Top digital stories this week, incl. Vint Cerf & ZX Spectrum

This week’s pick of the top digital stories, as selected for you by the beady-eyed Brasscals. Read on for Vint Cerf, ZX Spectrum, descriptive cameras, online display and Spotify in the rich list, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments bit at the bottom.

Back to basics

Paul Mallett, Managing Partner

This week saw Vint Cerf inducted into the Internet Society’s Hall of Fame. No great surprises, but I think, really timely.

The technology news agenda is becoming increasingly dominated by patent squabbles and the consumer version of the internet by Apple’s proprietary walled garden.

None of this was ever meant to be.

What always appealed to me (and the rest of the world) about the internet was its freedom, its lack of walls, its built in democracy. It enabled anyone, anywhere, to have a voice, a point of view. It enabled anyone to be a star, a revolutionary, a diplomat, a journalist. And it did this by being free and open.

Vint Cerf was one of the chief protagonists of this viewpoint. He and his colleagues were born from US counterculture and, funded by the military and the space race, invented a new age, equal in importance to the industrial revolution and the ability to replicate words through printing.

And they always said it should be open and free. As Vint himself said:

“We said we’re not going to patent it, we’re not going to control it. We’re going to release it to the world as soon as it’s available, which we did.”

This spirit lives on in the Open Source world of Linux and Android, but is being continually eroded by the closed systems of Apple and the patent squabbles of the tech giants.

Me, I prefer the world of Vint – the Godfather of Cerfing (I’ll get my coat)

Happy birthday ZX Spectrum

Andrew Brown, Creative Director

The ZX Spectrum was the most important home computer ever made. After two years of prodding the touch-insensitive keys of the black and white, low res 1k ZX81, the Spectrum exploded into our homes with seven colours, one channel of sound, 16k of memory and a high resolution 256×192 pixel screen.  It. Was. Awesome.

It’s often cited that the importance of these Sinclair machines was that they taught a whole generation to code. By sitting for hours inputting line after line from magazines we learned BASIC and grew up with a grounding in the principals of computer logic.  But what really distinguished the Spectrum from its nuts and bolts predecessor wasn’t the code we created ourselves. With the Spectrum we had our first taste of APPS. And APPS have tended to be the killer reason every other home computer innovation has survived or failed ever since.

Ask people to talk about ZX81 games and they might cite 3D Monster Maze and maybe a couple of others. Ask people about Spectrum games and you’ll be lucky to get away as aficionados wax lyrical about Jet-Pac, Ant Attack, Manic Miner and countless other games which were bought on cassette tapes and loaded by audio into the machine.The App(lication) was born, came of age and grew up fast on the Spectrum.  Small companies like the critically acclaimed “Ultimate” (from Twycross in Leicestershire) made small fortunes and grew into big companies. Ultimate later became Rare which in turn became part of Microsoft Studios and currently release games such as Kinect Sports.