QUOTE I think its inevitable that the gaming entertainment world will move in much the same way that the music and video entertainment worlds have already. The Digital Antiquarian. On July 9, 1. 97. Game On Eight Years of Game of Thrones Audition Secrets with Casting Director Nina Gold. Im an associate editor at Forbes covering media and entertainment, with a focus on the movie business. For the magazine, Ive written cover stories on Kim. Manhattans Plaza Hotel to witness the flashy roll out of The Source, an online service for home computer owners that claimed to be the first of its kind. The master of ceremonies was none other than the famous science fiction and science fact writer Isaac Asimov. With his nutty professor persona in full flower, his trademark mutton chop sideburns bristling in the strobe of the flashbulbs, Asimov said that this is the beginning of the Information Age By the 2. The Source will be as vital as electricity, the telephone, and running water. Actually, though, The Source wasnt quite the first of its kind. Just eight days before, another new online service had made a more quiet official debut. It was called Micro. NET, and came from an established provider of corporate time shared computing services called Compu. Serve. Micro. NET got no splashy unveiling, no celebrity spokesman, just a typewritten announcement letter sent to members of selected computer users groups. The contrast between the two roll outs says much about the men behind them, who between them would come to shape much of the online world of the 1. Worlds Hardest Game Jimmy' title='Worlds Hardest Game Jimmy' />They were almost exactly the same age as one another, but cut from very different cloths. Jeff Wilkins, the executive in charge of Compu. Serve, could be bold when he felt it was warranted, but his personality lent itself to a measured, incremental approach that made him a natural favorite with the conservative business establishment. The changes that will come to microcomputing because of computer networks will be evolutionary in nature, he said just after launching Micro. After months and months of rumors, speculation, and flat out waiting, we finally know who is taking on the TARDIS as the thirteenth Doctor in season 11. Ladies and. NET. Even after Wilkins left Compu. Serve in 1. 98. 5, it would continue to bear the stamp of his careful approach to doing business for many years. But William Von Meister, the man behind The Source and its afore described splashier unveiling, preferred revolutions to evolutions. He was high strung, mercurial, careless, sometimes a little unhinged. Naskah Drama Untuk 8 Orang Pemain Tentang Persahabatan Yang here. Described as a magnificent rogue by one acquaintance, as a pathological entrepreneur by another, he made businesses faster than he made children of whom, being devoted to excess in all its incarnations, he had eight. His businesses seldom lasted very long, and when they did survive did so without him at their helm, usually after he had been chased out of them in a cloud of acrimony and legal proceedings. A terrible businessman by most standards, he could nevertheless raise money from the dead, as one investor put it, thereby moving on to the next scheme while the previous was still going down in flames. Still, whatever else you could say about him, Bill von Meister had vision. Building the online societies of the future would require cockeyed dreamers like him just as much as it would sober tacticians like Jeff Wilkins. Had an anonymous salesman who worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in 1. Compu. Serve would most likely never have come to be. The salesman in question had been assigned to a customer named John Goltz, fresh out of the University of Arizona and working now in Columbus, Ohio, for a startup. But lest the word startup convey a mistaken impression of young men with big dreams out to change the world, Silicon Valley style, know that this particular startup lived within about the most unsexy industry imaginable life insurance. No matter from Goltzs perspective anyway the work was interesting enough. He found himself doing the work because Harry Gard, the founder of the freshly minted Golden United Life Insurance, wanted to modernize his hidebound industry, at least modestly, by putting insurance records online via a central computer which agents in branch offices could all access. He had first thought of giving the job to his son in law Jeff Wilkins, an industrious University of Arizona alumnus who had graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and now ran a successful burglar alarm business of his own in Tucson. The difference between electrical engineering and computing didnt occur to him, remembers Wilkins. I told him that I didnt know anything about computing, but I had a friend who did. That friend was John Goltz, whose degree in computer science made him the more logical candidate in Wilkinss eyes. Once hired, Goltz contacted DEC to talk about buying a PDP 9, a sturdy and well understood machine that should be perfectly adequate for his new companys initial needs. Gmud For. But our aforementioned fast talking salesman gave him the hard up sell, telling him about the cutting edge PDP 1. Like the poor rube who walks into his local Ford dealership to buy a Focus and drives out in a Mustang, Goltzs hacker heart couldnt resist the lure of DECs 3. He repeated the salemans pitch almost verbatim to his boss, and Gard, not knowing a PDP 1. PDP 9 from a HAL 9. Once his dream machine was delivered and installed in a former grocery store, Goltz duly started building the online database for which hed been hired. The notoriously insular life insurance market was, however, a difficult nut to crack. Orders came in at a trickle, and Goltzs 1 million PDP 1. It was at this point, looking for a way both to make his computer earn its keep and to keep his employer afloat, that Goltz proposed that Golden United Life Insurance enter into the non insurance business of selling time shared computer cycles. Once again, Gard told him to go for it any port in a storm and all that. At the dawn of the 1. Over the course of the 1. United States government bureaucracies, banks, automobile manufacturers and other heavy industries had all gradually been computerized via hulking mainframes that, attended by bureaucratic priesthoods of their own and filling entire building floors, chewed through and spat out millions of records every day. But that left out the countless smaller organizations who could make good use of computers but had neither the funds to pay for a mainframes care and upkeep nor a need for more than a small fraction of its vast computing power. DEC, working closely with university computer science departments like that of MIT, had been largely responsible for the solution to this dilemma. Time sharing, enabled by a new generation of multi user, multitasking operating systems like DECs TOPS 1. A business or other organization, in other words, could literally share time on a remote computer system with others, paying for only the cycles and storage they actually used. If you think that all this sounds suspiciously like the supposedly modern innovation of cloud computing, youre exactly right. Workbench Project Management Software Manual more. In technology as in life, a surprising number of things are cyclical, with only the vocabulary changing. Jeff Wilkins. John Goltz possessed a keen technical mind, but he had neither the aptitude nor the desire to run the business side of Golden Uniteds venture into time sharing. So, Harry Gard turned once again to his son in law. I liked what I was doing in Arizona, Jeff Wilkins says. I enjoyed having my own company, so I really didnt want to come out. Finally, Gard offered him 1. I set down the ground rules, he says. I had to have complete control. In January of 1. Gard having agreed to that stipulation, the 2. Jeff Wilkins abandoned his burglar alarm business in Tuscon to come to Columbus and run a new Golden Life subsidiary which was to be called Compu Serv. With time sharing all the rage in computer circles, it was a tough market they were entering.