Landing the Nostromo (1981) | Hacker News Reader

Landing the Nostromo (1981)

archive.org

92 pointskazinator42 comments

I just had an incredible moment reading this and I have to share:

I started flipping through the pages looking at the ads. I came across "Hi-Res Soccer" and "Hi-Res Football" by On-line Systems on page 59. Looks like you can order by sending a check to the address in Coarsegold, CA! I laugh because I know where that is...it's a super tiny, backwater town in the Sierra Nevada where some of my family live. I'm amazed someone was using a computer there in 1981.

I decide I am going to send payment in an envelope to that address for one of these games from 1981-- a gag. Maybe if I'm lucky the old guy still lives there and they'll get a kick out of it.

Out of curiosity I decide to see if I can Google street view the address to make sure it's still there and see what it looks like. Google Street view isn't available for that address.

Instead, I Google 'On-line Systems' and the street address just to see what ended up happening to the company before I send my gag letter.

Turns out 'On-line Systems' in Coarsegold, CA was started by Ken and Roberta Williams. They later turned it into Sierra On-Line and moved.

Holy shit. The goofy ad on page 59 eventually grew into Sierra Entertainment.

Just imagine what would have happened had they not renamed to "Sierra On-Line". That name could have been worth a fortune today.

Sierra was F-in amazing! They did King's quest and a lot of others. But of course, they were mot known (back in that day) for Leisure Suit Larry...

Man, I grew up with all their games. Such good memories..

I have real print magazines from 81-89 and you can always get all this stuff from archive.org (support!!).

For me it was the comic on page 132, which contains a line I actually used during a conversation last week ..

The Microsoft ad on the page facing the Alien article is awesome too. Way cooler logo and funny to see them selling an accessory for the Apple 2!

I still own that card. Used it to run cp/m in order to run Wordstar. FYI, Microsoft also wrote Applesoft Basic.

I also owned one and used Wordstar on CP/M. Also, Borland's Turbo Pascal!

I had the Z80 card in my Apple ][ and ran CP/M more often than the Apple's own OS.

Microsoft's roots are as a company full of hackers. Gates was coding up traffic software in high school and dropped out of Harvard to found a startup. Even through the wild 25 year ride of building a company on a well timed pivot around the lucky success of Windows, in fine Seattle tradition it built the skunkworks that is Microsoft Research.

The increasingly apparent changes in direction relative to open source, end user OS pricing, and nondenominational hardware specification indicate a possible return to those core valued of the company's early days.

Microsoft's hardware has always been excellent. I wonder why they insist on making software :-P

Applesoft Basic, the principal "firmware" of the Apple II, was a derivative of Microsoft Basic.

"Apple reportedly obtained an eight-year license for Applesoft BASIC from Microsoft for a flat fee of $21,000, renewing it in 1985 through an arrangement that gave Microsoft the rights and source code for Apple's Macintosh version of BASIC." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC]

Accessories for the Apple II is just an afterthought, really; kind of like Microsoft keyboards and mice for a Windows PC. :)

It would be funny to send a cheque to Sierra Entertainement for HiRes Soccer, just to see what they do with it :D

For those curious about what "Hi-Res" meant at the time, there are some screenshots:

http://www.apple2games.com/wiki/Hi-Res_Soccer

http://www.apple2games.com/wiki/Hi-Res_Football

There's also a scan of one of the manuals, without screenshots: https://archive.org/stream/Hi-Res_Football#page/n0/mode/1up

There's a chapter about Sierra On-Line in "Hackers" by Steven Levy -- a fascinating book.

It's a great book, and does a better job of explaining the origins of personal computing (and time shared systems) than pretty much anything else out there.

Indeed. I'd also add Code (by Charles Petzold) and D is for Digital (which I desperately want to read but haven't yet).

My graphics prof (who was fantastic) also worked at System Simulation and liked to bring up the part he worked on in class:

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~blob/alien.html

TBH, I'd do the same.

Holy cow, I met Blob Wyvill on a rock climbing trip to France in 1999. I had no idea his nickname was in Alien.

Once again realized: Archive.org is amazing. Please donate.

(not affiliated with it, just a fan)

https://archive.org/donate/

The author, Alan Sutcliffe, looks to have been a pioneer in the use of computer graphics in art. He co-founded the Computer Arts Society [1] and there are some examples of his work at [2]. He died last year, aged 83 [3][4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Arts_Society

[2] http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/521

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/13/alan-sutcl...

[4] http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/52263

I was more of a Compute! / Compute!s Gazette guy.. But man, does this bring back memories..

Hayes modems. Compuserve! The 80's were so simple. Every computer back then was awesome and it was all about getting your hands on them and just trying stuff. Aka, hacking - before it was 'illegal'.

I'll never be able to impart on my kids what it was like pre-internet. (Btw, it was great!) But, like anything, you can bring these lessons forward and present them with some context that makes sense.

