Hi James-

I've always wondered how on earth you came up with the name 
"SuperCollider" from.  Could you explain?  Graned, it's trivia, 
but there has been so much serious discussion going on recently,
I think we could use a bit of enchantment :)

And while I'm at the mic: damn straight, most people are so 
glued to their unit-generator-music-5 worldview, they simply
can't imagine the possibilities of a runtime variable signal
flow.

Cheers, 

At 11:42 PM -0600 6/16/99, Tobias Kunze wrote:
>Hi James-
>
>I've always wondered how on earth you came up with the name 
>"SuperCollider" from.  Could you explain?  Graned, it's trivia, 
>but there has been so much serious discussion going on recently,
>I think we could use a bit of enchantment :)
>
>And while I'm at the mic: damn straight, most people are so 
>glued to their unit-generator-music-5 worldview, they simply
>can't imagine the possibilities of a runtime variable signal
>flow.

The SuperConducting SuperCollider was a Texas Big Science
project that was feeding lots of the physicists working below me
while I worked at the Astronomy Dept at Univ of Texas at Austin.
Its funding got killed by Congress.
Meanwhile I had these two pieces of code, one a synth language called
Synth-O-Matic that I wrote in 1990, and a MAX object called Pyrite
that was a real time GCed dynamic language, i.e. a "number cruncher"
program and a (lisp) "atom smasher" program. I was going to "collide" these
two programs together to see if a dynamic language could run a synth
engine in real time. I was sure it was going to fail so I named it after 
the supercollider.
I had not intended to keep that name but it stuck. Sometime during
that period OSC had a contract to publish it. That fell through when
they got bought by MacroMedia. Some folks hated the name so much that
I decided I should call my next project something that no one would 
feel comfortable saying in public. So far the winner is "diarrhea popsicle".
That will be the name of my next synth program, so hope that "SuperCollider"
lasts a long time.. ;-}


   --- james mccartney     james@audiosynth.com   http://www.audiosynth.com
If you have a PowerMac check out SuperCollider2, a real time synth program:






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