Yeah, that's me.My boy dutifully kicked off May the 4th with a viewing of Star Wars. I lie: He popped Star Wars into the DVD player because that’s what he does on a Saturday morning. He had no awareness of today’s geeky significance.
But in honor of May the 4th, here’s a small, insignificant fascination I have with the original Star Wars.
I remember 1977. Here’s what I remember: 8-track tape players. Really big cars with carburetors under the hood. Pocket calculators that were just beginning to fulfill the promise of actually fitting in your pocket.
Considered awesome because you never had to rewind it!
There were no cell phones. No computers in people’s homes—and certainly not in their pockets. No internet—people wouldn’t start commonly using the web for nearly two decades. Heck: Microwaves and VCRs were just hitting the market. The Atari game console was still several years away.
Star Wars had droids and computers. Nothing special about that; both had been in the public consciousness (and movies) for decades. But when did we become aware of networks and their potential? I don’t recall being at all aware of such things—but when R2 shuts down a garbage disposal from a network interface half a small moon away, the audience went right along with it. In 1977.
I guess maybe this concept was already out there. Or maybe it made such intuitive sense that people bought it without thinking. I don’t remember it being a “wow” moment.
But then, it was Star Wars. It was the summer of ’77, and there had never been an experience like it. Maybe it was just lost in the blinding glare of a hundred “wow” moments.
Am I right to find this bit of trivia fascinating? Or am I misremembering—were we already all like, “Yeah, duh, it’s a computer network. Happens all the time.”?
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The Fascinating World of Charles Ryan 
Between when I started university (studying computers) and when I left it, the World Wide Web came into being. The internet was already there, but the graphical “html” interface was created during that period. That is the big technical breakthrough that I really noticed in my lifetime. When Star Wars came out, a decade and a bit earlier, I was almost five, and though I’m pretty sure* I saw it early on – probably even at the cinema, my parents guiding in my lifetime obsession with fantasy and science-fiction – I never realised how new R2-D2’s networking actually was. It was all new. Or all old, depending on how you viewed it.
I spent May the 4th at my FLGS, playing in a Star Wars LCG event. The game hasn’t really kicked off here, so we had effectively only four players. (We started with six, but didn’t end that way). It was a very strange experience. The X-Wing tournament that was to follow it didn’t even get close to happening, though the game is more popular here than the LCG, Real Life(tm) is interfering with most people’s plans.
*: As you might imagine, my memories of when I actually first saw Star Wars are pretty hazy. I know it was before The Empire Strikes Back came out, and I’m 99% sure it was at the cinema and not TV, but the exact date? Not a clue. Probably 1978. Did I see it before we went to England for 6 months in 1979? Urgh.
Good to see a new post from you, Charles!
Hi, Merric. Yes, I should post a bit more often, but that’s just one of a number of things I should do more often. See tomorrow’s post for a bit more on that topic.
In the summer of ’77 I was just about to turn 13—absolutely the perfect age for a first exposure to Star Wars (though my own kids got it at about 4). I was also moving back to the US after living overseas for three years. So I had missed whatever commercials/hype/buildup had preceded the film. I was coming into it completely blind. In fact, I remember thinking “Star Wars? That’s a dumb name for a movie. Shouldn’t it be something like The Star War or The Space War or something?” I had absolutely no preconception before heading into the movie theater with my cousins, whom I was visiting upon return to the States.
The “coolest” movie I had seen to date was The Land that Time Forgot. I remember openly doubting my cousins when they said this new movie would blow that away.
I think folks were simply so caught up in the moment that they didn’t really catch it, or their minds were actually not able to process it, then. I was six when Star Wars came out, and did not see it until years later, on HBO I believe.
Think about this for a moment… you said it yourself, in this article, that the internet would not be widely used for two decades, around 1997. I know that is when I joined the broad community online, starting with MechWarrior II: Mercenaries, in ’97. However, when you were writing the GenNet chapter for Millennium’s End, in the late ’80s or early ’90s -I ordered the entire set available at the time, from Chameleon Eclectic, and read it all on the airplane to Germany, in ’94-, what was going through your mind? How did you develop the processes you did, without either a great deal of research, or an imagination vast enough to conceive a truth well beyond its time?
How was the Grid developed for Shadowrun, or the Matrix for Cyberpunk? All of these games were developed at a time when folks were beginning to understand there was a means of communicating by text, without a telephone, even though TCP/IP had only been put in place in January ’91 and, before that, it was DARPA-Net, period, but nothing beyond text. How could any of the development companies for these games, or you in specific, have known that what we call the internet, today, was going to be anything more than a fad? Even Jordan Weisman (FASA Corporation 1982 – 2001; Shadowrun, BattleTech, Earthdawn), in an interview for ‘Mech Magazine in ’93, I believe it was, expressed his belief the new network was nothing more than a fad, and he wasn’t going to invest time in something that was going nowhere.
How could those of you, who innovated my life and continue to do so, have understood at the time, with the ground-breaking work you made, you with the GenNet, what it was going to do to the internet we now have? Internet gaming exists because of you (Chameleon Eclectic), FASA Corporation, and R. Talsorian Games; Dungeons and Dragons, and fantasy games like it, may have been the first to make their way to MUDs and the very first of the on-line gaming, but your work, and that of the other two games, pushed people to understand they could build games to play.
I’m starting to ramble, but I just wanted to close with this… my belief is people may not have understood that ONE scene in Star Wars, with the trash compactor being shut down, but they have since come to understand the work George Lucas put into the future. See, Star Trek is NOT the only bright future to be had; however, fewer people credit Star Wars, likely because many of the concepts are so far out they have not, yet, been recognized, and may not for some time to come.
I thought a bit about the GenNet and Cyberpunk and so on when I wrote that post. Clearly, at least by the very late 80s, the idea of a global, navigable network was well and truly out there, even if it wasn’t quite pervasive in the mass media. That would have been just 10-12 years after Star Wars. But now that I think of it, the movie War Games was in, like, 1983—only 6 years after Star Wars. So perhaps my memory is just faulty—maybe these concepts were pretty widely understood at the time.
Come to think of it, you’re right. I have Wargames on my DVD shelf, actually, though I’ve not watched it for about a year, I guess. I love that movie, but for whatever reason, I didn’t think about it until now. We also can’t forget Tron -though admittedly that’s much more fantasy-based than reality- in ’82.