Beck-Tech

Connecting LCD games specifically with Beck-Tech?

While I don't have any trouble believing Steven Beck was subcontracted to do the LCD games, I question how Beck-Tech itself is identified and not just Beck himself. It looks like around the same time that Beck-Tech merged into Lapis Technologies, another Beck-Tech company was registered as "BTQ". This entity is more likely who should be credited, even if that's a bit circumspect. I guess the real question here is: how did Beck-Tech get tied to the LCD games originally? - Scarred Sun (talk) 20:23, 25 March 2021 (EDT)

Is this other Beck-Tech related at all?

Link. Is this Beck-Tech related at all? At first I didn't think so, but... it's in Urbana, Illinois. It's kinda in the same industries (or at least began doing audio/visual/computer stuff). And it's a "family-run business" run by a "Matthew Beck". Uh it's probably not, but... Is Matthew his son? This needs a little more research. CartridgeCulture (talk) 00:37, 22 September 2021 (EDT)

Electron Video Creations mention

Mention Electron Video Creations, and if it had anything to do with games (probably not, but him founding it is at least worth a sentence). CartridgeCulture (talk) 00:45, 22 September 2021 (EDT)

1984 InfoWorld article

Link. Some good stuff here. CartridgeCulture (talk) 00:46, 22 September 2021 (EDT)

Beck-Tech on Computer Chronicles

Link. Might be some worthwhile information here. CartridgeCulture (talk) 00:51, 22 September 2021 (EDT)

Softalk November 1981 article dump (formatting mess)

"Steve Beck: Artist of the Riture

BY (RAK STinson)

The offices of Beck-Tech, in Berkeley, California, present a scene of subtle contrasts. The locale is the Claremont Hotel, a massive, sprawling piece of early twentieth-centiiry grandeur that evokes thoughts of Warren Harding and Silent Cal Coo- lidge. The Beck-Tech suite, tucked into a comer of this ven- erable beauty, is filled with computers and other modem elec- tronic gear.

Pictures of other worlds adorn various walls of the office. There are satellite photos of Mars and Jupiter and images of the earth from nonterrestrial vantage points. These space photos awaken in the visitor a respect for beauty and change- less realities and a conviction that the occupants place a high value on long-range vision. Around the comer from Mars and Jupiter, a poster-sized portrait of Beethoven surveys a room full of Apples and paraphemalia, bestowing a sense of range and vision of another kind.

Clearly, Beck- Tech is a place of high purposes and serious work. Yet one also sees here a shelf full of electronic toys — a Star Wars game, a hand-held horoscoper, and other frivolities of the microcomputer age.

A Man of Many Talents. All this diversity reflects the char- acter of Beck-Tech's proprietor, who is himself a man of strik- ing appositions. Stephen Beck is, among other things, electri- cal engineer, artist, musician, and inventor.

His principal artistic medium is video, a form of expres- sion that he has, on occasion, described as visual music, to stress — not its interaction of sight and sound — but, rather, its kinetic nature. Like music and unlike painting. Beck's art takes place across time; it moves from beginning, through middle, to end.

Beck has been involved in the field of video art since the late sixties. His works, for several of which he has written orig- inal music, are on display in such places as the Museum of Modem Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Ven- ezuela, and the Musee d'Art Modeme in Paris. Many of his compositions have been aired on PBS television.

Beck is one of a handful of artists working in the area of nonrepresentational video. His artistic heroes, he says, have been painter Wassily Kandinsky and the German film maker Oskar Fischinger ; the latter was the first to develop a nonob- jective kinetic art through animation.

"Personally," Beck says, "I have been interested in the symbolic, ideographic, and nonobjective modes of images, those which originate internally within the mind's eye." To this end, he sought to make television a means of re-creating, among other things, hypnagogic and hypnopompic Imagery — the kinds of pictures we see just before we fall asleep or during the process of awakening. Phosphenes — those colored flashes of light that dance before our eyes when we rub closed eye- lids — have been another source of artistic material.

Man Cannot Live on Art Alone. But if this predilection for the nonobjective lends a sort of right-brain bias to his art, it is certainly balanced by other aspects of his professional life, for Beck is a practical, problem-solving person — an artisan as much as an artist.

The principal activity of Beck-Tech is the development of hardware and software tools for the field of energy manage- ment. Products the company designs now conserve money, en- ergy, and manpower for large retail chains all around the country.

In his artwork as well. Beck has been a toolmaker. He has invented two generations of video synthesizers and a digital vid- eo weaver. The video weaver has led to the development of software that will make the Apple a tool for video weaving. Beck's video-weaving software for the Apple is scheduled to be available to the public in January.

Work is also under way to produce a peripheral card that will make the Apple's video signal conform to the govern- ment's standards for broadcast quality. This card— to be called the Chromatron — will also modify the Apple so that it will be able to produce 4,096 distinct colors.

Beck traces his interest in electronics back to his seventh birthday, when his father gave him a crystal radio set. He used to tune in Cleveland stations at night on his crystal set from his home in Chicago ; and electronics, along with painting and mu- sic, became a consuming hobby.

