Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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More from Alan’s Bookshelves, part one
While we’re back on Alan’s bookshelves (a central component in the atoms-to-bits discussion), this seems like a good time to take an inventory of what’s on those bookshelves. It turns out to be quite the cornucopia of past, present, and maybe even future, future distribution. Starting on the top of the first bookshelf:
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Cloning Kingsford
As mentioned last post about video greeting cards, and a while ago about AI, sometimes the Future is slow to arrive. A very personal example is when Alan and Priscilla went to clone their cat Kingsford. Back in 2002, for his end-of-course project in Developmental Biology at SOU, Alan investigated what and how long it…
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Distributing the Future at our 30th Anniversary
Alan & Priscilla’s 30th anniversary celebration was one of the few cases where we literally distributed the Future. In this case, the Future came in the form of a commemorative, re-usable, thank-you video greeting card we gave out at the event. Video cards of this sort were a new thing back then, and really haven’t…
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The 10th Anniversary of our 30th Anniversary
Last Friday, June 5, 2026 was the 10th anniversary of Alan and Priscilla’s celebration of their 30th anniversary. That celebration was staged at the Paul Masson Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, where they had been married 30 years and 4 days before (June 1, 1986). The celebrating couple were surrounded by family and friends, many…
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Happy Anniversary, Us!
Apple’s 50th anniversary was 2 months ago. Priscilla and Alan’s 40th anniversary is today. These are not unrelated events. On April 1, 1976 Apple Computer was established. On August 1, 1983 Alan started at Apple, Priscilla having started there a couple weeks before. The exact date of their 1983 meeting at Apple is lost in…
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Building a Time Machine
In 2006, Alan built a time machine. And not just any time machine. A particularly fine-grained time machine, which could advance or go back one second at a time. In fact it could actually only advance or go back by a single second, stepping back into the past a second, or jumping forward into the…
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Bits Pretending to be Atoms
As our world becomes more digital, we are being surrounded by bits pretending to be atoms. That’s what the whole field of augmented reality (AR) is about. Through a headset or handheld device, the atoms of our “real” reality are augmented by images created from bits on the device. We then perceive our overall reality…
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From Bits to Life
Craig Venter took a page out of Lynn Conway‘s book and was able to convert bits to the ultimate form of atoms: life. Venter and his team were able to create a novel living bacterium whose DNA atoms (genome) were determined by bits representing that DNA. Venter’s bacterium wasn’t created solely from bits. In fact…
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Craig Venter 1946-2026
Craig Venter, leader of a commercial effort which paralleled the government’s Human Genome Project (HGP), has died. Venter passed away less than six months after his frequent rival James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and first director of the HGP. Whereas Watson had been working towards a human genome his whole career, Venter…
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From Bits to Chips
The silicon-based integrated circuit, a.k.a. IC or chip, was productized in the early 1960s, giving rise to not just the name of a San Francisco Bay Area valley, but an entire industry. Like other similar technologies, chip design and manufacturing initially required the resources of large organizations. Today it’s another example of how much easier…
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