121–130 of 183 posts
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Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.
> Macs suck for games and they always have Not in the 80s. PCs were DOS machines for the office and if you wanted to play a game the Mac, Atari or Amiga were much nicer plattforms.
For expert BASIC code see Nibbles.BAS:
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"Correct" order is ambiguous to someone asking that question in the first place.
It sounds like he's saying the "line number" is just the index to a tokenized list (i.e. line 15 is at `lines[15]') where unused lines are just nops. So my "program" would be tokenized and the lines stored like: char** lines = malloc(...); lines[10] = &line1; lines[30] = &line2; lines[20] = &line3; Then when executing, it starts at `lines[0]', sees nops, gets to `lines[10]' and runs it, sees more nops, gets to `lines…
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salty is slang for "envious"
"Throwing salt" can also be used to mean "casting dispersions", as it were. I think the article tosses a bunch of salt towards Bill Gates, but who knows what the motivation was. I'm guess when properly confused, you might just throw some salt for luck, and end up looking salty yourself. :) Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.
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Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.
The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistic…
While true, the quality of sound achievable this way is a matter of software. There are many programs that achieved excellent sound quality, playing music even with just a speaker and a TTL drive.
Remember, the simplest DAC is PWM into a low-pass filter.
Shortly after that we got a PC at home and it came with a demo copy of EGA Golf which I think only had Pebble Beach. Sound quality was similar.
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> 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.
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Not an especially valuable comment from me here, but the fact that people who are probably very technically literate can ask this question makes me feel really rather old.
I remember explaining line-number based BASIC to a younger programmer once and he really couldn't get his head around the idea of GOTOs and GOSUBs based on line numbers -- "why wouldn't you just define functions?"
I escaped the "permanent brain damage" that Dijkstra complained about that era of BASIC producing, but I understand where he's coming from now and don't begrudge him the slight hyperbole. It was a language where there were so many accidental complexities that there was virtually no prayer of someone penetrating through to the essential issues, using Fred Brook's definitions of accidental/essential. You're not learning anything useful while you're manually renumbering lines because you used up everything between 15-20 and fixing up the GOTOs. (I never had anything with RENUM support.)