[deleted]
Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
101–110 of 183 posts
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. A proven winner, with significant contributions to the field would be more accurate. > Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? It's not what he thinks about games in general, it's what he think about a particular historical artifact that happens to be a game. And people care about his opinion on those times (the website linked is quite popular) because he was an i…
There's something unseemly about ripping on other people. I know it's bill gates, but Hertzfeld comes across as the kind of guy who enjoys making people feel small.
Seriously? I've ready almost every story on folklore.org, and this is the only instance I can remember where he puts anyone down -- it sticks out in my memory for that very reason.
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#103This reminds me about my time writing games in Basic on my calculator during math class. I suck at math because of this, but at least I'm an ok programmer.
I wish I were as driven now as I was back then. I used to sit for HOURS writing little programs with that horrible PRGM navigation menu. Nowadays I get upset when my color scheme isn't perfect.
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#104So 3 decades ago the autopilot could already keep the car in the current lane but was not able to avoid the unicorn^W donkey? Drivers need to remain engaged and aware!
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, programmers. I love how we can show the logic behind 3 correct ages for Bill when he wrote this :)
However, since only one age value can be actually correct in this case, the use of logic looks less like a feature of the programmer's mind and more like a bug.
One of them is a case of GIGO, using "36 years ago" as input when the correct value is 35. Fixing that reduces it to two values, and the discrepancy is down to day versus year granularity.
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#106Could we fix the title?
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The C64 was vastly superior for games, and the Amiga anyway. Macs never played a role for gaming at this time, because of their price and distribution channels. Only fairly rich professors and graphic artists were able to afford one. Ataris were never really that good for gaming either, but they were used a lot by pro audio folks. They had superior midi capabilities and programs.
Disagree about the Ataris. They were very popular gaming platforms at the time.
Not the ST, which would be the competition we're talking about vs the C64, etc.
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The C64 was vastly superior for games, and the Amiga anyway. Macs never played a role for gaming at this time, because of their price and distribution channels. Only fairly rich professors and graphic artists were able to afford one. Ataris were never really that good for gaming either, but they were used a lot by pro audio folks. They had superior midi capabilities and programs.
The Atari ST 1040 was a great gaming platform.
Boy were they unpopular though.
They built a machine to compete with the C64 at the time when Amiga was the new thing.
Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#109Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was rather sad when Dijkstra said anyone who learnt on BASIC was irrepairably broken : "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html The second line of code I ever wrote was in BASIC : goto 10
That line of code reminded me of the following thing you could do to the Commodore PET[1], one of the first computers to use Microsoft BASIC. 10 GOTO 10 RUN Oops. No way to recover without power cycling the computer. I remember Commodore brought their product to an early computer show, and all the annoying nerds (like me) kept entering that one-line program into the demo computers, much to the annoyance of the nearby…
I wrote a similar (first) version on my Spectrum 48k. For some reason it initiated the same kind of colour cycle that you'd get when loading a program.