Nola Donato Interview (Highlights) By Kevin Bunch (Additional Nola Donato information compiled by Adam Trionfo) May 8, 2020 This was originally posted to the Bally Alley discussion group, here: https://groups.io/g/ballyalley/message/17128 The additional content, after the highlights, was posted to the group by Adam Trionfo. ---------------------------------------- From: Kevin B via groups.io Sent: Friday, May 8, 2020 9:01 AM To: ballyalley@groups.io Subject: Highlights from an interview with Nola Donato The other day I had the opportunity to interview Nola Donato. She was involved in GRASS and ZGRASS for a while before her career took her elsewhere in the tech industry (with a few more video game-related stints with Mattel and 3DO). Nola started off in chemistry, but after being involved with molecular modeling with a vector display, decided she liked the computer side of things more; once the main input method shifted away from punch cards to keyboards she was all in and moved her major over to that burgeoning field. With computers being so new, undocumented and largely untouched outside of specific areas of study, one of her first tasks was to pioneer and educate students on computer graphics and how they worked - at the time, it was all vectors. This was basically how she ended up working on the original GRASS, which ran on a PDP-11 and a Vector General. The idea behind GRASS, of course, was to provide a fairly easy and powerful method for artists and graphic design folks to do what they were doing. She indicated it was a bit of a mixed result - a lot of artists aren't programmers and vice versa, but this meant that artists could have trouble grasping what the limitations of the computer would be when they were working on their designs. So what would happen is programmers would essentially set the parameters and the artists could work within that using the Vector General's rotary dials and joystick. Apparently at one point they even hosted an art show where every artist was teamed with a programmer (which she said was a difficult experience for the reasons I just outlined). Relevant to this group, Donato was responsible for ZGRASS as the primary author! She said the differences between the original PDP-11's setup and the Bally system - display technology, processors, etc. meant that she essentially had to create the language again from scratch. Essentially no code was shared between GRASS and ZGRASS, just the basic concept. Since it was requested that it also operate like Bally BASIC on the Bally system, she was the primary author for the language aspects to make it more BASIC-esque (as opposed to being more like Assembly on the PDP). She doesn't have anything related to it anymore, unfortunately, though she was very surprised that there's a group of people interested in the language even though it never came out for the Bally system! She left Chicago to move to California because there were more jobs in tech out there, and more fun ones as well. This led her to Mattel Electronics, where she worked on procuring advanced computers capable of simulating different proposed next gen hardware systems in their research department. Said this included low- level stuff, like seeing what a pixel addressable setup would run like vs. a sprite-based machine, etc. once the market busted she was laid off and moved into the general tech field, working on productivity software and eventually hardware components with Intel and other companies. She did have one more stint in video games with 3DO, where she worked on software for the M2 platform itself (not game software, but system software). When the M2 was sold off she was shuffled over to the game software development side before 3DO dropped the M2 platform entirely, at which point she left the company. ---------------------------------------- Additional content: https://groups.io/g/ballyalley/message/17131 From: Adam Trionfo Sent: Friday, May 8, 2020 10:48 AM To: ballyalley@groups.io Subject: Nola Donato's ZGRASS Source Code; was: Highlights from an interview with Nola Donato There is ZGRASS source code in pdf format here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/nuttingAssoc/zGrass/V2/ More specifically, Nola Donato's source code for ZGRASS version 2.00000000 is here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/nuttingAssoc/zGrass/V2/Nola_NonCPL.pdf The source code for version V4.00000001 is here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/nuttingAssoc/zGrass/V4/ Here is a link to just some of the ZGRASS code for version 4.00000001 by Tom Defanti, Nola Donato, and Jay Fenton: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/nuttingAssoc/zGrass/V4/S.ASM These links to ZGRASS items from J. Fenton's document and disk collection aren't anything new, but I thought they were worth bringing up again since Kevin talked to Nola recently. I'm not sure what the last version of ZGRASS was upon release for the add-under (or even if ZGRASS was complete for that hardware). I'm also not sure what the last version of ZGRASS was for the UV-1. Does anyone know if someone has tried to get any version of ZGRASS to assemble from this source code? Adam ---------------------------------------- Additional content: https://groups.io/g/ballyalley/message/17132 From: Adam Trionfo Sent: Friday, May 8, 2020 10:53 AM To: ballyalley@groups.io Subject: Karen Nelson Letter Mentioning Nola Donato (September 10, 1979); was: Highlights from an interview with Nola Donato Here is a link to a hand-written letter by Karen Nelson to Bob Fabris that mentions Nola Donato: https://ballyalley.com/newsletters/arcadian/letters/letters.html#KarenNelsonLet terSeptember101979 Here is a summary of Karen's 7-page hand-written letter: Karen is a programmer who got interested in the Bally when JS&A advertised it in Scientific American in 1977. She was told that she was one of the first people to get her hands on one. She was very excited about machines potential, but was disillusioned by the heat problems which were inherent in the first machines. She "burned out" two of the units. Just after she returned the second unit, she discovered that her programming instructor was doing the graphics for the Bally. She says, "Yes, folks, it was the infamous Tom DeFanti and his magic Z-GRASS." She knows Tom well enough to drop into his "Graphics Habitat" at the University of Chicago to talk intelligently about some of his projects. She also knows Nola Donato and a few other of Tom students who are working on projects for Bally. Tom has had the University of Chicago purchase eight Bally's and eight Sony TVs to teach students the basics of computers and programming. In August 1979, Tom was the chairman of a traffic seminar held jointly by IEEE and ACM/SIGGRAPH. For three nights, Tom and his crew presented new and interesting works in various areas of computer graphics (including a few by people using Bally Arcades). In addition to the seminar, a graphics experiment Expo was held and it was there that Karen met some of the guys from Dave Nutting, in particular Ricky Spiece (who developed the Football cartridge). Ricky was helpful and showed Karen some tricks (like the ports in BASIC), and he also demonstrated the graphics capabilities by loading a picture from a disk to a color monitor. In addition, his Bally was connected to a B&W monitor and a keyboard. His commands appeared on the black-and-white monitor, and the graphics were displayed on the color monitor. However, the whole setup was attached with the Bally board mounted in a frame, not in the case, which leads Karen to believe that some special wiring is needed. Karen describes her experimentation with the different ports available in BASIC. Karen has recently seen the pinball cartridge demoed at the graphic seminar. She says that it looks pretty good. She heard one of the Dave Nutting guys say that he had just sent the thing off to Bally and that it should be out on the market pretty soon. Karen says that there was a demo of Z-GRASS, but that she didn't get to see it. She does note that as a student of De Fanti, she learned how to program in GRASS-- Z-GRASS's daddy-- using a PDP-11/45. Karen is glad to find out that there are other people like her who think that the Bally Arcade/computer has a lot more potential than most people give it credit for. She hopes that Bob Fabris might be able to pass on some information to whoever the marketing manager at Bally is. She would like to see the Bally advertisement computer magazines such as BYTE and Personal Computing. She would like to see Bally stress that most people buy home computers for games and that Bally has terrific controls, and that by the time people become interested in programming, Bally will have add-on module available. She also says that the graphics capabilities of the Bally have no competition; they are the best, and the Arcade is dirt cheap when compared to other systems. Just imagine if everything in the Bob Fabris Collection was keyword searchable! Adam