Powerful hardware.
Sunday, April 8th, 2018
I think one of the reasons I’ve been spending my creative energy (or what passes for it) lately on creating detailed, 3D views of thirty-five-year-old electronic design is that it always had a certain beauty and conveyed functional power.
Do modern user interfaces on our screens do the same? Mmmm…maybe not. And yet, buried within a dense, complex nest of menus and buttons, the pure utility of modern digital technology leaves all the old tech in the dust. It’s not even close.
In order to get one more layer into my late-70s/early 80s compositions, I had to patch and drag equipment from multiple control rooms together and then go through a laborious series of alignments and checks to make sure they were doing the right thing—that their analog signals were playing nice, in synchronization with the other dozen or so analog signals.
At two in the morning, this was a bit hit-or-miss.
But at two in the morning, the warm glow of those buttons and the chrome-y call of those fader bars sure made you want to do more with what you had.
Grass Valley Group 300 switcher, ©2018, John Christopher Burns
Sohio.
Monday, March 19th, 2018
If you grew up in the state of Ohio, or if you wandered through the midwest generally, you may remember Sohio.
A gas station chain, part of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire, a brand that became extinct in the 1980s when BP America bought Standard Oil of Ohio and absorbed them out of existence.
©2018, John Christopher Burns
I liked Sohio stations in the late 1960s because they seemed (in the definition of the time) unmistakably modern, with clean lines and a bright red white and blue color scheme. In the cold Ohio winters, radio commercials with jarring proto-electronic music reminded drivers to fill up with Boron to prevent “fuel-line freeze-up”. (Kind of a 1960s automotive “heartbreak of psoriasis.”)
©2018, John Christopher Burns
That’s why, when I had some spare time, I tried to recreate one completely in a 3D modeling/rendering program, from what I discovered was very limited online reference material.
Now the frames I’ve created—very much idealized and “in my mind’s eye”— have become part of what comes up in internetland when you search for ‘Sohio.’ And as long as you give me credit I have no problem with you linking to or talking about these images (which also show up on Flickr and Instagram.)
©2018, John Christopher Burns
I like buses that speak in the first 
