Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS | Hacker News Reader

Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS

blog.danielwellman.com

139 pointspelf18 comments

This has been posted before[0], two[1] and four[2] years ago, and is a delightful and fascinating read every time. It's fun to anthropomorphize the AI running amok in the system's memory, and wonder if we'll ever see something analogous happen with more sophisticated AIs in the future.

[0] http://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-a...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087367

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326356

My first thought was "OMG he has a working Apple II GS?" and then I realized it was already 4 years old when it was written, and the author was recounting a tale from his childhood.

Lots of Amiga stories from the late 80's early 90's dealing with the fact that the Amiga was a multi-tasking system with an unprotected address space. Great when all the tasks are written by the same group, not so great when they aren't :-)

Of course the notion of anyone being able to write anywhere was the basis for ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing Service) at MIT which was a great counterpoint to Tenex (DEC 10 Executive) which was locked down pretty hard. It changes the way you think when you realize you can tell the computer to do anything you want and it will try to do it, up to and including killing itself.

I have a working Apple II GS! I'm pretty sure none of my floppies work anymore though :(

Daily Apple IIGS user here, with one 65816 project on github. :) There are still a few of us. For what it's worth, mine is stable at 12MHz (hot-rodded Transwarp GS), and is completely solid-state: CompactFlash and LCD only, no floppies or CRT monitors. I may not have used it to write this post, but I'm still busy trying to beat all the games.

Just recently snagged a mint Apple IIGS "Woz Edition" and can't wait to get it set up. Need to figure out how to do this solid-state conversion though, that would be really helpful. Any guides you can point to?

ITS was more intentionally a counterpoint to CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing system, hence the name ITS).

However, it's interesting that you mention that, as I think that Tron was a reasonable allegory for the MIT/ITS crowd's struggle against traditional time sharing systems and/or the "priesthood" that guarded the mainframes.

Having owned an Amiga 1000, I always thought the Apple IIgs was overprice when released in 1986. An Amiga with monitor ran $1300, where as a IIgs + harddrive + monitor would be over $1500. Apple was basically milking the last bit from the II series.

Something something old dog new tricks.

Something something John Scully not understanding computers are not soda pop.

This made me think of CoreWars:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/core-war-two-progra...

First read about it a few years after Tron came out.

It is really fascinating how humans immediately crash when they break out of the screen while the AI can follow the 0's in system memory fast enough to stand a chance.

That I think, is the most thrilling part of the story. Imagine how much longer it could go if it didn't leave a bit trail. I bet if you ran this in an emulator, you could arrange the memory array to resemble the screen, and watch it drive around.

I don't know if there are any hackers here who used to go to a high school called "H-B Woodlawn" where they had made a way, way, way more exciting version of tron called "trench".

Anyways, it would be neat to bring that back.

Uh oh... The AI just fired its second missile at my unsaved thesis edits.

What's sad is that huge amounts of software are still not provably memory-safe, and this sometimes has disastrous consequences, particularly for security. I hope that Mozilla's work on Rust will significantly contribute to solving that problem.

Delightful. I love this sort of thing. My jaw almost hit the floor when I realized what was happening when the cycle drove off screen. Does anyone know where I can find more stories like this?

reading this while accidentally listening to the awesome TRON Legacy Soundtrack by Daft Punk :)

omg we must go rescue him

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