Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

Last updated

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Agrippa-cover.jpg
Author William Gibson
Cover artist Dennis Ashbaugh
SubjectMemory
GenrePoetry
PublisherKevin Begos Jr.
Publication date
1992
Media type Artist's book
OCLC 48079355

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is a work of art created by science fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. [1] [2] [3] [4] The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh. [5] Gibson's text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time (the title referred to a Kodak photo album from which the text's memories are taken). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light. [5] The work is recognised as an early example of electronic literature.

Contents

Origin and concept

The impetus for the initiation of the project was Kevin Begos Jr., a publisher of museum-quality manuscripts motivated by disregard for the commercialism of the art world, [6] who suggested to abstract painter Dennis Ashbaugh that they "put out an art book on computer that vanishes". [7] Ashbaugh—who despite his "heavy art-world resume" was bored with the abstract impressionist paintings he was doing—took the suggestion seriously, and developed it further. [7] [8]

A few years beforehand, Ashbaugh had written a fan letter to cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, whose oeuvre he had admired, and the pair had struck up a telephone friendship. [7] [8] Shortly after the project had germinated in the minds of Begos and Ashbaugh, they contacted and recruited Gibson. [2] The project exemplified Gibson's deep ambivalence towards technologically advanced futurity, and as The New York Times expressed it, was "designed to challenge conventional notions about books and art while extracting money from collectors of both". [2]

Some people have said that they think this is a scam or pure hype … [m]aybe fun, maybe interesting, but still a scam. But Gibson thinks of it as becoming a memory, which he believes is more real than anything you can actually see.

— Kevin Begos Jr., End Notes, [9]

The project manifested as a poem written by Gibson incorporated into an artist's book created by Ashbaugh; as such it was as much a work of collaborative conceptual art as poetry. [10] Gibson stated that Ashbaugh's design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself." [11] [12]

Ashbaugh was gleeful at the dilemma this would pose to librarians: in order to register the copyright of the book, he had to send two copies to the United States Library of Congress, who, in order to classify it had to read it, and in the process, necessarily had to destroy it. [8] The creators had initially intended to infect the disks with a computer virus, but declined to after considering the potential damage to the computer systems of innocents. [8]

Release and replication

OK, sit down and pay attention. We're only going to say this once.

— William Gibson, National Public Radio, December 9, 1992. [13]

The work was premiered on December 9, 1992, at The Kitchen, an art space in Chelsea in New York City. [14] [15] [16] The performance—known as "The Transmission"—consisted of the public reading of the poem by composer and musician Robert Ashley, recorded and simultaneously transmitted to several other cities. [14] [17] [16] The poem was inscribed on a sculptural magnetic disk which had been vacuum-sealed until the event's commencement, and was reportedly (although not actually [18] ) programmed to erase itself upon exposure to air. [14] Contrary to numerous colourful reports, [19] neither this disk nor the diskettes embedded in the artist's book were ever actually hacked in any strict sense. [20]

Academic researcher Matthew Kirschenbaum has reported that a pirated text of the poem was released the next day on MindVox, "an edgy New York City-based electronic bulletin board". [20] Kirschenbaum considers Mindvox, an interface between the dark web and the global Internet, to have been "an ideal initial host". [20] The text spread rapidly from that point on, first on FTP servers and anonymous mailers and later via USENET and listserv email. Since Gibson did not use email at the time, fans sent copies of the pirated text to his fax machine. [19]

The precise manner in which the text was obtained for MindVox is unclear, although the initial custodian of the text, known only as "Templar" attached to it an introductory note in which he claimed credit. [20] Begos claimed that a troupe of New York University students representing themselves as documentarians attended The Transmission and made a videotape recording of the screen as it displayed the text as an accompaniment of Jillette's reading. Kirschenbaum speculates that this group included the offline persona of Templar or one of his associates. According to this account, ostensibly endorsed by Templar in a post to Slashdot in February 2000, [20] the students then transcribed the poem from the tape and within hours had uploaded it to MindVox. However, according to a dissenting account by hacktivist and MindVox co-founder Patrick K. Kroupa, subterfuge prior to The Transmission elicited a betrayal of trust which yielded the uploaders the text. Kirschenbaum declined to elaborate on the specifics of the Kroupa conjecture, which he declared himself "not at liberty to disclose". [20]

Agrippa owes its transmission and continuing availability to a complex network of individuals, communities, ideologies, markets, technologies, and motives. Only in the most heroic reading of the events … is Agrippa saved for posterity solely by virtue of the knight Templar. … Today, the 404 File Not Found messages that Web browsing readers of Agrippa inevitably encounter … are more than just false leads; they are latent affirmations of the work's original act of erasure that allow the text to stage anew all of its essential points about artifacts, memory, and technology. "Because the struggle for the text is the text."

— Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., "Hacking 'Agrippa': The Source of the Online Text", The Agrippa Files. [20]

On December 9, 2008 (the sixteenth anniversary of the original Transmission), "The Agrippa Files", working with a scholarly team at the University of Maryland, released an emulated run of the entire poem [21] (derived from an original diskette loaned by a collector) and an hour's worth of "bootleg" footage shot covertly at the Americas Society (the source of the text that was posted on MindVox). [22]

Cryptography

Since its debut in 1992, the mystery of Agrippa remained hidden for 20 years. Although many had tried to hack the code and decrypt the program, the uncompiled source code was lost long ago. Alan Liu and his team at "The Agrippa Files" [23] created an extensive website with tools and resources to crack the Agrippa Code. They collaborated with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, and Quinn DuPont, a PhD student of cryptography from the University of Toronto, in calling for the aid of cryptographers to figure out how the program works by creating "Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge", [18] which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes. [24] The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012. [18]

There is no encryption algorithm present in the Agrippa binary; consequently, the visual encryption effect that displays when the poem has finished is a ruse. The visual effect is the result of running the decrypted ciphertext (in memory) through the re-purposed bit-scrambling decryption algorithm, and then abandoning the text in memory. Only the fake genetic code is written back to disk. [18]

The encryption resembles the RSA algorithm. This algorithm encodes data in 3-byte blocks. First, each byte is permuted through an 8-position permutation, then the bits are split into two 12-bit integers (by taking the low 4 bits of the second byte and the 8 bits of the first byte as the first 12-bit integer, and the 8 bits of the third byte and the 4 high bits of the second integer as the second 12-bit integer). Each is individually encrypted by taking them to the 3491st power, mod 4097; the bits are then reassembled into 3 bytes. The encrypted text is then stored in a string variable as part of the program. To shroud the would-be visible and noticeable text it is compressed with the simple Lzw before final storage. As the Macintosh Common Lisp compiler compresses the main program code into the executable, this was not that necessary.

In order to prevent a second running of the program it corrupts itself when run. The program simply overwrites itself with a 6000 byte long DNA-like code at a certain position. Archival documents suggest that the original plan was to use a series of ASCII 1's to corrupt the binary, but at some point in development a change was made to use fake genetic code, in keeping with the visual motifs in the book. [18] The genetic code has a codon entropy of 5.97 bits/codon, much higher than any natural DNA sequence known. However, the ciphertext was not overwritten.

Weakness

  • A memory dump of Mini vMac can be obtained with Linux ckpt [25] or a similar tool after the Agrippa program has been loaded. The executable code could be reverse engineered.
  • The encryption itself due to the block cipher exhibited a regular pattern due to repeated text in the original plaintext.
  • The LZW compression itself does not hide the letter frequencies.
  • The scramble display has exactly the same letter frequencies as the underlying plaintext.

Content and editions

Agrippa comes in a rough-hewn black box adorned with a blinking green light and an LCD readout that flickers with an endless stream of decoded DNA. The top opens like a laptop computer, revealing a hologram of a circuit board. Inside is a battered volume, the pages of which are antique rag-paper, bound and singed by hand.

