Gauloises
Smoke
Algorithms
a different type of thinking
Tonight mechanics of language ring
like bells or machinery
Or lust
after longing
Circuits cut on paper
Writ on paper
Walls of paper
carefully positioned
Nights and nights
Missing it missing you missing.
Time to close to end it
and/or just hit Enter
Smoke
Algorithms
Cigarettes
Return
That game is impossible to solve without spoilers, so far as I'm concerned. And lord knows I tried. As far as Infocom goes, the only ones I managed to solve unassisted were Zork I and II and Planetfall, all of which are considered on the easy end of the spectrum. The later games were much more complex. Along with HHG2TG, Lurking Horror was really difficult too.
H2G2 was medium difficulty compared to Starcross and Deadline, it just required patience. And MAN was it satisfying to win as a 13 year old. Long before accomplishments were measured in twitch response rather than deductive logic.
Spellbreaker, OTOH, was potentially impossible. It had two puzzles early in the game that were solvable by irreversible methods that made the game unwinnable. (One was casting Girgol to stop time allowed you to solve the Ogre puzzle, but you needed that spell at the very end, can't recall the other).
I really liked Planetfall and it's one I made it through to the end without too much help (also pre-walkthroughs/pre-Web). Steve Meretzky was the author of both that and Hitchhikers--the latter with Adams of course. I also really liked his A Mind Forever Voyaging but that's probably closest to an interactive novel that Infocom ever did; the puzzle content is fairly light.
Interesting. I found Planetfall moderately difficult, but the Lurking Horror was easy (I almost finished it first time I played it---I think it took me two sessions). A friend of mine played HHG2TG (I never did) and almost gave up on it.
But his story has "New Testament" shape - he worked on his thesis, and then it was rejected by his fellow academics. Now, a successful author, he became vindicated by these popular articles.
I learned spreadsheeting in Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS in the early '90s. It is so fast and super powerful. I still use the 1-2-3 keystrokes in Excel to this day (an option that I'm both infinitely pleased and super shocked still exists, Microsoft actually did something right!)
If anyone out there knows how to obtain Lotus and get it running in Linux, please please let me know!
Because, not to put too fine a point on it, sc, sc-im and oleo are completely useless without months of self-training, and even then... meh.
If you no longer have the ability to read your floppies or CD-ROMs you can find them on archive.org fairly easily. I'd imagine the DOS version would run in DOSBox fairly easily. For the Windows version, wine is reported to work https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio....
Love the HOLE HAWG analogy about tools that do what you tell them to, immediately and sometimes dangerously, regardless of whether what you told them to do was right.
Though he sang the praises of the Hole Hawg, it's worth noting that he later switched to OS X. Usability still matters.
"You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command line" is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."
This is true, but the concept was taken further in the Oberon operating system, which has a design goal of never asking the user questions at any point.
Interesting. Another thing I vaguely remember reading about Oberon was that any subroutine in the OS could be used from any program, or something like that, for high code reuse. I'm sketchy on the details. Read it quite a while ago, maybe in a BYTE article about Oberon. Not sure if that implies if all programs were in one address space, or what.
I think they are, but OTOH I think that's acceptably safe when it's a single-user, client-side-only OS written in a rigorously bounds-checked, type-safe language.
I suspect that the obsession with process isolation in xNix reflects its origins: as a terminal-based multi-user OS written in perhaps the least-safe high-level language ever developed, one in which it is necessary to deploy terrible techniques such as pointer arithmetic just to get anything done at all.
Mostly agree. Didn't know Oberon was a single user OS, though I did read that Wirth was also involved with creating the Lilith workstation (he missed the chance to call it a Wirthstation :), so it could make sense that Oberon was single-user too.
What's so wrong with C pointer arithmetic, per se? I know about the issues with pointers in general, having used C a lot, earlier. But the arithmetic?
hehe this has become my favorite saying lately for computers 'do what I want, not what I told you to do!' computers have a lovely way of merrily going along and breaking things at a fairly fast pace.
Lately I find myself saying “do what I told you to do, not what you think I want to do”
Mainly this is due to the autocorrect, autocomplete on most devices nowawadys. I’m sure it’s very helpful, but I seem to notice the mistakes more than the successes. (Eg, trying to type “nowadays,” I had to break out of typing on my iPhone 3 times to backspace and stop it from changing it to other words and expressions)
hehe that is awesome it is opposite of mine but also so true! I turned off autocorrect on my phone. Suggest is fine, but just changing it... not so much.
Many CLI tools have a dry run option for expensive (time/resource wise) or risky commands (one way, irreversible or reversible only with a lot of effort). It would be interesting to see this become the default for some of them, with a separate flag `--now-i-mean-it` to actually execute.
I wish more tools had the option of dry run. Been using it with ansible quite bit in the past few weeks. Look ma I can mess up 50 computers all at once!
I was happy to see the C64 called out near the end of this. I love that machine, and the Amiga so much. And reading about this Pi 400 the other day truly struck me in the same vein. I honestly don't care much about the couple obvious shortcomings, for $100, this is a purely nostalgia purchase for me.
I could do with some case color options, but that's a small niggle given what this thing can do. And I appreciate the focus on price point. Old school design constraints.
Have you looked into the Atari 8-bit home computers (800, 800XL, 130XE)? They were designed by the same people who designed the Amiga (eg. Jay Miner) and are basically 8-bit Amigas.
Yep. I had a C64 and my step-brother had an Atari 800. It was a cool machine as well. Same processor, but radically different graphics and sound chip, if I remember correctly.
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