Smalltalk-74(ID:2846/sma013)Early version of Smalltalk Related languages
References: The major piece of work going on at Simon Fraser is the input and animation of Labanotation, a dance language widely used in the USA. The aim is to produce a system which will allow choreographers to input and see dance notation being performed while they are composing. A secondary aim is to produce films of existing dance and ballet scores. The work is similar to that proposed by the Royal College of Art using Benesh notation. The Department has a GT40 with a floppy disc attached to a 370/155 in the Computer Centre over a 300 baud link. The Centre's machine appears to be lightly loaded. A 3-minute job has a turn-round of less than 5 minutes. It is, therefore, quite viable to do interaction using the 370/155. The original work has been done by two dancers, Zella Wolofsky and Iris Garland. This was a batch system with the original dance notation being coded to allow input to a FORTRAN program. Output was initially by frames to a CALCOMP plotter. The centre has a spooling system which allows the CALCOMP output to be directed to a Tektronix. The GT40 was purchased from DEC and the floppy disc drive from another manufacturer. They are currently trying to obtain DEC DOS software and manuals privately so that they can run it on their floppy disc. Handlers have been written to allow Tektronix input and output to be simulated on the GT40. The system at the moment can take the coded Labanotation, run the program on the 370/155, and then display the results on the GT40 in real time. The dancers are currently simple stick figures and the display is changed 12 frames per second. The time from input of data to animation display on the GT40 is about 4 minutes or less. The next stage of the work is to provide means of inputting the Labanotation symbols directly using a menu of symbols and a lightpen. The last few time periods of the score being generated is available to the artist. He has the ability to scroll backwards and forwards through the score, displaying the actual dance figure at any point if he requires it. The long term aim is to move all the software to the PDP11 so that a low-cost viable system is produced which could be made available as a commercial system. Extract: Smalltalk first impressions [Barenholtz] mentioned a system being produced at Rank-Xerox, Palo Alto by Alan Kay called SMALLTALK, this looked as though it would be a high-class interactive system using special hardware. External link: Online copy at Chilton |