Gavin Edwards, Details , June 1992. [8]

The book was published in 1992 in two limited editions—Deluxe and Small—by Kevin Begos Jr. Publishing, New York City. [1] The deluxe edition came in a 16 by 21½-inch (41 cm × 55 cm) metal mesh case sheathed in Kevlar (a polymer used to make bulletproof vests) and designed to look like a buried relic. [2] Inside is a book of 93 ragged and charred pages sewn by hand and bound in stained and singed linen by Karl Foulkes; [26] the book gives the impression of having survived a fire; [1] [2] it was described by Peter Schwenger as "a black box recovered from some unspecified disaster." [7] The edition includes pages of DNA sequences set in double columns of 42 lines each like the Gutenberg Bible, and copperplate aquatint etchings by Ashbaugh editioned by Peter Pettingill on Fabriano Tiepolo paper. [27] [28] The monochromatic etchings depict stylised chromosomes, a hallmark of Ashbaugh's work, accompanied by imagery of a pistol, camera or in some instances simple line drawings—all allusions to Gibson's contribution. [29]

The deluxe edition was set in Monotype Gill Sans at Golgonooza Letter Foundry, and printed on Rives heavyweight text by Begos and the Sun Hill Press. [28] The final 60 pages of the book were then fused together, with a hollowed-out section cut into the centre, containing the self-erasing diskette on which the text of Gibson's poem was encrypted. [2] The encryption was the work of a pseudonymous computer programmer, "BRASH", assisted by Electronic Frontier Foundation founders John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore. [26] The deluxe edition was originally priced at US$1500 (later $2000), and each copy is unique to some degree because of handmade or hand-finished elements. [26]

The small edition was sold for $450; [30] like the deluxe edition, it was set in Monotype Gill Sans, but in single columns. [28] It was printed on Mohawk Superfine text by the Sun Hill Press, [29] with the reproduction of the etchings printed on a Canon laser printer. The edition was then Smythe sewn at Spectrum Bindery and enclosed in a solander box. [28] A bronze-boxed collectors' copy was also released, and retailed at $7,500. [30]

Fewer than 95 deluxe editions of Agrippa are extant, although the exact number is unknown and is the source of considerable mystery. [26] [31] The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses a deluxe edition, numbered 4 of 10. [26] A publicly accessible copy of the deluxe edition is available at the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library and a small copy resides at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, while the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City hosts a promotional prospectus. [26] The Victoria and Albert Museum's copy was first exhibited in a display entitled The Book and Beyond, held in the Museum's 20th Century Gallery from April to October 1995. [32] The same copy was subsequently also included in a V&A exhibition entitled Digital Pioneers, from 2009 to 2010. Both V&A shows were curated by Douglas Dodds. Another copy of the book was exhibited in the 2003–2004 exhibition Ninety from the Nineties at the New York Public Library. Gibson at one point claimed never to have seen a copy of the printed book, spurring speculation that no copies had actually been made. Many copies have since been documented, and Gibson's signature was noted on copies held by the New York Public Library and the V&A. [29] In 2011, the Bodleian Library's Special Collections Department at the University of Oxford acquired Kevin Begos' copy of Agrippa, as well as the archive of Begos' papers related to the work. [33] [34]

Poem

William Gibson, author of the Agrippa poem, pictured in Paris on his 60th birthday, March 17, 2008. William Gibson 60th birthday portrait.jpg
William Gibson, author of the Agrippa poem, pictured in Paris on his 60th birthday, March 17, 2008.

The construction of the book and the subject matter of the poem within it share a metaphorical connection in the decay of memory. [35] [36] In this light, critic Peter Schwenger asserts that Agrippa can be understood as organized by two ideas: the death of Gibson's father, and the disappearance or absence of the book itself. [37] In this sense, it instantiates the ephemeral nature of all text. [38]

Theme and form

The poem is a detailed description of several objects, including a photo album and the camera that took the pictures in it, and is essentially about the nostalgia that the speaker, presumably Gibson himself, feels towards the details of his family's history: the painstaking descriptions of the houses they lived in, the cars they drove, and even their pets.

It starts around 1919 and moves up to today, or possibly beyond. If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past. You can see it in Westerns, the way the 'mise-en-scene' and the collars on cowboys change through time. It's never really the past; it's always a version of your own time.

