Retro Workshop, Part 2
----------------------

Continuing my Retro Workshops thread from a couple of weeks
ago ...

But before I get on with that, I have to say I'm honoured to
note that Cyber Scrapheap is now one of the 78 phlogs
aggregated by Bongusta! [1] An honour I'm not entirely sure
is deserved, given I haven't written much and only for a
short while.  However I will do my best to be worthy of the
distinction.

Admittedly, I was momentarily bemused to see the phlog
listed as "Cyber Scraphead", but on reflection I've decided
I like it.  Seems to me, a "cyber scraphead" could be a
couple of different things:

a. A "head" of a cyber scrapheap, i.e. the one in charge of
a pile of junked computers.

b. One whose head is filled with random scraps of
computer-related information (and possibly not much else).

I think both of those definitions are applicable in my
case.

And now onward to Retro Workshops, second part.

In part 1 [2], as you may recall, I attended a workshop on
Letterpress printing. This time around it's a bit different,
instead of attending one, I was asked to give a 1.5 hour
workshop on retro computing to a group of second year
university students in our Media Studies program.

Now, I haven't actually done it yet, I'm just working
through ideas. The constraints pose some challenges for
sure:

- 1.5 hours isn't much time! It's fine for a lecture and a
  demo, but a workshop, where you actually want the students
  to get hands on with something retro?

- Most of them were probably born somewhere in the mid
  oughts. We can assume their familiarity with things like
  MS DOS, floppy disks and so forth is minimal, yet I don't
  want to take up too much time explaining basic concepts. 

- While my university library is blessed with a
  well-equipped retro computing lab, the sad truth is it's
  not much good for workshops like this one, because none of
  the computers work the same way. How do you develop a
  meaningful lesson plan for, say, a dozen students sitting
  in front of a dozen very different computers?

So I mulled it over for a day or so, and then it came to me,
how we might make it work ... 

Why, emulation of course. Install an emulator in one of our
modern computer labs. Something like DOSBox that can be
configured to boot directly into the software I want them to
use. No fiddling around with command prompts necessary, just
fire it up there you are. 

And to make it easy on myself, let's make it software that I
am very familiar with: Microstar Graphics Editor (MGE), a
drawing program developed in the mid-late 1980s for the
purpose of creating NAPLPS graphics. (NAPLPS, the "North
American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax, is a highly
compact vector encoding originally designed for videotex,
that saw its greatest success as the graphics encoding for
Prodigy Online. I've used MGE quite a bit over the past few
years, in the context of a project to recover and restore a
lost school of Canadian videotex art).[3]

So the idea here is in a sense, to work backward in
time. Start with the emulated environment, in which the
students can fool around with a drawing program that works
very differently from any modern graphics program they may
have used. That can take up most of the first hour of the
class I think.  Following that, have them save their work to
a shared directory that we all have access to, after which I
will assemble their saved files into a simple videotex
presentation (which I'm calling a 'zine) as an in-class
demo. Copy the presentation to a floppy disk using a
'tweener', a computer that bridges generations of hardware
... in this case, something with USB and a floppy drive. And
then load the presentation on a real, period appropriate
computer so they can compare the emulations with the 'real
thing'.

That should give us plenty of things to talk about, and
introduce a few fundamental concepts relating to the
preservation of digital media, I think.

I was pretty pleased with myself for coming up with
something so workable, so quickly ... and then I realized,
it's fundamentally the same structure as the letterpress
printing workshop I'd taken the week previously: a group of
students work on individual mini-projects designed to
familiarize them with the absolute basics of the concept,
followed by an instructor demo assembling the pieces into a
unified (if eclectic) presentation.  So a tip of the hat to
my letterpress instructor, not just for teaching me
letterpress basics, but - of more immediate utility -
showing me how to put together a workshop.

Admittedly, the technical hurdles to be overcome are a bit
different in each case.  Convincing our University's Infosec
folks to allow me to install DOSBox in one of our computer
labs will be my next challenge, but I have some ideas how we
might make that work.  I may write about that in future, if
it pans out.



References
----------

[1] gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1bongusta 
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jdd/phlog/20240623-workshop-1.txt
[3] https://www.durno.ca/telidon.php

Mon Jul  8 11:29:10 PDT 2024