Gaming Generation - Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs / Breakout

As you already know, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the founder and co-founder of one of the biggest companies in the world, Apple. They had met as they both went to the same high school. A friend of Wozniak introduced Jobs to Wozniak as they both played pranks on people at school and wanted to see which pranks were of who. Without them knowing they had created the friendship behind Apple.

However, it is not as it seems. Wozniak has said that Steve Jobs had sort of 'betrayed' him sometimes. One time was in the making of the game Breakout. Co-founder Wozniak has said that Jobs didn't tell him the truth about a deal over the game ' Breakout' with Atari. Apparently Jobs took a lot more money than Wozniak where(apparently) Wozniak did all the work in the creation of the game.

Breakout is an arcade game published by Atari. It was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, influenced by the 1972 Atari arcade game Pong, and built by Wozniak and aided by Steve Jobs. Breakout was the basis and inspiration for certain aspects when it came to the Apple Personal Computer.

The game is very simple. A layer of bricks are stacked in the top third of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls of the screen. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces away and the brick is destroyed. The player loses a turn when the ball 'falls off', that being touching the bottom of the screen. The player has a movable paddle to hit the ball upward, keeping it in play.

This game was an extension of a game that they had already programmed that has paddles and balls that can move at different angles and speeds. It had to be put in a reflection and counting when you hit bricks. It had  no name when Wozniak had done the project. Atari chose the name.
Like many technological advances, the idea for video games came from the government. They wanted something to improve the reflexes of military personnel.

many games of the 1970's period were Magnavox Odyssey, Atari PONG, PONG clones, RCA Studio III. 

The Human Factor - Alan Turing

In 2012, it was a special year for all mathematicians, scientists and computer scientists as it marked 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing. He was born in 2012 and sadly committed suicide in 1954 by poisoning an apple for not being accepted and in fact given medication to change from being gay.

Alan Turing was perhaps one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century. Turing was a Pioneer of computer science. He is mostly known today for breaking the German enigma code for the second world war. At that time he was already established as an incredible mathematician.
Touring concede of a hypothetical machine that reads symbols on a strip of tape, rewriting them or deleting them based on a finite set of rules. In fact originally he described a person performing these operations a computer. Given a problem to compute this machine would either stop and give you the answer or run forever if the answer doesn't exist.
The imagined touring machine model went to become one of the corner stones of computer science, and Touring was only 22.

During the second world war, the Germans used a machine called enigma to encrypt their secret message about the size of a type writer, the enigma has a second set of letters that light up called the lab board. If you press a letter on the keyboard, the machine generated a different letter to represent it on the lab board creating the code. The standard enigma machine had over 150 million, million, million possible codes(150,000000,000000,000000). This is that the system changes pressing the same letter to becoming a different result. Double letters for example, may not become double letters in the code.
Turing was one of the code crackers during the second world war and helped code many messages. They say that without these coders, the war could have gone as long as 2 years longer. They technically saved many lives by discovering secret messages of times, places, methods of destruction and so on. Along with Gordon Welshman, he designed a machine to smash the German enigma code, called the bomb. This was all done with coding which shows how he was to vital to today's computers and technology of communication.

Thinking Interaction Design

Task: Research an interaction-based marketing scheme, discuss the problems they solve and justify your reasoning.



The interaction-based marketing scheme i chose to talk about is the Lipton Ice Tea Cool Down Stop. 

Lipton's Interactive Bus Stop Ad Helps People Cool Off in the Summer.

In Lipton's interactive bus stop ad, they placed sprinklers on the bus stop so when people would push the button, they would get refreshed by a bit of water sprinkled on them. This is a good idea because firstly it was in the summer season meaning it was very hot. When in summer, everyone wants to be out enjoying the sun. Lipton use the interactive bus stop brilliantly to help people cool off in the process. Lipton made a bus stop known as the 'Cool Down Stop' with a button encouraging people to press it. 

Although there images of Lipton products splashed all over the bus shelter, there is no physical drink  involved in this campaign. In my opinion they should have also added a Lipton ice tea dispenser to show how cool and refreshing it really is.

However, this is a really clever way to build association that Lipton is a good summer refreshment when it's unbearably hot outside.

LINK TO THE YOUTUBE VIDEO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOI-hGvMiZc

Why I chose Graphic Design

I've always loved art. Starting from primary school, art was always my favourite subject. Through secondary school art remained my favourite subject. 

Although art was my favourite subject at school, it felt as if something was missing, as if it wasn't just drawing and painting that i wanted to do for my life and choose for my career. Without knowing that courses like graphic design or any type of design course existed besides actual art, i knew that something like that was for me. Funnily enough, here I am starting graphic design at university level. 

After getting my art O level, I decided to take it as an A level. Art A level thought me a lot, and not just about art. It thought me the beauty of simplicity. I felt at peace with myself when painting, drawing, or designing something. Before i knew it 2 years flew by and I had done my Art A level. Now it was time to start something that i truly enjoyed looking at and learn how to master it. I've always been fascinated by posters, logos, booklet designs and event tickets. 

I've always loved the fact of editing something that isn't real or creating something out of nothing buy colour, shapes and lines. Until I do get used to Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, I will find it hard to cope. My favourite topic or style out of all is playing around with geometric shapes for logos, posters and so on. I am sure that this will be my style to build upon.

One day I either hope to be working freelance or working for a company. How i see graphic design is you are either the best, or one of the rest. Working freelance especially, a good name travels to so many people. Being the best is a goal of mine in graphic design and with good determination, hard work and practice I hope to make it. Maybe one day I might have my own company with graphic designers working for me, who knows. All i know is time will tell. 

I also wish to continue drawing and painting not just to relax and enjoy, but also to be a side business. I think painting, drawing and graphic design go hand in hand with each other creativity wise and determination wise.

The only thing to focus on right now is these three years I have at Mcast because these will either make me or break me.