— Gibson, as quoted in Details , June 1992. [8]

In its original form, the text of the poem was supposed to fade from the page and, in Gibson's own words, "eat itself" off of the diskette enclosed with the book. The reader would, then, be left with only the memory of the text, much like the speaker is left with only the memory of his home town and his family after moving to Canada from South Carolina, in the course of the poem (as Gibson himself did during the Vietnam War). [39]

"The mechanism"

The poem contains a motif of "the mechanism", described as "Forever / Dividing that from this", [40] and which can take the form of the camera or of the ancient gun that misfires in the speaker's hands. [41] [42] Technology, "the mechanism", is the agent of memory, [41] which transforms subjective experience into allegedly objective records (photography). It is also the agent of life and death, one moment dispensing lethal bullets, but also likened to the life-giving qualities of sex. Shooting the gun is "[l]ike the first time you put your mouth / on a woman". [43]

The poem is, then, not merely about memory, but how memories are formed from subjective experience, and how those memories compare to mechanically reproduced recordings. In the poem, "the mechanism" is strongly associated with recording, which can replace subjective experience.

Insomuch as memories constitute our identities, "the mechanism" thus represents the destruction of the self via recordings. Hence both cameras, as devices of recording, and guns, as instruments of destruction, are part of the same mechanism—dividing that (memory, identity, life) from this (recordings, anonymity, death).

Critical reception and influence

Agrippa was extremely influential—as a sigil for the artistic community to appreciate the potential of electronic media—for the extent to which it entered public consciousness. [36] It caused a fierce controversy in the art world, among museums and among libraries. [44] It challenged established notions of permanence of art and literature, and, as Ashbaugh intended, [8] raised significant problems for archivists seeking to preserve it for the benefit of future generations. [44] Agrippa was also used as the key of a book cipher in the Cicada 3301 mystery. [45]

Agrippa was particularly well received by critics, [46] with digital media theorist Peter Lunenfeld describing it in 2001 as "one of the most evocative hypertexts published in the 1990s". [1] Professor of English literature John Johnson has claimed that the importance of Agrippa stems not only from its "foregrounding of mediality in an assemblage of texts", but also from the fact that "media in this work are explicitly as passageways to the realm of the dead". [47] English Professor Raymond Malewitz argues that "the poem's stanzas form a metaphorical DNA fingerprint that reveals Gibson's life to be, paradoxically, a novel repetition of his father's and grandfather's lives." [48] The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, which described the poem as "a mournful text", praised Agrippa's inventive use of digital format. [42] However, academic Joseph Tabbi remarked in a 2008 paper that Agrippa was among those works that are "canonized before they have been read, resisted, and reconsidered among fellow authors within an institutional environment that persists in time and finds outlets in many media". [10]

