…+++ If I didn’t know better I’d say Gibson had a time travel machine,
every time I see something new I remember how I’ve aleady read it in one of his books.
Actually I don’t know any better, maybe he does +++…

By chrome_halo on 12.14.05 4:11 pm

Does anyone out there know how quickly the lines scrolled across the screen, and how many lines were visible at any given time? From the look of the hacker video, it appears to be roughly 2.5 secs per line, and 18 lines visible…

By Ray Malewitz on 01.25.06 7:31 pm

I can’t think of any way to verify from observation the scroll speed of the poem, other than to acquire an original copy of the diskette with Gibson’s poem and then to play it (but also therefore to encrypt/erase it). And even then, that wouldn’t answer the question of how fast the poem was intended to scroll on a 1992-era Mac computer. I suspect that we’d have to look at the source code for the part of the program on the disk that scrolls the text to see what it sets for its timing parameters. Unfortunately, no one seems to have that source code any longer—though a few excerpts (from print-outs) were made available to us by Kevin Begos for the Agrippa Files site. So, for the present, the best evidence remains the video. –Alan Liu

By ayliu-editor on 02.05.06 2:06 am