Historic Computing Calendar,1992
In 2009 I went in search of a piece of cyberspace history
INTRODUCTION
This piece was first posted on my blog in 2009
In 2009 I was awarded a British Academy Grant to spend several months as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara. Lucky me - it was a thrilling place to work. I was researching a new book with the working title of ‘Metaphors of Nature in Cyberspace’. (It would eventually be published as ‘Technobiophilia’.) During that time I travelled around California interviewing people from the early days of the web - Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand and Douglas Engelbart, and many others including Roland Bryan. I’d been interested in his connection to a very special wall calendar and it turned out that he lived just a few miles from where I was staying. This piece is about the day I went to meet him. As I set off in my rental car that morning I didn’t know what to expect. Some of my interviews had taken place in wealthy suburbs, others in shiny Silicon Valley offices. This time I was headed inland, away from the coast towards the eastern edge of the city of Santa Barbara. It was early Spring and the dusty streets were warm and quiet. It took me a while to find the address, which turned out to be a smallish office in an industrial unit. Roland came out and greeted me with a friendly smile. He said he was curious about my curiosity. We went into his office and started talking.
I interviewed Roland Bryan in Santa Barbara, California, on 25th March 2009. He had been one of the original Arpanet team, famous for having developed the internet. By 2009 he was CEO of MachineTalker, a Santa Barbara based company developing intelligent wireless networks. I wanted to speak with him because I was in pursuit of some drawings I’d found a few years earlier on Martin Dodge’s great Atlas of Cyberspaces – namely the ‘scroll’ to be found some way down this page.
Dodge attributes the scroll to Roland, however I discovered when we talked that he did not actually design it, but commissioned it to his concept in 1992 as a promotional calendar for his company Advanced Computer Communications (ACC). ACC helped design and implement the first packet switch network for a U.S. Government agency and was later sold to Ericsson.
The artist was in fact Chuck Huckeba, now based in Arizona. I was excited to learn that Roland still owns the original painting and we went together to his storage facility in Santa Barbara in the hope of locating it. It didn’t surface on that occasion but hopefully he will find it soon. Judging from the colour prints he has sent me, it must be very lushly-coloured and rich in detail.
It was fascinating, also, to discover that the images were colour – the pictures on Martin Dodge’s site are black and white and it never occurred to me that the original would be anything other than monochrome. Roland has very kindly allowed me to blog about these images. I have uploaded them to Flickr and linked to them here. I am delighted – they are a real find. I especially like the cool shades worn by a very hippy-looking Leonardo da Vinci. Enjoy!
Attribution: The content of the ACC calendar was a collaborative effort by ACC staff and the artist Chuck Huckeba
Postscript
Roland later sent me a link to this Wired magazine cover photo of the Arpanet team who made cyberspace happen.