In a lecture at the exhibition of Agrippa at the Center for Book Arts in New York City, semiotician Marshall Blonsky of New York University drew an allusion between the project and the work of two French literary figures—philosopher Maurice Blanchot (author of "The Absence of the Book"), and poet Stéphane Mallarmé, a 19th-century forerunner of semiotics and deconstruction. [2] In response to Blonsky's analysis that "[t]he collaborators in Agrippa are responding to a historical condition of language, a modern skepticism about it", Gibson disparagingly commented "Honest to God, these academics who think it's all some sort of big-time French philosophy—that's a scam. Those guys worship Jerry Lewis, they get our pop culture all wrong." [2]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 Lunenfeld, Peter (2001). Snap to Grid. Cambridge: MIT. p.  46. ISBN   978-0-262-62158-8.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Jonas, Gerald (August 29, 1993). "The Disappearing $2,000 Book". The New York Times . Retrieved July 30, 2008.
  3. ↑ Robertson, Adi (July 12, 2012). "New contest hopes to crack the code around William Gibson's poem 'Agrippa'". The Verge. Retrieved February 12, 2021.
  4. ↑ Bell, Chris (November 26, 2013). "Cicada 3301: the internet code-breaking mystery that has the world baffled". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved February 12, 2021.
  5. 1 2 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2002). Burns, Edward (ed.). "Textual Studies and First Generation Electronic Objects". Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies. 14. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 15–16. ISBN   978-0-472-11272-2.
  6. ↑ Barber, John (2001). New Worlds, New Words. Cresskill: Hampton Press. p. 176. ISBN   978-1-57273-333-6.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Schwenger, Peter (1995). "Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book". In Dellamora, Richard (ed.). Postmodern Apocalypse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 277–278. ISBN   978-0-8122-1558-8.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Edwards, Gavin (June 1992). "Cyber Lit". Details (134). Archived from the original on September 24, 2008. Retrieved September 29, 2008.
  9. ↑ Fein, Esther B. (November 18, 1992). "Book Notes". The New York Times . Retrieved October 10, 2008.
  10. 1 2 Tabbi, Joseph (Summer 2008). "Locating the Literary in New Media". Contemporary Literature . 49 (2). University of Wisconsin–Madison: 311–331. doi:10.1353/cli.0.0027. S2CID   161738677.
  11. ↑ Gibson, William (1992). "Introduction to Agrippa: A Book of the Dead". WilliamGibsonBooks.com. Archived from the original on November 20, 2007. Retrieved November 11, 2007.
  12. ↑ Plaugic, Lizzie (January 21, 2015). "James Patterson's newest novel will self-destruct after 24 hours". The Verge. Retrieved February 12, 2021.
  13. ↑ William Gibson; Kevin Begos Jr.; Penn Jillette; Garrels, Anne (December 9, 1992). "Amazing Disappearing Computer Book". Morning Edition (Interview). Interviewed by Tom Vitale. National Public Radio.
  14. 1 2 3 "Art collection". International Contemporary Art. June 22, 2003. Prior to the publication of Count Zero, Gibson did a performance along these lines with the artist Dennis Ashbaugh in New York City at The Kitchen. Simulcast to several other cities, the performance, called Agrippa—A Book of the Dead (1992), consisted of the public reading of a text that had been inscribed onto a sculptural magnetic disk. Vacuum-sealed until the beginning of the performance, the disk was programmed to erase itself upon exposure to the air. Words disappeared as soon as they were spoken.
  15. ↑ Kirschenbaum, Matthew G.; Doug Reside; Alan Liu (December 5, 2008). "No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa". The Agrippa Files. University of California, Santa Barbara. Archived from the original on April 16, 2009. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
  16. 1 2 "Agrippa (a book of the dead) | The Kitchen Archive". archive.thekitchen.org. Retrieved December 7, 2017.
  17. ↑ "Re:Agrippa (Experimental Video of Dec. 9, 1992, 'Transmission' of Agrippa) (1993)". The Agrippa Files. University of Santa Barbara, California. Archived from the original on October 26, 2008. Retrieved October 10, 2008.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 "Cracking the Agrippa Code". Crackingagrippa.net. March 25, 1992. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  19. 1 2 Moschovitis Group (2005). "William Gibson (1948–)". In Laura Lambert; Chris Woodford; Hilary W. Poole; Christos J.P. Moschovitis (eds.). The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 13. ISBN   978-1-85109-659-6.
