Bob Heller, who's the technical director of the Fine Arts Center, thinks John should port the software to the IBM platform.
#Lightwrite update Pc#
In 1982, the first floppy drives became available for the TRS-80, so John upgraded to a TRS-80 Model 3, with TWO floppy drives! At the time, he's teaching at SUNY-Stony Brook, and the IBM PC has just been announced. John adds 16k of RAM (for another $700), teaches himself BASIC and Z80 assembler and eventually produces "Electric Assistant", something only he could love.īut it works! Never mind that it takes half an hour to save a 100-unit show onto the cassette tape for safekeeping whenever the computer is turned off. Campbell becomes a "computer widow" as the years slog by. So the appropriate $$ are paid, and on his return to New York, John sits down and starts work. She says BASIC's pretty simple and that he could probably write something with it. Next call is to Alice, John's younger sister, who once took a programming class in high school. So back to the hotel room to call Campbell to convince him that the shop needs to spend the money. But even better, it has software called Tape Payroll! And it comes with Tape BASIC, a programming language that the salesman assures him he can use to write his own lighting paperwork program. It has 32k of RAM and a cassette tape to store programs and data. So he wanders into Radio Shack, where he finds the TRS-80. There's a dealer selling Apple computers, which look really fun, but they don't have anything that would help with the paperwork problems. Whereupon he hops in the car and drives to the local shopping mall, where he looks at these new things called Personal Computers. He has writer's cramp and thinks to himself An idiot could do this! A machine could do this." John is stuck in his room, doing yet another boring set of paperwork. On that fateful April weekend in Raleigh NC, the dancers have run off to the beach. To help make things easier, he's been using a generic sort of plot where all the lights look the same, but the dimmer hookup and instrument schedule still have to be hand written and customized for each and every theatre. So once or twice a week, John has to draw up a new light plot that's pretty much the same as the old one - but not. The company is doing the university circuit, where the light plot is basically the same at every stop, but the actual equipment used is different, depending on what's available at the theatre. And the touring, while fun, is getting tedious. So while John is on tour with Pauline, the payroll molders.
#Lightwrite update how to#
The shop is doing very well, but the headaches of doing the weekly payroll aren't much fun, and he's the only one who seems to know how to do it.
John is designing for Pauline Koner's dance company and also running (with Campbell Baird and David Lockner) a scene painting shop. He understood WHY, but it still seemed like an awful lot of work, especially after he'd worn down three pencils doing one class project.įlash ahead to the spring of 1979.
Way back in the dark ages of 1973, John McKernon took his first lighting class at the North Carolina School of the Arts and learned that a Dimmer Hookup and Instrument Schedule both listed the exact same information, just in a different order.
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