My first app was written in the most popular programming language at the time. The program I wrote was written in C. Yep I took a college course in Programming Language at West Valley College in Saratoga, California and learned how to write mostly accounting programs. At the time that was what was hiring most college graduates of a software nature. Computer graphics was just not that popular yet, and it was years before Adobe would move on from hyper-card to Director and eventually Flash. Scripting was not separated out from coding yet, it was one in the same, or still considered part of the programming skill.
What I was attempting to do I later found was doable right in DOS, but I did not know there was two flavors of text, or two editing modes in a text editor. The one I knew of was ASCII, and the one I did not know of was Binary. I was using a line editor (edlin) to write scripts for batch processing, and needed a script to run inside of a script.
Today’s typical graphic artist would understand running an action in Photoshop. For repetitive tasks you can program Photoshop to run an action to do a single, of series of steps, by a single click. Furthermore that action could be run on a folder of images, etc.
I needed to modify a sequence of images. Actually, I needed to modify the creation of a sequence of images. In the beginning it was just to see if I could do it, and later it caused me to think of how it could become useful if I could.
Back to the place I was going with all this, I learned how to program in C and wrote an application that I sold for $5 a copy to Jay at a a user group meeting at Siggraph in 1988. The name of my App was "CRASH" had I done research I would have picked a name that was better suited. The App was later described as a time code calculator. But because it was the first of its kind the short name was drawn from what you would be recovering from when you used it. My colleagues and I were computer graphic animators, we would spend countless hours setting up the computer to run all night, sometimes days at a time to create motion graphics for our clients. Many times in the wee hours of the middle of the night, the computer would "crash" thus the name "CRASH.EXE".
If you learned to "nap like an animator" you would sleep, and continue sleeping, as long as you heard the snap of the tape-deck when a single frame had completed its edit. If while dozing realized to much time had past since the last edit, your computer crashed and you would need to wake up and reset the computer to pick up where it left off.
Yes it would have been easier to run the computer saving each image and in the morning dump them to tape, but who had a hard drive that large. Mine was currently the biggest at 150 megabytes and it would fill up half way through a typical five to seven second commercial. So running the animation all night to tape, was the most effective method at the time.
The problem I could solve with my App, was if you could figure how to fix the frame the animation crashed on, how would you then figure out where to start the edit again. Or, if you had the last frame the system successfully completed and edited to tape, where would you begin to look for the problem the computer had computing that single frame. The App when run would ask “Do you have the last frame the computer rendered or do you have the time-code the last image occurs on video?” in either case would then ask what time-code to you begin editing the animation to tape, assuming that you started with frame 1. (Frame 1 = 00:10:00:01 Frame 73 = 00:10:12:13)
Sometimes it was just the one frame, and just starting it up again was a consequence of the computer just needing a break, or more realistically a memory flush, it was confused by numbers the programs were not clearing its cache and memory leaks would often cause certain combinations to over-load the memory, a restart would do the trick. If that did not work you go on to the next, and the next thing until finally you would get that frame rendered, and the animation running again. And return to napping again.