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008). "Hacking 'Agrippa': The Source of the Online Text.". Mechanisms : new media and the forensic imagination (2 ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-11311-3. OCLC   79256819. Archived from the original on January 21, 2019. Retrieved November 11, 2007.
  21. ↑ "The Agrippa Files " The Poem Running in Emulation". Agrippa.english.ucsb.edu. December 9, 2008. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  22. ↑ "Bootleg Video of "Transmission" Event at the Americas Society, With Live Run of the Diskette Containing William Gibson's "Agrippa" (9 December 1992)". The Agrippa Files. Archived from the original on December 14, 2008. Retrieved December 13, 2008.
  23. ↑ "The Agrippa Files". Agrippa.english.ucsb.edu. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  24. ↑ Goodin, Dan (July 11, 2012). "Solve 20-year-old mystery in William Gibson's "Agrippa"; win prizes". Ars Technica. Retrieved July 24, 2012.
  25. ↑ Archived June 20, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  26. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hodge, James J. "Bibliographic Description of Agrippa". The Agrippa Files. University of Santa Barbara, California . Retrieved August 5, 2008.
  27. ↑ Rosenheim, Shawn (1997). The Cryptographic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 250. ISBN   978-0-8018-5331-9.
  28. 1 2 3 4 "AGRIPPA: (a book of the dead)". Center for Book Arts. Archived from the original on February 5, 2007. Retrieved August 3, 2008.
  29. 1 2 3 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (June 4, 2005). "Ashbaugh and Gibson's AGRIPPA: A Description of the Book Based Upon My Examination of the NYPL Copy". MGK. Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Retrieved November 7, 2008.
  30. 1 2 Lindberg, Kathryne V. (October 1996). "Prosthetic Mnemonics and Prophylactic Politics: William Gibson among the Subjectivity Mechanisms". Boundary 2. 23 (2). Duke University Press: 44–83. doi:10.2307/303807. JSTOR   303807.
  31. ↑ "Deluxe Edition". The Agrippa Files. University of California, Santa Barbara. Archived from the original on July 18, 2008. Retrieved August 5, 2008.
  32. ↑ Dodds, Douglas (1995). The book and beyond. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved February 24, 2023.
  33. ↑ "An Interview with Kevin Begos, Jr". The Oxonian Review. April 23, 2012. Archived from the original on April 27, 2012. Retrieved December 9, 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  34. ↑ "Agrippa : a book of the dead – University of Oxford". Solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  35. ↑ Dannatt, Adrian (December 19, 1992). "The book that ate itself". The Independent . Independent News & Media.
  36. 1 2 Abbott, Chris (2001). Information Communications Technology. New York: Routledge/Falmer. p. 91. ISBN   978-0-7507-0951-4.
  37. ↑ Johnston, John (1998). Information Multiplicity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 255. ISBN   978-0-8018-5705-8.
  38. ↑ Walker, Janice (1998). The Columbia Guide to Online Style . New York: Columbia University Press. p.  187. ISBN   978-0-231-10788-4.
  39. ↑ Mark Neale (director), William Gibson (subject) (2000). No Maps for These Territories (Documentary). Docurama.
  40. ↑ Agrippa, Pt II, L 4–5
  41. 1 2 Marcus 2004 , p. 802
  42. 1 2 Marcus 2004 , p. 794
  43. ↑ Agrippa, Pt II, L 41–42
  44. 1 2 Killheffer, Robert (September 6, 1993). "Publishers Weekly Interviews – William Gibson". Publishers Weekly . Reed Business Information . Retrieved August 5, 2008.
  45. ↑ Bell, Chris. "Cicada 3301 update: the baffling internet mystery is back". The Daily Telegraph . Archived from the original on January 7, 2014.
  46. ↑ Liu, Alan (June 30, 2004). The laws of cool : knowledge work and the culture of information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 339–48. ISBN   978-0-226-48698-7. OCLC   53823956.
  47. ↑ Johnston, John (1998). Information Multiplicity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 255. ISBN   978-0-8018-5705-8. What makes Agrippa important, then, is not only its foregrounding of mediality in an assemblage of texts but also that media in this work are explicitly as passageways to the realm of the dead.
  48. ↑ Malewitz, Raymond (Winter 2011). "William Gibson's Paternity Test". Configurations . 19 (1). Johns Hopkins University Press: 25–48. doi:10.1353/con.2011.0004. PMID   22371980. S2CID   38591737.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Floppy disk</span> Removable disk storage medium

