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ASCII Photo Booth by Scott Murray

Over New Year’s, I got to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, and I’m finally going to post some pho­tos from my visit.

First, what I really wanted to see was the com­puter with the first true GUI -- the Xerox Alto:

Next up, the clas­sic PDP-1, known to me as the machine on which the very first video game, Spacewar!, was pro­grammed by some folks at MIT in 1962. Today, you can play Spacewar! online. When you do, notice that the space­ships are affected by “grav­ity” from the black hole in the cen­ter of the screen, but that the fired mis­siles are not. That’s due to the fact that the space­ship cal­cu­la­tions were already max­ing out the PDP-1’s proces­sor cycles. And yes, that hulk­ing mono­lith in the back­ground is the CPU. The dis­play and light pen are the inter­face. And those really are stacks of manila punch­cards on the desk.

Two more land­mark devices: On the left, an Interface Message Processor. This par­tic­u­lar IMP was one of the first nodes on the ARPANET, which of course even­tu­ally grew into the Internet that we know today. On the right, one of Doug Engelbart’s first mice.

And now for a com­puter that nobody except the museum has heard of: the Kitchen Computer. From the museum’s description:

The Kitchen Computer was fea­tured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus cat­a­log as a $10,600 tool for house­wives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user inter­face was only binary lights and switches. There is no evi­dence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold.

I guess for some peo­ple, fil­ing 3-by-5 cards in a box is eas­ier than learn­ing binary. Actually, just mem­o­riz­ing all your recipes would be eas­ier than learn­ing binary. “If it’s not usable, it doesn’t work.” An early, expen­sive les­son in the impor­tance of usability.

And finally, some early ASCII art (“in color” even!) -- the Mona Lisa rep­re­sented in ASCII by H. Philip Peterson in 1964:

As you can see, peo­ple seemed to have a good time at the ASCII art show on Saturday. I had a blast, and was really pleased with how my ASCII Photo Booth turned out.

The “booth” was weeks in devel­op­ment, and often took pri­or­ity over my reg­u­lar school work. But I learned a ton about Processing, worked with live video for the first time, and also fig­ured out how to gen­er­ate and print PDFs. Also, although I was half-expecting the appli­ca­tion to crash at some point, it never did. What more could I have asked for?

Here’s what it looked like dur­ing installation:

It was fun watch­ing peo­ple use it for the first time, and I got some usability-related insights that will help me improve future instal­la­tions. But most peo­ple under­stood it right away. You sit down in the chair and see your image trans­lated into ASCII text on the screen. Click the mouse, watch the count­down -- 3… 2… 1… Smile! -- the screen flick­ers for a moment, and a sec­ond later your image emerges on paper from a laser printer. Cool!

Update: Just posted this video of the photo booth in action:

One thing I observed is that the best images were cre­ated by the peo­ple who didn’t rush and took some time to exper­i­ment with the sys­tem. They would lean in closer to the cam­era, then far­ther back, watch­ing the on-screen text regen­er­ate in response to their motion. The final images were sharpest when the sub­jects sat com­pletely still before and dur­ing the expo­sure. That felt appro­pri­ate, given that ASCII is old tech­nol­ogy, orig­i­nat­ing from a time when com­put­ers were much, much slower and unable to process images at all. As with early pho­tog­ra­phy, a clear image in ASCII takes time to develop.

I was happy to see peo­ple walk away with a phys­i­cal arti­fact of the expe­ri­ence, in this case a photo of them­selves or of a friend. I hope that one or two of those dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated, orig­i­nal art­works will end up on a refrig­er­a­tor some­where. (If you had your pic­ture taken, leave a com­ment below and tell me about your experience.)

More pic­tures from the evening below. The gallery sign (excel­lently designed by Colin, who curated the show):

JK’s ASCII video wall: