Quizzes, puzzles, music & games. Drunken debauchery, phallic mascots & anti-military sentiment. Jake Rockatansky guides you through the world of Mel Croucher, his company Automata, and the "Piman".
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Episode music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic), Matthew Delatorre (http://implantcreative.com)
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 121 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Mel Croucher and Automata episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we are resting brains at home and abroad with a flight of inventive fancy, the life of Mel Croucher.
He's a video game pioneer from the UK who has led a life replete with writing, drawing, broadcasting, creating music, and developing video games.
Resembling a friendly Grateful Dead fan, Mel is now in his 70s and is considered a pioneer of effective computing, which concerns systems able to recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human emotions.
Better than going on a good trip is having a quality guide like Jake Rokitansky, esteemed longtime guest, ongoing consultant, and micro-minority owner of the QAA podcast.
So, without further ado, as he's so fond of saying, The year is 1977.
You're in the sunny United Kingdom, huddled next to your radio, listening to Radio Victory, an independent station that operated out of Portsmouth.
It's a late-night comedy show, hosted by a jolly-sounding young disc jockey, leading you on a journey through local pubs in the area where he would interview blasted patrons and ask them trivia questions.
But then, something happens.
The drunken interview you were listening to only moments ago disappears and is replaced with a strange beeping.
If you didn't know any better, you thought your radio had malfunctioned.
Or worse, aliens were ready to invade the planet, and this was their final warning.
But if you did know better, you would actually suffer through all of the slurred trivia answers to get to this very moment.
There, with a microphone in your hand, you recorded the two full minutes of strange noise that emanated from your radio speakers.
And that's because you knew it wasn't just noise.
That instead, it was a message.
A message that could be fed into your Commodore PET personal computer and be decoded.
The decode was always the same thing.
A string of numbers.
Coordinates, in fact.
And if you took those coordinates and diagnosed the correct location on a map, you could call back into that very same radio program and receive a very cheap prize.
Oh, they're training bakers.
Turns out the DJ behind the broadcast was none other than United Kingdom's founder of video games, Mel Croucher.
From an early age, Mel had taken an interest in hacking and coding.
As a child, his parents had gotten him a Zutty xylophone as a birthday present.
Now this was a somewhat dangerous instrument that was made out of very sharp tin.
The xylophone came with cards that had colored dots printed on them.
And the idea was that when you lined the dots up and struck them in the proper order, even the most musically averse was able to plunk out something that resembled a tune.
Young Mel, however, quickly grew bored with the 12 songs that came with the toy, and decided he would attempt to make his own.
He pulled the xylophone bars out and reordered them in a way he sought fit, and then made his own little color-coded dot cards.
The tunes didn't sound better, per se, but at least they were his.
A couple of years later, Mel happened upon a rotting pianola behind the kitchen of his flat and, once again, decided to try his hand at reprogramming the damn thing.
You know what these things are, you guys.
They're the pianos where you feed the notched pages into them and they play, you know, pre-programmed pieces of music.
It's basically for people who wanted a piano in their house, but couldn't play it.
Mel describes the process in his book, Deus Ex Machina, The Best Game You Never Played in Your Life, from which I drew quite a bit in researching this episode.
He writes, Pianolas were a sort of giant mechanical iPod for Victorians who didn't have the talent to play regular pianos, and they were very popular in the 19th century.
By the time I tackled this ancient Aeolian upright grand bottle, the world was listening to music on the wireless, and pianolas were very unpopular indeed.
In fact, they were so unpopular that most of them had rotted.
This was because the firmware that powered the keys was a matrix of rubber tubes which time had hardened and fractured like dead macaroni, so it wheezed like my dad in the mornings.
But the software that called the tunes was great.
It was stored as holes punched into the rolls of paper that tore and decomposed in sync with the British Empire.
The grand old Pianola was, of course, my first properly programmable computer.
That summer, I had a square-ended metal hole punch nicked from the dockyard by my dad and acne.
