Moore's Law, manifest

[womzilla]

I spent most of the 1990s working for Crossover Technologies, a small software company run by a cabal of former wargame and roleplaying game designers. (At various points, they also employed quility, wild_irises, cattitude, agrumer, eleanor, baldanders, and sandial, as well as giving freelance work to nellorat, supergee, and a bunch of other people who you probably know if you know me. We used to joke about the Crossover Technologies "full employment for fandom" policy.)

Crossover was always short on money and hence on computing resources. In my mind this resource shortage is best exemplified by our major project for 1994: Behind the Mask, a CD companion to the Jim Carrey film The Mask. Our client was New Lines Cinema. The schedule was tight and the budget was, if we did everything perfectly, exactly enough to pay the salaries of everyone involved in the project. The big up-side was that the budget included purchasing a vital piece of cutting-edge hardware: a 2x CD-ROM burner.

I believe it cost $5,000. We called it "Vernor". The first pirated CD I burned, I burned on Vernor. Here's a picture of Vernor on our kitchen counter, the day that I took him to the dump.



I was reminded of Vernor today when I installed my DVD burner, which cost me $50, fits into a 5-1/4" drive bay, and burns data 24 times as fast. I believe that the last time I was at CompUSA, they had a rebate offer whereby you could get a CD burner for free if you bought a stack of 100 blank CDs.

Sic semper gloria techie.

Comments

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

The first pirated CD I burned, I burned on Vernor.

I shall have to ask, but I believe that CD still exists, and is somewhere in my ex-husband's apartment. Did anyone at Crossover ever use that SGI workstation that I "fixed" for you by clearing something large (for the time) out of /tmp?

(Heh. I just realized that I've been a sysadmin for 15 years now- two years longer than I'd been a professional software developer before that)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I had completely forgotten about the assistance you had provided us! And I was thinking of a different pirate CD.

I think we did end up using the SGI workstation, but I no longer remember for what.

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

I had completely forgotten about the assistance you had provided us!

No particular reason for you to remember- I think it took me all of 5 minutes to find and fix, and it was 12 years ago. I barely remembered it myself until you mentioned Behind the Mask.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Aaah, the good old days. I had a Smart and Friendly 2x burner from around the same era. Back then, even buying 25 at a time, CDRs were $12.50. Hardly worth pirating audio CDs. The first time I didn't do a test burn and it died when hitting a mote of dust I almost cried at the expense...

[paleogrrl.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to your post and 6 months late to boot - he's a child psychologist. Can you tell I haven't had much time this year?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine why!