Monday, June 07, 2004

v4n2 Sep 1975

contributors all men except robin allison this time.

Chiptalk: This year's miracle PACE
men engineers designing chip layout, male hands (black hands, actually) handling silicon wafers in the plant -- physical labor of production
story of cigarette smoking woman who had the unusually high chip yield -- but she was also doing the physical labor of chip production, while gender was included.
icons of a princess/fairy with a magic wand and a smoking cigarette; and a width with a pointy hat, robe, and broom

"story starts with a few enthusiasts, a blackboard, and a whole crew who doubted it could be made at all. Moby chip, as it was known, was not a project for the faint hearted"

"Sometimes a partcular person can make things when others can't..." Company outsourcing chip production, set up production line, taught company how to do it, and "men from the big company went home" and now nobody could do it anymore.
They noticed that one employee on the night shfit, was making far more than all the others combined. But when they watched her, she did no better than anyone else. The mystery was not cleared up until someone who she knew was watching her work and chatting, very late one night. She was loading a batch into the oven and, rather tentatively, remarked that she usually smokeed a cigarette about that time. She was told to go ahead, just do everything the way she usually did when she was alone...like surgeon smoking over the patient, but the batch turned out fine. Later experiments showed that tobacco smoke upped the yield for other employees, but not by very much and they never figured out why, so she eventually made the entire 500 units."

"Magic there is too."
wafer broken up and mounted on the chip. close up of device doing mounting. Macroview of lines of women operating the devices. "The girls who do this work are careful -- but a few more chips bite the dust here. Leaving survivors to go testing.."
picture of woman working with the actual testing machine

Domefilm - men building the geodesic domes in the frame below. link to countercultural stuff definite.

Kingdom computer game - "based on the presmise (like many other computer games) that there are a lot of things the average person would like to do, but, for some reason or another, cannot. To satisfy these urges, there are games through which it is possible to land a spaceship on the moon, quarterback a football team, beat the house at Las Vegas blackjack, or indulge in any number of similar activities...Kingdom lets you rule the world.

Just why everybody seems to have this compulsion to rule the world is still one of nature's great mysteries...turned out everyone who played the game turned out to have a little Alexander the Great (or, in some cases, ivan the Terrible) hiding inside them somewhere."

many male king figures, random old wrinkly men wizards, and sickly ones and such, and a figure I id as female only because the hearts on the robe. seems to be priestessy.

same authors as fortran man
they don't use a single gendered prornoun or term in the whole thing

medieval kingdom as opposed to US of Industrialized Russia "is to keep the rules of the game simple enough to be understandable (and if you have looked at the state of the US economy lately, you may realize how terribly complex the 'rules' can get, and teh kind of terrible mess you can get into by not totally understanding them!)

what does it mean when the ruleset most comprehensible and the one ppl feel most able to engage with is a time when roles were simple, women did their work, people died when they got sick, you couldn't do anything if you were poor, etc? nostalgia in a way.

p8 - "goal of [kingdom] player to rule the world" stricly non-gendered prose. drawing is of a big nosed hairless creature, probably a man. but maybe that wasn't their intent?? wearing a crown sitting at a table with money allocated to various things

many articles seem to hae a self representation thing going on

Design Notes on Tiny Basic by Dennis Allison, Happy Lady ICON, and friends

Driving the Dragon - marketing Altair extenders Bob. Man in suit, white, pointing at a CPU

photo of two lions in africa, clearly male, labeled K Britton and B Mullen at work (p20)

Letters section -

Interantional Women's Year - female symbol with a dove in the center, bicentennial stamp.
all letters from men. stamps from various places like Hong Kong, Helvetia, Australia (letter earlier from australia)