Think Big by Thinking Small...

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Founded in 1990, in Providence, Rhode Island, the Company of Science and Art [CoSA], before becoming synonymous with software such as After Effects and being sequentially absorbed first by the Aldus Corporation and subsequently by the industry titan Adobe Systems, produced [ahem] one of the most radical if short-lived pieces of software ever to hit the graphics and video realm. PACo Producer was possibly the most stupidly powerful piece of software ever to cross my path. The complete installation, including full documentation, came on a single 1.44Mb compact floppy disk [if you're under fifty or so, you'll have to Google around it]; and yet the little beast had the power, given time, to turn a bunch of full screen frames into a full-blown 30fps video, back in the days when the most on offer from any computer manufacturer outside of the very specialised and heinously expensive likes of Sun, Silicon Graphics and Avid workstations was a postage stamp image running at sub-prime frame-rates. It was a stunning piece of work which again exemplifies the philosophy of "code light and code deep". As per last night's scribble, getting as far down into the metal as is feasible yields massive - orders of magnitude massive - rewards. We could do worse than heed that message in so much of modern life: just chucking more and more resources at a problem because you don't really understand the root causes of that problem is not a solution. Apply Occam's razor, apply lateral thinking, and think sideways, always...

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