Malcolm X College

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 27 Oct 2023 11:43
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    • jobs senile reminiscing
    • I always thought it was pretty cool to have this on my resume, although the building looks about as far away from Malcolm X as you can get, Chicago modernism is a pretty white-guy style.
    • I was hacking on PLATO, making these rather dopey "now, johnny" computer-assisted instruction lessons for basic math and some biomedicine. The college existed to help teach basic job skills to people who had passed through the Chicago public schools without learning anything. Medical technician was one big target job market. I think my crowning achievement was to make an animation of the human heart cycle, including sound effects from the compressed air actuators that were a feature of each PLATO terminal.
    • What were hydraulics doing in a computer terminal? Well, PLATO had only low-res (512x512) and monochrome (orange) bitmapped graphics. But no worries, if you wanted to show a high-resolution color image, all you had to do was prepare and distribute a microfiche to along with your software, and you could back-project images from it to overlay the monochrome screen. The actuators were to move the microfiche plate around.
    • PLATO was very ahead of its time in offering bitmapped graphics, networked live chat, multiplayer games, and a host of other things that the internet would take another few decades to rediscover.

    • Feb 12th, 2022 Just watched Judas and the Black Messiah and was amused that MXC was mentioned early on at one of the Black Panther meetings (basically as an example of meaningless reform as opposed to the actual revolution they were advocating). Also didn't know that it used to be Theodore Herzl Junior College!