In March 2009 I interviewed
Roland Bryan, one of the
original Arpanet team and now CEO of
MachineTalker, a Santa Barbara based company developing intelligent wireless networks. I was in pursuit of some drawings I found a few years ago on Martin Dodge's great
Atlas of Cyberspaces - namely the 'scroll' to be found some way down
this page. Dodge attributes the scroll to Roland, however I discovered when we talked that he did not actually design it, but commissioned it to his concept in 1992 as a promotional calendar for his company Advanced Computer Communications (ACC). ACC helped design and implement the first packet switch network for a U.S. Government agency and was later sold to Ericsson. The artist was in fact
Chuck Huckeba, now based in Arizona.
I was excited to learn that Roland still owns the original painting and we went together to his storage facility in Santa Barbara in the hope of locating it. It didn't surface on that occasion but hopefully he will find it soon. Judging from the colour prints he sent me later, it must be very lushly-coloured and rich in detail. It was fascinating, also, to discover that the images were
colour - the pictures on Martin Dodge's site are black and white and it never occurred to me that the original would be anything other than monochrome. Roland has very kindly allowed me to blog about these images. I have uploaded them to Flickr and linked to them here. I am delighted - they are a real find. I especially like the cool shades worn by a very hippy-looking Leonardo da Vinci!
1: Full image
2: Roland Bryan
3: Detail
4: Detail naming a number of important individuals from the early days of computing including the creators of Arpanet and showing the first computer mouse, designed by Douglas Engelbart
Attribution: The content of the ACC calendar was a collaborative effort by ACC staff and the artist Chuck Huckeba
This piece was first posted on the Nature and Cyberspace blog in 2009.
