No-Thing

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In the light of yesterday's post about the old Mac Classic, I was reminded of a job we did in around 1992, to update and replace an existing audio-visual show in the Eagle Tower at Caernarfon Castle. The central controlling device was a Mac Classic. But neither Joe nor I can remember exactly the configuration that we used to effect the show presentation system. We can remember what kit came out of the old show - much of which was repurposed in later projects, but neither of us can remember the specifics of the replacement gear, apart from the fact that the Mac had several SCSI CD[!] drives as the delivery system of both audio and control tracks. I seem to remember at least four drives, but I really don't recall much apart from the ball-ache of dealing with the SCSI [Small Computer System Interface] daisy chain itself: suffice to say it was a nightmare, as anyone in the tech field of that era will testify. Anyhow, in the absence of any real coherent shared memory of that one, our conversation turned to my experience in running the original Llanberis AV show [The Electric Mountain as it became] as it should have been experienced [cf my post August 2nd 2020] from its inception, [that is to say, had the perpetrators of said original system listened to us at the time. Alas arrogance and hubris on their part held sway, and duly ignored we were]. The thought struck me that this was very much '...a tree falls in the wood...' moment: I was the sole witness to the event. When I'm gone, my memory - the ony record of the event - will be gone too, without anyone else having a direct, as opposed to anecdotal, connection to it. How very Zen...

Comments

  1. Anonymous19 April 2025 at 13:37

    I believe you cos I got there just after you'd run it and we couldn't be bothered to re-set it cos we were re-engineering the show to have just ONE control system, Dataton's recordable time based show control that ran off the DA88 that I'd just collected. No need to re-run what would never be used again cos we solved the problem and ultimately we lost the maintenance contract; but that's another story!!
    ATB
    Joe
    Oh I'd also seen the show running in synch a few times when we were controlling the speed of the 35mm cine projector with a simple "gain" pot!!!

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    Replies
    1. sideways19 April 2025 at 18:51

      Alas you never saw 'Merlin' in perfect lip sync, as he was still being jumped around to 'compensate for the differences in frame-rates: 24fps (film) vs. 30fps (Laserdisk) vs. 75fps (CD video). As you and I know, a second of elapsed time is a second of elapsed time: how it's chopped up is simply irrelevant. But, hey! What did we know? More pertinently, what the heck did the designers know? A lot less than us, is all I can say...

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