When I was young, this was all positive and all inspiring. I guess that was possible through the 6502. If someone could invent a time machine - what a magical time...

> The 80's were so simple.

Simple things were simple, complex things were impossible, mostly because computers of that type and era didn't have the RAM.

Rose-colored glasses are nice, but they say a lot more about the wearer than the era.

Amen, I poked around on c-64 emulator one time looking for a nostalgia rush, all I got was headache; that inexorable blinking cursor. Living in the rural midwest, my 80's where an exercise in frustration due to lack of information and resources. Is there a word for good nostalgia and bad nostalgia? Remorse I guess.

I understand that from a hardware point of view it's way cooler to start hacking closer to physical bytes and voltages.

The computational substrate has become more complex, yes, but the prepackaged computers did wrap an astonishing amount of complexity behind an off-the-shelf usable interface, just like nowadays. I would claim philosophically the scene has not changed for the majority - vendors prepackage computational substrate, users use it.

What has changed is that the interface and the computational substrate has become more complex.

The modern approach is then to pick an abstraction platform on which to implement one's hacking. With kids Scratch seems to be fantastic. The added abstraction layer removes some of the immediacy of the experience but the power of the computer enables a far richer spectrum of expression.

The modern computer is about intellectual exploration of all domains - visual arts, music, architecture, mathematics,... where the computer and the software is the enabler for the human expression, and not the end in itself.

I would claim it is equally as magical to grab a copy of Mathematica and start exploring physics without having to internalize endless tables of geometric identities, integral formulas, and solutions to differential equations.

Or, if one wants to learn an instrument, say guitar, just find a suitable tutor from the endless streams of youtube. Similarly for art techniques.

The modern platform enables anyone to start exploring the whole spectrum of human expression right from ones home couch rather than travel long ways to attend lessons. I would claim it is far more magical for the population in general than e.g. hacking ones TCP/IP stack.

The funniest thing about this is the Dakin5 advertisement. There is still no solution for a company to upload financials direclty to a bank. Most still take spreadsheets and email them to a bank, who then hires people to spread those financials in another spreadsheet that is for bank purposes. Then they upload them to another internal database that tracks some of it, but that database doesn't talk to any other databases so you enter it into another database to generate a risk score.

At least at the 7th largest bank in the US by assets.

I read this stuff in hard copy as a teen in the 1980's.

Ah, Creative Computing ...

The rest of the articles in that issue are brilliant as well, and the ads really took me back!

What amazes me is how useful a lot of this stuff is today, even still .. the computer music article would serve as a perfectly fine introduction to digital music generation for any new student of the subject, and the line-drawing/graphics routines are still quite relevant for any artist who wants to understand, underneath the covers, whats going on when they fire up their favourite paint program.

Wonderful stuff!

And the most annoying thing is that despite the dearth of information available today, I find it hard to find one well vetted source of modern best programming practices!

Creative Computing, Byte, Dr Dobbs etc. had some incredible articles vetted by some amazing editors. If anyone has any recommendations for modern, well vetted programming resources, I'd love to hear them. I currently tend to just check /r/programming , HN, lambda-the-ultimate etc. on a periodic basis looking for new, interesting stuff. Any extra sites would be much appreciated!

Creative Computing, along with BYTE, was one of my favorite computer magazines in the 80's.

This one had a role in the Wargames movie:

https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1982-09

This brings back a lot of memories: the family Apple IIe and TRS-80 (Trash 80), Compuserve and external modems. Good times! I don't think I ever owned a Hayes external modem though. IIRC my first online experience was with a 9200 baud internal modem.

Wow, you had a 9200 baud modem?!?! My first modem was 300 baud..

It's funny how that translated - for decades to come - into real movie usefulness. In reality, of course, it was ridiculously painful.

What can I say? I was pretty late to the internet show. Never really got deep into the BBS scene, though I do remember doing some exploration of several.

You must be conflating 1200 and 9600 baud.

The usual bit-per-second speeds were 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14400, 28k, 56k going from the 1970s to the late 1990s.

Does anyone know where to find that scene in ALIEN? I looked on youtube, but without success.

It's when they're landing the dropship. It's one of the computer displays.

Here's a French-dubbed version of the scene

You'll see the glideslope display, then you'll see the terrain display all in the first couple minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWheoJMxX6k

Compare to the landing scene in Prometheus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EtnyKXacF0

> Have a nice day, Andy! > Nice days are made, not had!

#page/n79/mode/2up

How do you zoom in on text at archive reader? I can only go back and forth through pages.

edit: in chrome

go full screen and you get zoom tool

Makes me want to re create that code today, the esthetic is very nice!

Indeed, flipping through that printed code took me back to the days of typing lines of BASIC from a library book on programming into an Atari 400 chiclet keyboard, only to have the program error out and I'd have to scroll up until I found my typing mistake. Two hours of painstaking typing to get an animated sprite. Ahh, memories :)

The ads are fantastic!

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