Painting with Music. In 1968, while he was working toward a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, music synthesizers were just coming into vog^e ; their exam- ple led him to produce a video synthesizer — an instrument that would generate video signals directly, without the use of a camera.

At that time, the University of Illinois had a contemporary music ensemble of national prominence. Beck used to attend some of their concerts with video synthesizer in hand, making visual music to complement the ensemble's performance.

He was also in those days trjdng out neon as a visual me- dium. "I was always more interested in emitted light than re- flected light," he says. "I built a kinetic tombstone with twen- ty-seven pieces of neon tubing. It had three ruby-red hearts that blinked in sequence, so the piece appeared to be throb- bing." Beck also wrote a complex computer program to con- trol this sculpture.

Beck's first video synthesizer was an analog device, somewhat smaller than a bread box. It still resides in his office in Berkeley.

Two years later, he produced a much more powerful sec- ond version of the synthesizer. At this time, in 1970, Beck was an artist in residence at the National Center for Experiments in Television, working under a grant provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Center for Experi- ments in Television, in San Francisco, was the official re- search vessel for public television, and during his tenure there. Beck broadcast several hours of his work over the Public Broadcasting System network.

In 1973, Beck received a grant from the American Film In- stitute to do experimental nonobjective composition using a combination of video synthesis and film techniques. About this time, he became interested in the nonobjective imagery pro- duced by native American weavers and quilt makers, and his career took off in an entirely new direction.

"I was looking for a way to connect my art with the tradi- tional," he says. "I had grown tired of being avant-garde."

Back to the Loom. His new fascination led ultimately to the invention in 1974 of a video weaver — a digital device that worked in conjunction with his direct video synthesizer to pro- duce real-time control of mosaic imagery on the CRT screen. In the case of the video weaver, frustration was the mother of invention.

"My girlfriend had given me a standard loom. I worked with this thing for about three months, trying to get it going. I finally got the warps and wefts up, and I decided this was ri- diculous. I was never going to get anywhere doing this."

So Beck went back to what he knew best and adapted elec- tronics and computer technology to an old art form. "Any computer-driven raster is the same kind of matrix as woven tex- tile," Beck says. "I didn't try to copy their patterns, but I plugged algorithms into the video weaver and, lo and behold, what came out was like Navajo weaving." For the video weav- er. Beck designed a microprocessor chip that produced pixels- picture elements — directly rather than by way of numbers.

In 1976, Beck licensed one aspect of his microprocessor to National Semiconductor and began fifteen months of consulta- tion with that company on the development of a television game chip set.

Work on microprocessor chips for game applications even- tually led to an association with Eddie Goldfarb, of Los Ange- les, who had been making games of all sorts since the 1940s. Beck and Goldfarb together were among the first to get into the business of making hand-held electronic games built around small dedicated microprocessors.

The two produced a series of games over the next several years, including a musical version of Concentration called Melody Madness and a hand-held electronic astrology calcula- tor that used a 2K microprocessor to produce detailed horo- scopes.

It was about this time that the Apple computer appeared in the marketplace, and Beck adopted the new machine as a sketch computer for the development of game chips.

Hopping with Energy. Beck-Tech became a corporation in 1978 as a hardware and software consulting firm. The compa- ny started out writing single-chip programs and, through the intermediary of Texas Instruments, came in contact with an- other company, Margaux Controls of Santa Clara, California, which was working in the field of energy management sys- tems.

Beck-Tech's first product for Margaux was a single-chip Timemaster that allowed for the programming of eight cir- cuits for time control. Subsequent work led to the development of complete systems for monitoring temperature, pressure, and other energy parameters, using the Apple as a communi- cations device.

To date, the Beck-Tech- Margaux collaboration has found its principal application in large retail store chains like Safe- way and Penney's. Traditionally, the function of energy moni- toring and management had been carried out by mechanical devices, without any kind of centralized control. Under the sys- tem developed by Beck-Tech and Margaux, a regional super- visor can dial up individual stores on his Apple, over standard voice-grade phone lines, and monitor or alter factors that af- fect energy consumption.

Besides making the process of energy management sim- pler and more flexible, the system has averted a few disas- ters — as in the case of a Safeway in Houston where a mechani- cal thermostat in a meat locker jammed one night. The rising temperature was sensed by a Beck-Tech monitoring unit, which then set off an alarm in a central office, allowing the meat to be saved.

A Visual Concert. The newest child of Beck-Tech is a group called Electron, consisting of Beck, Henry Spragens, and other players to be announced, which is putting together live musi- cal/video performances using Apples. Their first concert is scheduled for Berkeley's Claremont Hotel late this month, and they have been invited to perform at the 1982 Video Confer- once of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and Wash- ington, D.C. next June.

Beck has also recently finished making a segment for a television series called "Computer Chronicles." On his seg- ment of the show, Beck will explain his video-weaving algo- rithms. Produced by KCSM in San Francisco, the series is scheduled to begin airing over the Public Broadcasting Sys- tem in November. II

NOVEMBER 1981 "

CartridgeCulture (talk) 01:21, 22 September 2021 (EDT)