Jamie Fenton
(formerly Jay Fenton)
Jamie Fenton is a software engineer working at the SRI Center for Technology in Learning. Jamie is married to Erfert Fenton, has 3 cats and 3 horses, and is interested in trains, airplanes, photography, dancing, technical stagecraft, ham radio, and horse riding.
Jamie has been involved in the video game and multimedia computing industries since the beginning. This page describes some of the interesting projects that Jamie has worked on in the last 20 years.
1976 - The Bally Fireball Home Pinball Machine
The Fireball was one of the first pinball machines ever to ship with a microprocessor inside. It used a Fairchild F8, which had 64 bytes of RAM and 2K of ROM. This unit was designed for home use. It did not sell well because the availability of microprocessor commercial pinball games created a glut of relay-controlled units on the home market.
1977 - The Bally Arcade Video Game System
Jamie's first foray into management was to lead a group that designed and implemented a ROM based operating system for a home video game console. The Bally Arcade used a Z80 microprocessor, 4K of RAM, and 8K of ROM. It was far ahead of its time. Later, Jamie implemented a Basic interpreter called Bally Basic that ran on the Bally Arcade system in a cartridge. Basic language statements were entered using a keypad overlay over the calculator keypad. For about 6 months, Jamie held the honor of providing the world's cheapest computer.
1980 - The GORF Coin-op Video Game
Jamie did a number of arcade video games in the late 1970s - early 1980s era. The best known of these was GORF. GORF was the first game ever to show multiple scenes. After defeating a rack of Space Invaders, one would blast into space and deal with various alien menaces, working up to mission 5, an encounter with the Gorfian Flag Ship. GORF also featured a speech chip that hurled insults at the player.
In 1981, Jamie wrote a game for Bally/Midway called Robby Roto. It is a maze/digging/rescue game. It did not do well in the marketplace. As the rights to this game have reverted to me, I have chosen to permit MAME users to duplicate and play the ROM images for Robby Roto free of charge. Unfortunately my other released titles still belong to other organizations, but I am looking into making them available too.
For more information on the MAME project, please visit their homepage.
1985 - MacroMind VideoWorks
Jamie formed a corporation with Marc Canter and Mark Pierce called MacroMind. Our early products include MusicWorks and VideoWorks. Jamie did most of the coding on these projects. VideoWorks has been available for many years, and is now being sold as MacroMedia Director. Here is a screen dump showing the basic features of VideoWorks/Director:
1989 - Playground
In 1987, Jamie left MacroMind to work with Alan Kay's Vivarium Project. Here she developed a number of prototype programming environments for children called Playground. In these experiments, children constructed simulation worlds like the one shown here:
Programs consist of English-like statements which execute in parallel. These statements were situated within each animated character and interact in order to generate behavior. This example directs the clownfish to seek food and avoid sharks:
1991 - Digital Photo Album
During his spare time in the early 1990's, Jamie developed an electronic photo album program for the Macintosh called the MegaloMedia Photo Album. Here is a simple screen display. Jamie has also developed programs for editing and presenting PhotoCD images.
1992 - Farallon - ScriptX
Jamie left Apple in 1989, worked for a while at Farallon Computing. There she developed a HI-8 video editing program,
a streaming network multimedia presentation system, and a phone dialer utility.
Jamie wound up becoming involved with Kaleida Labs and its ScriptX project. Jamie was one of the primary architects and helped implement this system.
1995 - Global Cyberspace
Jamie's last project at Kaleida involved creating a Distributed ScriptX demonstration of a social virtual world. This effort brought him to the attention of Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, and was one of the lead architects at Electric Communities. At E/C Jamie developed an animation engine,
a persistent object database, the distributed object communications system, and several
demonstration programs. The E/C project recently completed a public alpha test.
1996 - Transgender Forum
As my new gender identity continued to evolve, I set up and have continued to operate a large virtual community for transgendered people on the Internet called Transgender Forum.
1998 - SRI Center for Technology in Learning
Jamie joined CTL in June of 1998. She is working with the LEGO Mindstorms project and on the Tapped-In virtual learning community.
Jamie's Email address is: jamie@fentonia.com