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A comment on Hal Finney’s proposal for optimizing Bitcoin to be enabled in Bitcoin Core. Parent comment

Re:Hal Finney’s proposal for optimizing Bitcoin to be enable... by WalterBright on Sunday September 27, 2020 @03:11PM (#24609329)
I worked at Aph for a while, and did one of the video games (Roulette).

Hal wrote a Basic interpreter to fit in 2K of ROM. To save bytes, it had only one error message:

    EH?
Still my favorite error message.

Of course, all of us at Aph were idiots. We had everything needed to make a killer consumer microcomputer, did not, and missed out on being billionaires!

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Re:Hal Finney’s proposal for optimizing Bitcoin to be enable... by WalterBright on Sunday September 27, 2020 @09:48PM (#24612121)
Another Hal anecdote: Caltech at one point had a contest against MIT about who could write a Gomoku program that could beat the other. On a lark, Hal decided to enter a program he wrote over the weekend. It beat MIT.

That was when I found out Hal was not your average bear. Usually, he was just the friendly fellow who was always up for taking as many students as would fit into his VW bug to Tommy's at 3AM. I was small enough at the time to fit in the luggage slot behind the back seat.

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