last update : august 2010
The Persistence of Vision (POV) Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.
About 20 years ago, I used POV on my Atari Computer to render my first 3D scenes.
A wireframe modeller (Moray) for POV is available at the Official Moray Homepage.
last update : august 2010
In 1997, Rockwell Semiconductor Systems’ Brooktree Division launched the first single-chip video capture processor and PCI Bus master. This device was used in various video cards like Hauppauge, miroVideo PCTV, …
Last update : August 27, 2013
Dice
The idea of the musical dice game is to cut and paste prewritten measures of music randomly together to create a piece of music. The random generation is done by a dice roll. The sum of the thrown numbers is looked up in a scoring table to determine which measure to play.
Today, its W.A. Mozarts (1756-1791) “Musikalisches Würfelspiel” which became famous and succesful. This mucical dice game was first published in 1793, two years after the death of Mozart. The original manuscript nor a direct reference to Mozart were ever found, but his authorship is no longer questionned by musicologists (Köchelverzeichnis KV1 Anh. 294d, KV6-516F).
IEEE Computer Magazine 1991
I first heard about Mozart’s dice composer in 1991. The july issue of the Computer magazine Vol.24 No.7 published by the IEEE Computer society was dedicated to computer-generated music. The project overview of Stephen W. Smoliar “Algorithms for musical composition: a question of granularity; pp.54-56” mentionned Mozart’s work.
The same year (1991), Chris G. Earnshaw from Cambridge, developped a computer implementation of Mozart’s dice game as a public domain program for the Atari computers. His version was based on the 1798 edition by Simrock in Bonn (reprinted by the Liverpool Music Press) of Mozart’s “Instructions to compose without the least knowledge of music so much german waltzer or schleifer as one pleases, by throwing a certain number with two dice” .
Other programmers have written before him versions for the BBC micro and for the Sinclair Computer.
Software for the Atari Computer 1991
In the mean time, many computer implementations of Mozart’s Würfelspiel have been published on the web. The most interesting related www sites are shown below :
W.A. Mozart
Mozart was not the first composer who was interested in chance music and mathematical composition. Other known authors are A. Kircher (1650), Mizler (1793), J. Haydn (1793), F.G. Hayn (1798), J.C. Graf (1801), C.H. Fiedler (1801), L. Fischer (1801), A. Calegaris (1801) and G. Catrufo (1811). The best documented historical work is Johann Philipp Kirnberger ‘s “Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen= und Menuettencomponist” published in 1757.
Schott Music, Mainz, published a software about musical dice games for Windows computers : Musikalische Würfelspiele, von Mozart, Haydn und anderen großen Komponisten. Aus Tabellen werden Takt-Kombinationen gewürfelt, die so klingen, als wären sie ganz individuell komponiert. Available on amazon.de.
Last update : July 23, 2013
On October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) unanimously passed a resolution defining the term Internet. This Internet Definition was developed in consultation with the leadership of the Internet and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Communities.
Today, Wikipedia gives the following Internet Definition : The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve several billion users worldwide.. Thus, the Internet is a network of networks, defined by the TPC/IP standards.
The Web is defined in W3C’s Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume I, as follows: The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). Thus, the Web is an information space. The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML. They have been written by Tim Berners-Lee.