DigiBarn Stories: Rich Didday

Rich and his alter-ego, the "old philosopher"
in Finite State Fantasies

On June 12, 2009 I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Rich Didday, after years of hoping to do so. Rich is the cartoonist and author behind a number of works including one of the most treasured in the Digibarn collection, Finite State Fantasies, a comic book depicting the then new culture of home brewed microcomputing back in 1976. Below please find a conversation with Rich recorded here at the farm when we were going through his life and works, including the original drawings for Finite State Fantasies.

Interview: Rich Didday on his life and times, and creations

Early artwork for "Fortran for Human"	Artwork in "Fortran for Humans"	Rich!	... and Fortran For Humans (4ed)
Finite State Fantasies and other books	IMG_2767.jpg	10 to the power of 2 things you should know about personal computers (in Italian)	Cover of Finite State Fantasies
Original artwork of FSF (last page)	Artwork of ESCAPE where Arnold "escapes" into the virtual world he coded into his home brewed S-100 micro	Rich explaining about ESCAPE (listen to the audio)
IMG_2824.jpg	IMG_2823.jpg	IMG_2826.jpg
Letter from Matrix publishers and back cover of FSF	Opposing Computer Manufacturers Battle for Market Supremacy	Other Didday artwork about a meditation detector	Visualizing a 1946 Ford?
Another project: Infinite Loop Comics	A science comic, cool!	IMG_2838.jpg	IMG_2839.jpg
IMG_2840.jpg	Those odd 1970s large format copier outputs	Explaining that the cover of FSF is inspired by an Intel memory chip layout	IMG_2843.jpg
The BASIC code generated the back cover of FSF	The front of Bruce's stained copy of FSF	Rich's hand drawing the robot that puzzles together the computer hobbyist that creates the computer that pulls the "s" off Fantasies, well....?	Frontice (visions of a levitating mainframe)
Backus (back inside cover) in honor of the Backus who created FORTRAN	Pondering the final message of FSF: "its just another tool, use it, don't let it use you"	All these other tools dont change our lives (inner and outer) as much as this computer!?	IMG_2855.jpg
Sharing Bruce Damer's Global Strategy board game with Rich	Bruce's The Comic Strip about how he put together his Ace comics in the 1970s	Another board game design by Bruce	Rich examining some of Bruce's virtual world art, circa 1978
Bruce's world of 1978	Rich gets a tour of the Digibarn and meets the Cray-1

See Also

Our dedicated pages on Finite State Fantasies
Rich Didday's comic book of the hobbyist microcomputer era - 1976

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