A floppy disk or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Gibson</span> American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist (born 1948)

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CP/M</span> Discontinued family of computer operating systems

CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. CP/M is a disk operating system and its purpose is to organize files on a magnetic storage medium, and to load and run programs stored on a disk. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.

File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers and was the default filesystem for MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. The increase in disk drives capacity required three major variants: FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32. FAT was replaced with NTFS as the default file system on Microsoft operating systems starting with Windows XP. Nevertheless, FAT continues to be used on flash and other solid-state memory cards and modules, many portable and embedded devices because of its compatibility and ease of implementation.

In computer science, self-modifying code is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing – usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code, thus simplifying maintenance. The term is usually only applied to code where the self-modification is intentional, not in situations where code accidentally modifies itself due to an error such as a buffer overflow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apple ProDOS</span> Operating system on Apple II series computers

ProDOS is the name of two similar operating systems for the Apple II series of personal computers. The original ProDOS, renamed ProDOS 8 in version 1.2, is the last official operating system usable by all 8-bit Apple II series computers, and was distributed from 1983 to 1993. The other, ProDOS 16, was a stop-gap solution for the 16-bit Apple IIGS that was replaced by GS/OS within two years.

Apple DOS is the family of disk operating systems for the Apple II series of microcomputers from late 1978 through early 1983. It was superseded by ProDOS in 1983. Apple DOS has three major releases: DOS 3.1, DOS 3.2, and DOS 3.3; each one of these three releases was followed by a second, minor "bug-fix" release, but only in the case of Apple DOS 3.2 did that minor release receive its own version number, Apple DOS 3.2.1. The best-known and most-used version is Apple DOS 3.3 in the 1980 and 1983 releases. Prior to the release of Apple DOS 3.1, Apple users had to rely on audio cassette tapes for data storage and retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apple SOS</span> Apple III operating system

The Sophisticated Operating System, or SOS, is the primary operating system of the Apple III computer. SOS was developed by Apple Computer and released in October 1980.

In computer science, group coded recording or group code recording (GCR) refers to several distinct but related encoding methods for representing data on magnetic media. The first, used in 6250 bpi magnetic tape since 1973, is an error-correcting code combined with a run-length limited (RLL) encoding scheme, belonging into the group of modulation codes. The others are different mainframe hard disk as well as floppy disk encoding methods used in some microcomputers until the late 1980s. GCR is a modified form of a NRZI code, but necessarily with a higher transition density.

In computer systems a loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs and libraries. It is one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, as it places programs into memory and prepares them for execution. Loading a program involves either memory-mapping or copying the contents of the executable file containing the program instructions into memory, and then carrying out other required preparatory tasks to prepare the executable for running. Once loading is complete, the operating system starts the program by passing control to the loaded program code.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TRSDOS</span> Operating system for Tandy TRS-80 computers

TRSDOS is the operating system for the Tandy TRS-80 line of eight-bit Zilog Z80 microcomputers that were sold through Radio Shack from 1977 through 1991. Tandy's manuals recommended that it be pronounced triss-doss. TRSDOS should not be confused with Tandy DOS, a version of MS-DOS licensed from Microsoft for Tandy's x86 line of personal computers (PCs).

MBASIC is the Microsoft BASIC implementation of BASIC for the CP/M operating system. MBASIC is a descendant of the original Altair BASIC interpreters that were among Microsoft's first products. MBASIC was one of the two versions of BASIC bundled with the Osborne 1 computer. The name "MBASIC" is derived from the disk file name MBASIC.COM of the BASIC interpreter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rainbow 100</span> DEC microcomputer

The Rainbow 100 is a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1982. This desktop unit had a monitor similar to the VT220 and a dual-CPU box with both 4 MHz Zilog Z80 and 4.81 MHz Intel 8088 CPUs. The Rainbow 100 was a triple-use machine: VT100 mode, 8-bit CP/M mode, and CP/M-86 or MS-DOS mode using the 8088. It ultimately failed to in the marketplace which became dominated by the simpler IBM PC and its clones which established the industry standard as compatibility with CP/M became less important than IBM PC compatibility. Writer David Ahl called it a disastrous foray into the personal computer market. The Rainbow was launched along with the similarly packaged DEC Professional and DECmate II which were also not successful. The failure of DEC to gain a significant foothold in the high-volume PC market would be the beginning of the end of the computer hardware industry in New England, as nearly all computer companies located there were focused on minicomputers for large organizations, from DEC to Data General, Wang, Prime, Computervision, Honeywell, and Symbolics Inc.

The ZX Spectrum's software library was very diverse. While the majority of the software produced for the system was video games, others included programming language implementations, Sinclair BASIC extensions, databases, word processors, spread sheets, drawing and painting tools, and 3D modelling tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dennis Ashbaugh</span> American painter

Dennis John Ashbaugh is an American painter and artist who resides in River House in New York City, and also lives and works in Millbrook and Pawling, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MAC/65</span> Atari 8-bit family 6502 assembler

MAC/65 is a 6502 assembler written by Stephen D. Lawrow for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. MAC/65 was first released on disk by Optimized Systems Software in 1982, with the program requiring 16 KB RAM. A bank switched "SuperCartridge" from OSS followed in January 1984 for US$99, occupying only 8 KB.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Floppy disk variants</span> Types of floppy disk formats

The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the 8-inch format that preceded them, many proprietary floppy disk formats were developed, either using a different disk design or special layout and encoding methods for the data held on the disk.

ANTI is a computer virus affecting Apple Macintosh computers running classic Mac OS versions up to System 6. It was the first Macintosh virus not to create additional resources within infected files; instead, it patches existing CODE resources.

The FAT file system is a file system used on MS-DOS and Windows 9x family of operating systems. It continues to be used on mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well suited file system for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 through the present.

References

See also

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.