Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim
There’s very little information about Fernbach-Flarsheim on the web. His most famous piece, Boolean Image/Conceptual Typewriter was part of the Software show.
John Levine (co-author of the lex & yacc and qmail O’Reilly books) recalls the technical assistance provided by the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. for that piece:
NYC artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim sketched out a clever Conceptual Typewriter which displayed an image each time the user pushed one of the buttons, with labels like the silent (a circle) and the providing (sheaves of wheat), with the images scrolling up on each button push. If the user selected an image with the light pen, it changed somehow, e.g., more or less sheaves of wheat, or a spinning image slowed down and spun the other way. Our job was to write the software, which was quite a challenge. The IDIIOM was only programmed in 620i assembler on punch cards, and there was no support for the display at all beyond minimal display list commands to draw points, lines, and circles. I was the de-facto project manager, working with Peter Eichenberger on the program code, and everyone I could find on the image code. Some of the images were easy, just a circle or a few lines. Some were drawn on graph paper and hand-coded to screen coordinates. For a particularly complex one with bubbles arcing out of a fountain I wrote a SNOBOL4 program that calculated the positions and punched out IDIIOM display list source, and ran it on Princeton’s 360/91.
None of us were old enough to drive, so our development process involved punching and hand-checking source code at Princeton, then we’d take the train or bus from Princeton to NYC, then the subway across town, another train to Mt Kisco, then walk about a mile to Information Displays, debug for a few hours, then reverse the process to get home.
The exhibit was an anti-climax. The show opened in the summer, when it was rather hot, and the heat from all the computers made it even hotter. To keep the IDIIOM from overheating, they stuck a block of dry ice underneath which worked OK, but when the company saw what was happening to their computer, they took it home.
