I'm still running off kilter, and today's post will reflect that by more than mere lateness. It's not too late to go visit Friday Night Fights instead. (Though it might be too early to vote as yet)
I'm still just tossing messages in bottles out of the cave currently, but i'll be venturing out soon. Meanwhile, it is and it isn't time for
Let's journey back 33 years to 1984 and take a look at how we used to do fun & games on our computers. It was 4 years after i built my first Sinclair Z80 system, and home computers were becoming a thing. But it was still a very hands-on DIY affair in many respects, as we'll see in the second Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book:
If you wanted to have fun and play games on your computer, this was how it was done in those ancient days:
That might be semi-incomprehensible to modern gamers, so let us flip back a few pages and take a look at the instructional reference...
Y'know, looking back - I don't want to hear any more whining (or even whinging) about having to set up modern games to run properly on the system. We used to have to customize the code by hand!
Here's a couple more programs from the book:
For the truly curious, Basic (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) emulators still exist, and you can run the programs for yourself to see what was considered "fun" on the computer in the early days. It would be a few more years before i got involved in the industry. By that time Floppy Disks had arrived - a huge game changer, along with internal hard drives.
Imagine that - in the early days, there was no internal memory beyond the OS. You had to load whatever you wanted to do onto the system via a modem like system with the data stored as sound on a cassette tape, or type it in by hand. If you had mainframe access, you could dump a stack of punch cards.
30 years ago, computer graphics consisted of 4 colours with resolution of 300x200. One might note that means the pixels were rectangular, not square. Somehow, the original programmers didn't think that might affect simple things, like drawing a circle.
3 decades later, we live in our games, and there are people forming personal (and sexual) relations with computer generated imagery.
Damn.
How long before our game characters can look out at the player and ask "Do You Bleed?"
I'm still just tossing messages in bottles out of the cave currently, but i'll be venturing out soon. Meanwhile, it is and it isn't time for
Let's journey back 33 years to 1984 and take a look at how we used to do fun & games on our computers. It was 4 years after i built my first Sinclair Z80 system, and home computers were becoming a thing. But it was still a very hands-on DIY affair in many respects, as we'll see in the second Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book:
If you wanted to have fun and play games on your computer, this was how it was done in those ancient days:
That might be semi-incomprehensible to modern gamers, so let us flip back a few pages and take a look at the instructional reference...
Y'know, looking back - I don't want to hear any more whining (or even whinging) about having to set up modern games to run properly on the system. We used to have to customize the code by hand!
Here's a couple more programs from the book:
For the truly curious, Basic (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) emulators still exist, and you can run the programs for yourself to see what was considered "fun" on the computer in the early days. It would be a few more years before i got involved in the industry. By that time Floppy Disks had arrived - a huge game changer, along with internal hard drives.
Imagine that - in the early days, there was no internal memory beyond the OS. You had to load whatever you wanted to do onto the system via a modem like system with the data stored as sound on a cassette tape, or type it in by hand. If you had mainframe access, you could dump a stack of punch cards.
30 years ago, computer graphics consisted of 4 colours with resolution of 300x200. One might note that means the pixels were rectangular, not square. Somehow, the original programmers didn't think that might affect simple things, like drawing a circle.
3 decades later, we live in our games, and there are people forming personal (and sexual) relations with computer generated imagery.
Damn.
How long before our game characters can look out at the player and ask "Do You Bleed?"
pages from the Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book 2 (1984)
My head hurts just looking at that. I'd never have learned to use a computer back then - it looks far too complicated (unless one has an interest of course).
ReplyDeleteYeah - one had to really want to use computers to play with them back then. The old machines were actually much more useful as support tools for my gaming. What gaming we did back then was mostly on college mainframes.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I find that I'm unable to apply myself to anything that fails to capture my interest. Always been like that since I was a kid. Now that I'm the Kid, nothing has changed.
DeleteThat's not atypical. Everyone experiences it, only the degree varies. For many, that degree is extreme.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, such things did interest me. I was waiting for computers to come home, and also enjoyed the creative aspects of programming. Still do, in fact, though to a much lesser degree. I don't do any from-scratch programming, but i regularly play around with different engines, coding mini-games and personal experiments. Occasionally i even release one into the wild, but that's been several years now.
As focus fades, so does the percentage of projects that make it to completion. There's a reason i'm retired these days, after all.