So I spent it in hiding, humiliating the Pianola and forcing it to perform lewd acts of a musical nature.
Programming was simple.
I got a roll of wallpaper and drew up a linear grid of 88 squares times infinity, one square for each note on the piano keyboard and infinity representing time.
If I didn't want a note to play, then I did nothing at all.
If I did want a note to play, then I punched a hole in the right place at the right time, ready for a dead macaroni rubber pipe to fart a jet of air through it.
This released a tiny hammer onto the associated piano strings and played a pitch-perfect note.
The player piano was powered by the kind of foot treadles beloved by sewing machine operators and torturers, linked up to an air pump, a revolving drum, the dead macaroni rubber pipes, and the hammers and strings of the piano.
The harder I pedaled, the faster the drum revolved and the louder my mechanical music became.
There was also a mystery brass lever operated by a sideways jiggling of the inner thigh.
The lever had a little brass plate with the word EXPRESSION stamped on it in an old-fashioned font, and it had magical powers.
It made my dad use the expression, FOR FUCK'S SAKE, and it made my mom use the expression, DANREVETER NACHMAL.
She wasn't being pretentious, she was just being German.
It also made my younger, smarter sister the competitive spirit she is today.
All three of them urged me to cease the bloody racket.
Eventually, that bloody racket made a guest appearance a few decades later on the intro of a song called Pompeii Rock, which uses one of my childhood punch card boogies in the intro.
Mel would go on later to try his hand at programming again, while taking a course on computer science he had enlisted in, because he had a big crush on the professor who taught it.
For some reason, the Portsmouth Polytechnic building where the class took place had access to a Royal Navy computer at the time, which was affectionately called the Beast.
It took up the entire second floor of the building.
Mel's crowning achievement was getting the thing to beep out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star using a similar method he had used to hack his little Zooty xylophone, except this time he used ones and zeros instead of colored dots.
He was promptly kicked out of the program.
He decided that a career in computer science anyways was much too serious and didn't allow for a lot of mucking about, as he puts it.
I see.
So he was the first guy to think, hey, here's this computer.
I'm just going to fiddle around with it, which is a normal thing now.
But back when there were two computers the size of buildings was not appreciated.
Yeah, and to have a Royal Navy computer that students had access to was near unheard of.
He still has no idea why the Portsmouth Polytechnic had one, but nevertheless.
So this was designed to basically calculate the trajectory of missiles to help win wars, and he's using it to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Yeah, he got it to blink out in little beeps and lights on the machine's interface.
So he became an architect instead.
The decision to follow his career path stemmed from going to the library, looking up a careers book, starting with the A's, and then getting bored.
It took him six whole years to become an architect, and by the time he secured his degree, he found it nearly impossible to find any work.
Although it took six long years to qualify as an architect, my studies coincided with everything the 60s had to offer on the extracurricular side, and I invested a lot of time in them.
Much of my energy was spent on growing hair and playing six-string bass guitar in the Ice Cream Yak Band.
Nice.
Then there were wars to end, buildings to occupy, and happenings to happen.
When the news came that I had scraped through my diploma in architecture, we were living in a caravan on a beach in fascist Spain.
The worker who married me was teaching English, the Irish setter was begging for proper food, and I was playing my part in the crime against humanity known as Bengdorm, sign writing and hustling.
Consequently, when I was professionally released into the wild, I was a very green architect.
Not green in the sense that I used recyclable materials and wind power, but green in the sense that I didn't know what I was doing.
By the mid-1970s, the British economy was in recession, and work had dried up for very green, unemployable architects like me.
So I was forced to seek refuge further overseas and wheedle my way into the patronage of the first despot who would have me.
His name was Sheikh Rashid bin Said Al Maktoum, and my job was to build him some prestigious structure in a little desert backwater that he inherited in the traditional manner of historic assassination and sucking up to the British aristocracy.
The little desert backwater was called Dubai, and they had just struck oil.
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