Part 6 of Ars Technica’s excellent History of the Amiga Computer is now online. It takes us through the tumultuous and important years of 1986 and 1987 and - as always - tells the story of some very smart moves which - as always - are completely negated by bizarre corporate decisions. On the block this time are large parts of Commodore’s own engineering staff, who began to design the new Amiga models, along with Commodore’s new CEO Thomas Rattigan.

In order to follow up the soft launched Amiga 1000 Rattigan decided to split the Amiga line into a high and low end model. He felt that the Amiga 1000 fell at a price point the market didn’t understand (too high for a consumer computer, too low for a business computer) and the Amiga 500 and 2000 were meant to fix that by giving each market a machine to love.

Apart from their form factor and expandability they were essentially the same machine, which meant - to me, and to artists like me - that the Amiga 500 made a perfect entry level system, especially when its RAM was expanded to one, count it, one megabyte. That was considered a crazy amount of RAM in those days. We also meet Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, and Dan Silva, author of the seminal paint program Deluxe Paint.

I’ve been enjoying these articles all along but it’s getting more exciting to me here because this is about where I arrived. Good reading.

If you missed them, here are the earlier chapters:

Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part 1
Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part 2
Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part 3
Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part 4
Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part 5

Technorati Tags: amiga computer, amiga 1000, amiga 500, electronic arts, commodore, trip hawkins, dan silva, deluxe paint, dave haynie, Thomas Rattigan, irving gould

Vivian Heller’s The City Beneath Us is a wonderful book from the New York Transit Museum, full of period photographs and information about the construction of the three lines that eventually merged to become the single New York subway system.

I’m especially interested in the appearance of the tunnels during the 20’s and 30’s, as part of the research for a gigantic personal project of mine. Heller’s book doesn’t disappoint there, but I found that I was captivated by the wealth of historic detail about the struggles to create and maintain the system - first opposed by those who thought it was impossible or ill-advised, and later plagued by the political impossibility of raising the nickel fare - which lasted for nearly 45 years - so that the system could be properly maintained and expanded.

I was amazed to learn that the short test run of a pneumatic subway was constructed secretly (and illegally!) before 1870. That’s how desperate the city was to give its immigrant population some means of getting out of the overcrowded tenements of lower Manhattan - one of the prime motivations behind a public transportation system.

The three lines were built using several different techniques, depending on the composition of the land they were cutting through. While tunnels were driven through rocky sections, a “cut and cover” technique was used wherever possible. Utility lines (already a labyrinth beneath the city) had to be rerouted so that trenches could be cut below the streets and then covered over, the streets being restored above the heads of the workers who then completed the work. Where stone was removed from the tunnels it was moved, with carts, cars, and mules, and crushed so that it could become part of the concrete that formed so much of the tunnel lining. This work was largely done at the turn of the twentieth century and the engineers worked brilliantly within the limits of their technology.

The design itself was so good that even after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 there was little damage to the tunnels except where they passed closest to the World Trade Center. When those tunnels were rebuilt, the modern engineers made only minor modifications to the hundred year old bracing design that had worked so well.

Likewise the construction of the subway lines that passed underwater used techniques that are very similar to those used in the trans-Bosporus tunnel now being built in Istanbul. Whatever else you can say about the turn of the 20th century, those were days in which builders rightly believed that they could accomplish just about anything.

Like any public transit system the New York subway has had its rough times, its encounters with bankruptcy, its intrigues, and its rebirths. It’s where Heller’s book deals with Robert Moses that I just had to smile. Moses is a polarizing figure in New York history and he was no friend to public transportation. When I’ve read about Moses’ role in the creation of the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, he’s described as a visionary - but because so much of that vision was based on the automobile and its highways he’s very nearly demonized here. He is always a figure who seems larger than life, either way - though from this 21st century vantage I have to lean toward the Transit Museum’s view of him. New York would have been far better served through the improvement and expansion of its public transit.

The text runs for just 81 of the book’s 245 pages - the rest is given over completely to the vintage photographs that introduce us to the workmen and sites that, street by street and borough by borough, gradually knit themselves together into a functioning network that now carries people rapidly and reliably through all of Manhattan and its outlying areas. And while that complete process took decades it’s still true that its original framework - the IRT line - came together in just the first four years of the 20th century, at a time when the city was growing and changing at an unprecedented rate. Mounting and completing such a major project in the middle of that growth and change was - and remains - a staggering achievement.

The City Beneath Us - Building the New York Subways at Amazon.

Technorati Tags: new york, subway, public transit, public transporation, manhattan, irt, brt, ind, urban planning, 20th century, engineering

I’ve never liked showing work in progress*, and I can prove it.

Though I don’t remember this myself I have it on the best authority that as an infant, I just wouldn’t talk. Just wouldn’t. They were actually getting sort of worried about me, till one day I fell down and hurt my head badly enough that blood poured all over my face, and before I could stop myself, I yelled “Get this stuff offa me!”

The first thing I ever said was a complete sentence. The way I figure it, I wasn’t going to say a word to anyone until I’d conjugated everything that could be conjugated in my head so that no one could hear me make a mistake. True story.

So obviously that means I’d rather not let you see things that aren’t finished, except that’s stupid, so here’s one that’s a long ways from being finished yet. It’s so unfinished that it doesn’t have a name. I usually name these after the titles of, or lines from, popular songs of the 20s and 30s, and though I have a few ideas I’m not sure yet what it’ll be called.

I’m combining a lot of elements here that I’ve built during the past eight years (which means some of them need some retooling; I spent some time reworking the monorail pylons, for example, which are just so dang big in this picture) along with some new stuff. The new bits are/will be mainly in the near foreground, where some of my newest Retropolitan characters will appear in their glorious high res-ness.

And though at the moment it’s arranged as three separate scenes - eventually, it’ll probably be two - I’m having a wonderful and a very relieved time spreading out into the new memory space that’s available to me now that I’ve finally gone over to a 64 bit OS. There are frequent sighs of relief here in the Secret Laboratory.

I’ve got tons to do on… well, practically everything… but the highlights will be the people on the balcony and what they’re up to, some folks debarking from the monorail, and more, some of which will come as a surprise to me.

The distant buildings are part of my ongoing city model, a necessary and huge asset for my “Empire State Patrol” project. Miles to go before I sleep, and all that.

I’d been planning for this to end up as about an 18 x 24″ poster and print, but it’s shaping up so well that I think I may do the final version larger… about 20 x 30″.

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*So why do I have a “Works in Progress” category here in the blog? Because it’s never too late to change.

Technorati Tags: retropolis, retro futuristic, world of tomorrow, metropolis, retro science fiction, gernsback, 3d graphics, computer graphics, 3ds max