womzilla | Moore's Law, manifest

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.

Vernor the Burner

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.