When Ivan and Charlie premiered Laserium back in November of 1973, They called on some friends to help do the show. Four guys - each with two sliders – controlled the x/y gain to one of the four RYGB scan pairs, and Ivan or Charlie controlled the frequencies of two war surplus sine wave generators for the Lissajous patterns used to perform “The Blue Danube”. Obviously, five or six laserists per show wasn’t cost effective. The problem was - recording the Lissajous signals after the gain changes requires 4 times the bandwidth of the original X/Y Lissajous signals. And recording even 1 X/Y signal – with decent quality playback – wasn’t cost effective in 1973. So instead of recording the image signals after the four extra guys manipulated them - they decided to isolated the gain signals from the sliders – and recorded those much lower bandwidth signals. On playback we used those signals to emulate the contribution of those four guys had on the Lissajous signals that were generated with another emulated 8 bit analog Lissajous “rate” control and 4 bits to select between “loops” and “eights”. Here’s the thing – I’ve written and talked about Laserium’s data channel way more than once, and the first production machine patent had even more information, but I didn’t and I don’t remember anybody explicitly saying, “It was the emulation of the things we didn’t have the bandwidth to record that set Laserium apart.” The emulation allowed the laserist to do the cool stuff – Quadrature Image manipulation, color mod, chopper, joystick, selsyn, fiber focus, lumia, etc. while the emulation did the lower level repetitive stuff that takes too much time for one guy to do much of anything but those things, most of the time – especially in real time. We had the benefit of all those guys doing what was essentially meta-choreography and we could play with it or override some or all of it. Eventually technology arrived that allowed the entire show to be recorded – and we did that – but we still did the Emulation/Laserist style shows in planetariums, because Laserium was a labor of love for most of us, and taking a show that was as good as we could make it when it premiered and making it better and different and our own night after night was right up there with the what we loved most about doing Laserium.
"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso