lakkal

He's been going through the history of computer games (with emphasis on 'interactive fiction' and related types of games) for quite a while. Highly recommended if you're interested in gaming history. He's also written a book about the history of Commodore and the Amiga.

You might like Vernor Vinge's 'True Names', too. There was a PDF of the story on the web a while back; I'm not sure of its legality so I won't link to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

I think 'Real Genius' deserves a place on the list. Actual hacking is only a small part of the plot, but the rest of the movie fits the mindset well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius

The first calculator I owned was a Sharp EL-506C (1981?). I loved that thing, but it died and I replaced it with an EL-506G, which I used into the late 90s. And now I need to dig it up again for use in a class I'm taking (phone calculators are not permitted for use during exams).

Looks like Sharp is up to the EL-506W model now, still recognizably the same lineage as your 5813 or my 506C.

My resource for learning 6502 machine language was the Apple ][ Reference Manual: http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Refere...

which had appendices that covered the instruction set and opcodes, useful addresses, ROM listings, and all other kinds of useful stuff. What a great manual that was!

Visual Foxpro. The application originated in 1986 or so and the original language was dBase II, but moved to FoxBase in 1987, and FoxPro/Visual FoxPro over the next couple of decades.

I do as much in Python as I can justify, but I still have to work in VFP quite a bit. I personally have code from 1988 that's still running in this application.

Sigh...

> VMS terminal users had smooth responsive I/O all the time.

I recall that you could press Ctrl-T and it would instantly echo back some useful information about the running process, like CPU time and page faults. That was a nifty feature.

I loved VMS. Everything was so coherent, whereas Unix looked like it was hacked together overnight by a bunch of people who never talked to each other. These days, I like Unix, but back in the 80s, I only tolerated it.

The ones around here that aren't part of a convenience store are part of a car repair place.

I am a Sanders donor, and I wasn't upset by it at all. (He was saying they should move on to more important topics).

I used to do something similar to Apple ][ computers. I'd go into the monitor (CALL -151) and type a short machine language program that looped infinitely, printing random characters and clicking the speaker. So the screen would fill with scrolling garbage while the machine emitted a buzzing noise. Good times. Atari rules!

Just to add to the chorus, I turned 50 a few months ago, and still enjoy coding for a living.

<line-eater, are you there ?>

And now we know that the "NSA line-eater" was maybe not so mythical, after all (though not responsible for actually eating lines).

Back in the very early 90s, I went through my company's codebase and replaced the mixed indentation with tabs. This was purely to save a space (small company, limited disk space). I probably preferred tabs at the time. Some time in the late 90s, though, I started to prefer the predictab ility and granularity of spaces.

Beer and wine are available in NH from supermarkets.

http://thedailywtf.com/ would count as "Code I've been forced to work with".

I read his story a while back and was shocked that I used live nearby and may have (as a paperboy) delivered newspapers to his house. I left the area a few years before his experiments, though.

Very interesting. Thanks for that.

Yeah. As part of buying a house a few years ago, I prematurely drained a couple of small 401k accounts from previous employers to pay for some repairs. That was in Feb-March. Then a year later when I was doing my taxes, I had received the appropriate 1099-whatever for only one of them - I either lost the other, or it didn't get forwarded to my new address- I don't know. And by that time, I had forgotten all about it. The following year (2015) I wound up getting whacked for under-reporting my income in 2014 (house purchase was 2013). It's annoying that since the IRS knew about this (the 401k company had reported it to them, of course), but I had long since forgotten. There must be a better way.

I initially read one of his articles through a post here. I've since started supporting him through Patreon. Great stuff.

A mid-80s movie called "Maximum Overdrive" (based on a Steven King story) explores this...

Thanks.

w3schools is where I've gotten most of my DOM/HTML information as a non-web (for the most part) developer - simply because it does show up first in searches. I'd never heard of MDN until now, but it looks really good. I'll definitely look there next time I need to know something.

Same in Death Valley in August. No plane/car noises, no animal noises, no wind noises. Bliss.

Try giving your talk at a smaller, local meeting (if possible) for practice.

I'm not familiar with most of the games in this list. My personal entry would be Gravitar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitar). Asteroids-style controls, limited fuel that you have to replenish by hovering above the ground and beaming up fuel, and all the terrain has strong gravity.

The Gandalara books by Randall Garrett as well.

Same here. We moved when I was 6, 10, 12, and 16. A shy, introverted geek in the 70s and early 80s had it hard enough without that.

Hmm, not sure what game you'd mean, then.

I was only able to find this man page for the game I was thinking of:

http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/athena/contrib/games/man/man6/con...

There was a game called Conquest, which was a fantasy game similar to Empire. I recall that you could play various races, Orcs being one of them, Wizards another. It was very detailed, with each square of the map's terrain having ratings for how useful it was. I remember that there was a note in the source or license that the game was free but not allowed to be run on 'PCs'. (I interpreted this to mean MSDOS machines, and was able to get it running under Coherent). This would have been in the early 90s.

I recall that it's also considered by one of the Minds to be the greatest instrument of torture ever invented.

That won't stop me from standing in line to get one, though.