I was part of the team that worked on this way back in the day, and it was a blast. It was a bunch of soldering, running wires, trying to debug all the issues, etc. And then everything came together and it just worked.
Woz showing up was the icing on the cake, and it was definitely one of the highlights of my college career.
I was a middle-schooler and my parents took me to play. I recall a bug where if you rotated the square quickly enough it would travel upward. Someone (maybe Clara?) whipped out a patch and recompiled.
No idea who'd have done the patch, it was really a team effort. I forget the exact number, but there were 20+ contributors over the course of the project. And by the time it was up and running a lot of us were crashing due to the long hours. I only vaguely remember the first night it fired up, since I had gone home to sleep after a long shift and someone came back to tell me that it was finally working.
I created an account just for this: I dated Clara's sister for 7 years, and I still run into her brother occasionally, from the other side of the country.
And it was done before that in 1995 at Delft University, as the article mentions. (I saw it there!). Playing Angry Birds on the side of a building would be more with the time.
Polish students show such demo every year on their P.I.W.O. display. It has a 10x12 resolution and supports 4 colours using 8 light bulbs in every window. There is also animation editor available for download and an ongoing contest for the best animation.
That's very cool and playful, but "Holy grail of hacks" seems a bit overwrought. I don't want to be a naysaying jerk, and the whole thing is cool, but . . . is this harder than it looks?
Could you explain? I've seen MIT do similar 'hacks' in the past with various patterns in the windows ('SOX' for the 2004 World Series is the only one I remember off the top of my head). Nothing was this elaborate, but I imagine that the hard part is actually setting up the system to coordinate the actual lights turning off/on.... and it seems like they've had that for a while.
I was a student at MIT in the early 90s and Tetris on the Green Building was considered the "holy grail of hacks" back then. Definitely a major accomplishment, particularly with color and also lots of props to Brown for getting there first!
I still don't quite get it. Presumably the story is more interesting than "we got permission and used lots of wire", but the first couple of pages of google results don't really explain how.
IF they got permission, well, it makes it a whole lot easier. The hard part would be covertly entering every room of a building and leaving your control system and hoping not to get caught.
They had to break in to the Rose Bowl stadium, design and build special boards to take over the scoreboard lights, and break back in to install the boards. The control of the board during the halftime break in the Rose Bowl game was done by RF link. This was in 1984, when hardware was much more finicky and expensive.
Or the 1961 Great Rose Bowl Hoax that inspired it, which might not be as high-tech, but is to me even more satisfying because they tricked an entire crowd of UW fans into unwittingly cheering for their nerdy and ignored school.
They even made the first few compromised banners subtle enough that the crowd kept going with it until the finale where they wrote "CALTECH," an unmistakable prank.
Another note about the 1984 prank. The Pasadena police and the Rose Bowl organization, which is a fusty old group, were not amused with the surreptitious entry of the Rose Bowl building. They threatened to charge the pranksters. One of the senior Caltech faculty (Carver Mead?) offered to pay for legal defense if required.
I can't find anywhere that details if this hack was done with permission from the various occupants of the building. If they had to break in to every office on that side of the building to install the equipment the hack becomes even more impressive.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadhttp://techhouse.brown.edu/bastille/
Woz even showed up to play it:
http://techhouse.brown.edu/bastille/photos/woz_play.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwNQqePk8Kg
Woz showing up was the icing on the cake, and it was definitely one of the highlights of my college career.
Awesome to hear from someone who got to play it!
Pointless post is pointless.
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2012/tetris/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoFdS5lWXg8
http://www.piwo.pwr.wroc.pl/?lang=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rose_Bowl#Scoreboard_prank
They had to break in to the Rose Bowl stadium, design and build special boards to take over the scoreboard lights, and break back in to install the boards. The control of the board during the halftime break in the Rose Bowl game was done by RF link. This was in 1984, when hardware was much more finicky and expensive.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/04/sports/sports-people-prank...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rose_Bowl_Hoax
They even made the first few compromised banners subtle enough that the crowd kept going with it until the finale where they wrote "CALTECH," an unmistakable prank.
A more detailed story is here: http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display?story_id=11464
I'm assuming there must be some central computer controlling the lights, either than or they attached something to / modified each light switch?