008. I didn’t officially cancel the feature, as I really enjoy the characters and I have plans to return to the adventures of Alex, Sam and Lenny. Since the webcomic had ended in the middle of a story, I thought I’d do the next page. The results are at the right.

The good

Speed. One thing is certain: the Cintiq speeds things up. I got this done in about half the time that it would have taken had I done the art in pencil, then ink, then scan, then color.

Neatness. I really miss dropping my palm onto an area of not-quite-dry india ink and smudging it into unrecognizability.

Oops.  Forgot the <SARCASM> tags.

Cleaner lines. The lines I got from drawing on paper could vary in their quality. Depending on how much ink is in the nib, the paper at any given spot or any of a kajillion variables, I could get a beautiful, clean line or one that… well, one that because of which, “Photoshop” became a verb. The Cintiq line is clean and consistent. Once I get the pressure sensitivity set just right, I should be a very happy camper indeed.

The bad

The feel. One of the great things about Bristol is the feel of the pen as it is drawn over the paper. There’s a tactile sense that’s hard to describe, but is very important feedback that helps me as I draw. Drawing on the Cintiq feels like I’m drawing with a ballpoint pen on glass.

Of course, that’s essentially because I am drawing with a ballpoint pen on glass. Duh.

Calibration. Since the LCD panel lies a few millimeters under the sensing surface, there’s a bit of a gap between the end of the stylus and the actual display. As you work and move your head about, the calibration will appear to be off as the parallax shifts.

Overall conclusions

The good really outweighs the bad, and the bad really isn’t all that bad. I can get used to the minor what-have-yous and will eventually develop workarounds for these problems, just as I did when I moved from marker-type pens to dip pens and india ink.

Next up: animation!

John Lotshaw Accidental Centaurs, Accidental Centaurs, Computers, Hardware, Peripherials

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have completed a new demo DVD. I’m not going to put the whole disc online, but here’s the intro animation for the disc.

The complete demo reel can been seen on the main Moonbase Studios page.

John Lotshaw General, Project Announcements

Two cons are coming up in the very near future for Moonbase Press (the dead tree side of my work). First is Momocon, which will be March 14th and 15th at Georgia Tech. We’ll only be there on the 14th.

The biggie is going to be Furry Weekend Atlanta, being held on the next weekend (March 20-22) At the Atlanta Hilton. Bill Holbrook will be at the table, and if all the stars align like I think they will, we’ll be debuting a new Kevin & Kell Treasury there!

John Lotshaw Conventions, Print