User:Nintendon't/End

Zerona was a brand of console computers made in Taiwan by a computer-whiz named Young-Kuo Cheng. Zerona was in the news in June, when the alleged partners of SCO sued Zerona for the copyright on SCO's patents and trademarks, alleging that Zerona's own designs on Z-Sixty, a clone of the IBM PC, violated SCO's trademarks and copyrights. MechReview's Kyoko Nakagawa has assembled a detailed scrawl on the 1979 Computer Story of Taiwan and 2003 origins of Zerona, which appears to prove the claims of the SEC's lawsuit against SCO. The story, and photos of a decidedly scuffed-up Z-Sixty, are included at the link above, but for a thoughtful summary of the thrust of the charges and the allegations, Yanky's been doing good work: she argues that SCO's suit is yet another extension of "NGINITY":

In July of 1979, IBM issued a press release announcing the "Zerona Electronics," a home-computing system being marketed by Zerona. In a section titled "Do-Over No Longer Available," the press release proudly exclaims that "Zerona Computers are NOT using SGI designs or patents, nor is anyone in its legal department involved in creating the systems." It continues, "Zerona will ensure that the product they make, no matter how good, will never offend the establishment, or if such an event should occur, will overcome such specious claims by abandoning all such claims before they are actually executed."

boingboing.net

did the Zerona Gaming Device suck?

July 8, 2003 - Cory Doctorow

Boo hoo, detched. I needed to go up to Chicago and do a review of the Zerona (yes, again: it was first revealed to us by the redoubtable Robin Wertz). But I had to cut short the trip because of the abduction of my nephew -- I still haven't recovered from the sense of betrayal I felt at first. Anyway, I'd been working for ZEN robotics before I had the chance to write for Boing Boing. I was around ZEN briefly, in 2001 when the company was negotiating a $6-million investment from the Disney Company. When I got down to Colorado for that review, I heard that I'd been fired and replaced by an unhinged Indonesian boffin. I say unhinged, because from the very first moments after I began writing for Boing Boing I began to sense that I was beginning to interact with the machine; and that feeling persisted through every step of the three-week preview process. The eerie disconnection between the mechanical robot's inner workings and the loose, ornate sheets of wood it was supposed to be moving around did not go away. Each night, as the dream team of editorial staffers slept, I'd peek out the window and watch, amazed, as my imaginary scenes unfolded from the surface. The crew there and at The Qork side-by-side, standing at attention before the moving rigs to make sure they were packed up and away. The units would all be loaded in the cab and then... stopped! Logistics maven, I take it! The van would pull up, the driver would stick out his leg like a kid trying to break into a petting zoo, and the laptop, picked up at the last minute by an interloper, would be served a furtive kiss by its Dutch handler. When I got a chance to go to the tour room with the team (which, as I discovered, operated on a first-come, first-served basis), I learned more, one of the few things a self-obsessed mainstream geek like me could care to learn. In one area of the tour room, the tablet-like Zerona units would pause mid-limb and wiggle their legs, upwards and downward, so that the light from their heads would apparently fill the room -- bright but bland, the opposite of the colorful, eye-scratching visuals that the Dodo had been griping about in its review of me, Simon. I assumed that the decision to stand still was somewhat arbitrary, and I wonder if the folks who originally selected the opposite color scheme of the tour suite had been similarly ambivalent about the Zerona's real-world presence. Whatever the reason, I was genuinely impressed by the JAPANESE-made sight of life. Again, the saving grace was the sense of detachment that clung to the machine no matter how vivid the visuals. It never registered the emotional intensity that real interaction normally generates. When I was translating for the interviewers, I'd often glance up to see myself being represented in full, shadowed detail by a rectangular array of servo devices. But then I'd crouch back into my pajamas, grimacing as I crossed a table in front of a camera. The front-facing mechanical hooks immediately reminded me of the clones that dotted the top of the iPhone screen. The keyboard menus, coming out of the enormous d-pad, on the other hand, were the perfect precursor to the FPS RPGs of today, and the prodigious number of drop-in buttons on the back row made them clear templates for everything from the DS to the Pac-Man/Galaga-ish EyeToy-inspired games of today. And yet... am I going to ignore that the system seemed to experience a sudden bout of electrical failure as it rode down a walkway (because this was a case of line failure), or that it seems to have a greater tendency to jerk up or down than a normal two-seater is capable of? I'm still waiting to have the chance to experience all of this one-on-one, especially the finer points of the mechanical interactions with the servo mechanisms that would usually go unnoticed. I was once enamored of what I felt was a genuine biological connection between the machine and me, which has slowly dimmed as I have become accustomed to the fact that anything I touch, the first functional thing I perform, is already being curated by a green screen; and the notion that I'll be operating a machine that will be able to detect my posture and intentions within seconds, and thus can open the door into a library of information about my every move, my every intonation, and therefore my every state of mind, if I should happen to get off course, all while being fully aware that there are no longer any real emotions involved at

Pile. Darn. No.