We had some Apollo Domain machines at school which could also run similar programs - I remember 'Crumble' and 'Melt' being two of them. And you could run them on other peoples' display. So we used to melt/crumble the screens of the engineering students in the next lab over. 'We' in this case had admin privileges, though, and only did it a couple of times.
Hah, and visiting the page with Javascript disabled gives you an "Enable Javascript to continue" message styled like a Guru Meditation error. Nice touch.
During my time as a Mason (I left for much the same reason as jayofdoom), we followed the same procedure when voting for new members. The couple of times there was a non-unanimous vote, the Master called for another vote, in case anyone made a mistake or wanted to reconsider. In none of the cases did anyone make a show of not voting or showing their votes, though. I think it only happened twice in the 12 or so years I was there. I have no idea why someone rejected one of the candidates; and in the other, I suspect some of our members thought the candidate wanted to join because he thought it would help him with a political career (this is purely speculation; we didn't discuss this at all).
My Atari 800 died in a lightning storm in 1983, but I still have the replacement 800XL downstairs, with floppy drives, cassette drive, thermal printer, and 300 baud modem. An Ape Face paralell port adapeer for the Epson RX-80, which I don't have anymore. Lots of floppies and cartridges, too. And JForth along with the manual.
Oh, long after the system I worked on was replaced. Back in 1997-1999 the images were filenames in a database record, and we just read the image file and printed it on the card. Then at a later stage a camera looked at the printed card and compared it to what it should look like. We also used to 'etch' the same photograph into the 'laser' (CD-like) golden strip on the back of the card. When you wrote data to the laser strip, it changed the appearance by darkening it. There was an API library supplied by the manufacturer of the encoder drives that could write a visible image to the strip. Not sure if the modern cards still have that feature.
That's interesting that your card made it to you with the wrong photo on it. There was a visual inspection process that compared what the printed card looked like, to what it's supposed to look like, and cards were supposed to be ejected and reprinted if there was a mismatch.
I worked on the machine/system that prints those cards in the late 90s. When was your card issued? I heard somewhere (and find it easy to believe) that the entire system we built was replaced with something much smaller and simpler a few years later as technology improved.
I used to DM games sometimes using those random charts from the AD&D DM Guide. It was a lot of fun. The players (who knew what I was doing) always tried to figure out the purpose of the labyrinth based on what what developed.
Neat. I just recently found an old letter pertaining to my great-great-grandfather selling a house in Germany prior to coming to the US in the 1880s or so. The town mentioned is the site of a cluster of his (uncommon) surname.
I'm from the US and in my 50s, and read quite a bit, but never encountered the word 'bespoke' until a couple of years ago. Not sure whether it's rising in popularity or what. I see it fairly often now.
In 1988, I started working for a company whose software was written in dBase II and Foxbase. That was pretty cutting edge at the time. But, although they had run coax cable for an Arcnet Novell network, none of the workstations (8086 and 80286 running MSDOS) had network cards yet. So they were carrying a large (full size/height) 80MB ESDI drive from machine to machine on a padded tray and plugging it into external ESDI ports on the workstations to copy customer data to from it.
I'm working right this second on an application that originated in the mid-late 1980s in dBase II, then moved to FoxBase, then FoxPro and is currently Visual Foxpro. (and I've been developing/supporting this all along, since 1988) Might finally get phased out in 2022... maybe. It does what it does very, very well.
That describes me. I described it once as 'highly advanced hunt-and-peck'. I did learn to tough-type in school, but I didn't touch a computer until the following year and simply forgot it all. That was 40+ years ago. I get by well enough.
Where did you play it, and on what system? There might be people here who would recognize it. Another good place to ask is https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/