xyzzy

@xyzzy@lemm.ee

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xyzzy ,

C

<stdio.h>

int main() {

printf("Hello, world");

return 0;

}

C++

<iostream>

int main() {

std::cout << "Hello, world" << std::endl;

return 0;

}

xyzzy ,

tl;dr for article and comments:

Microsoft mangled arrays and code comments with ASCII extended characters into UTF-8 encoding, which makes building many of these files impossible without a lot of extra work. This was mistakenly attributed to Git.

The timestamps for each file are also not preserved, which is debatably a valid criticism of Git (original file timestamps can technically be preserved on an archive like this, but it requires a large amount of work to line up those times and the correct commit times programmatically).

Several Microsoft employees involved in this project appeared in the comments and offered to work directly with the author to correct the character encoding issues. One Microsoft employee indicated that historical timestamps could likely not be included due to Microsoft corporate policy around personally identifiable information.

xyzzy ,

According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.

xyzzy ,

12:30 made me tense up with momentary anxiety

xyzzy ,

It was Compaq. Incidentally, that story was the basis for the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

xyzzy ,

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone...

Not following the logic here. Why does Microsoft's choice in 32-bit OS kill Apple?

xyzzy ,

My old homepage from nearly 10 years ago was a page that looked like it was straight out of the late '90s but was entirely valid HTML5 and CSS 3. That included an applet-like rippling water reflection effect beneath a photo of my city at the time, MIDI audio, JavaScript emulating the blink tag, and right-click "image save protection."

It was a total blast to make and people loved it, but being in the tech industry it kind of gave the wrong impression to hiring managers, so I swapped it for a much more boring page.

xyzzy ,

If you click the link...

xyzzy ,

As someone who’s also invested a considerable amount of my finite life into thoroughly understanding the inner workings of archaic technologies, the level of passion on display here is really motivating me to wrap up one of those projects and release it into the wild (for absolutely no one to use).

xyzzy ,

This is cool! I did run into a bug, though: the filter list is too tall for mobile and you can’t scroll it.

It’s also missing quite a few retro game shops in the Portland, OR area. However, it seems like arcades are pretty well covered; it’s just missing a couple in Tigard.

Right now Yelp is still more useful for finding shops in my area, but I really like the idea behind this and I’ll keep it in mind.

xyzzy ,

This looks cool, but I was surprised there was no signage anywhere.

I really like the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, but it looks like they closed during Covid and haven’t yet reopened…

xyzzy ,

Doom Eternal. Time to rip and tear, toddler!

xyzzy ,

Isn’t educational use the whole point of Raspberry Pi? It seems like that has way more opportunity for it with a modern architecture, ready-made robotics kits, and other maker-type applications that could get kids excited about electronics and programming.

xyzzy ,

Exactly, the single session where wizards are level 1 in an inaugural battle that likely lasts 2-3 rounds

xyzzy , (edited )

Yes, OK, two sessions, maybe three since wizards level slower. In AD&D your GM should be awarding for good ideas, role play, encouragement of other players, etc. though, as well as enemies slain. And it’s common to be a little generous with XP in those first sessions.

There was a reason wizards carried daggers and slings as well in early levels.

I just get tired of magic users complaining that they need to do equal damage to fighters from the beginning at range and also be able to warp reality in higher levels.

xyzzy ,

I agree. I think both should be completely redesigned from the ground up, but they’re not interested in doing that in 6E.

  • Wizards should be boosted in early levels and nerfed in later ones, and should be split into multiple classes focused around illusion, commanding undead, AoE damage, control, buff/debuff, etc. (but not all of them simultaneously).
  • Fighters should get maneuvers and cleave damage focusing on one or few targets.
  • Rogues can continue occupying their niche of single target, high risk / high reward critical damage (but note key phase: high risk). Etc.

Everyone should have a clear specialization with a little overlap. A class should be the best at a thing and adequate at something else.

xyzzy , (edited )

Of course. I’ve played a number of them, although Zork quickly showed its age (in terms of game design) compared to later text games.

xyzzy ,

Oh, lots. One that comes to mind is my surprise and joy when my mom brought home Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. They had just been released. Until then I had mainly played shareware games like the original Star Trek game (that had you shooting Klingons in a top-down grid) and Captain Comic.

xyzzy ,

Some of them didn’t make it easy. Not all games were laid out on a strict grid (in fact, the very first one had numerous curving connections), and more than a few of the early games included a maze to intentionally make graphing difficult. Back then it was a lot easier to plug away for a couple months on a game like that, since there were so many fewer games and they were such a novelty.

The dungeon crawler games like Wizardry made the same assumption about the player (“Of course they want a big challenge! How else will they get their money’s worth?”), and look how many people play that series today. Very, very few people have the patience in a saturated game market.

I think later text games corrected those initial assumptions and the parsers became very good, and many even added graphics, but by then most people had moved on.

xyzzy , (edited )

CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL (I used them all at one point or another) were all competing for the walled garden that AOL ultimately succeeded in. They absolutely were “the Internet” for most users for a time, and justifiably so: they existed well before commercial ISPs were available to the public, and were developed either before or concurrently with the Internet (not the Web, which came later).

Recall that these services offered Usenet access (newsgroups for discussions, before they devolved into what they are today), commercial portals, online games, personal pages, and even Web access eventually… and everyone was there. For a user at the time, even after commercial ISPs emerged, the value proposition was fully in favor of these information services.

Over time the Web continued to evolve but the clunky browsers included with these services couldn’t keep up in features. Also, online games like Quake 2 required an actual Internet connection. Eventually it just made sense to move on, but there was a sense of “giving something up” in making the switch.

Everyone of a certain age had an AOL email address, and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn’t retire my handle until the late 2000s.

Fun fact: because AOL shut down Hometowns (and the tens of millions of websites it hosted) in the late 2000s with only one month’s notice, Jason Scott was so incensed that he created Archive Team, which archived a chunk of GeoCities and many other platforms since then. Too bad Hometowns couldn’t be saved, but GeoCities was the real prize IMO, so I suppose it’s good it happened first.

xyzzy ,

By the way, if you want the full “AOL experience,” someone’s been rebuilding all the AOL server APIs to support the old Windows client. It even supports the original Neverwinter Nights (the AOL online D&D gold box game)!

Patreon page with videos: www.patreon.com/project_p3ol

xyzzy ,

I was an original backer for this project. I still have it on DVD! His next one about text adventure games was very good as well.

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