eludwig

To be fair, the earliest text adventures are brutally, brutally difficult and in many cases, very much unfair! There are nowhere near enough in-game indicators or foreshadowing of what might work in a certain context. Some solutions are obvious, but others are truly ridiculous and won’t realistically be solved without a walkthrough or “invisi-clue” book. All imo, of course.

Back in the 80’s we used to play these games in a group, with one person driving and a group of others helping out. Even then we used to fall back on hints occasionally.

> An alternative could be a good 5K/6K monitor with a KVM, but this is a unicorn as well...

I use a Dell U3224KB (32" 6K) in this way. Thunderbolt (usbc) is connected to a Macbook Pro and DP & regular usb c is connected to Windows gaming machine. Works perfectly. And yes, the U3224KB is pretty ugly, but I've grown to love it's features.

I actually did this back in the late 90s! The editor was called "Scorpio"[1]. It was written for the classic MacOS in some version of C with objects, maybe Think C(?). I'm not 100% sure.

It's an amazing fun thing to do, but I probaby wouldn't wan't to do it again now. This thing didn't handle unicode (I had never heard of it), barely handled spell checking and didn't handle bi-directional input.

Text (1 byte per char) was stored in a big array on the heap. Styles were also an array (again on the heap) of fixed length structs. Font information, in the form of fixed-point width tables, was gathered from system calls and cached.

It did actually support inline pictures though, which was pretty challenging.

Writing an editor is a hugely fun project. Highly recommended.

[1] https://atpm.com/3.03/page11.shtml

Closer to a nibble!

This is great! Back in the 60s & 70s, before the digitization of all life on earth, there were a huge number of very ornamental, very hard-to-read fonts that were sold, generally, on sheets of Letraset press-on type (at least for those of us too poor to have our own Linotype machines)

This is very much like that, but turned up to 11. Very slick presentation and a nice, simple website as well. Nice work!

p.s I realize that there are a ton of hard-to-read digital fonts available as well, but I grew up in the pre-"desktop publishing" times for better or worse

Hehe, being a Java dev since the late 90’s meant seeing a lot of bad code. My favorite was when I was working for a large life insurance company.

The company’s customer-facing website was servlet based. The main servlet was performing horribly, time outs, spinners, errors etc. Our team looked at the code and found that the original team implementing the logic had a problem they couldn’t figure out how to solve, so they decided to apply the big hammer: they synchronized the doService() method… oh dear…

Mainly remote, even though I am about a mile from the office lol. They fully bought into the remote first idea. We have team get togethers generally about once a month. Very nice to spend time with the team, but I prefer my home office with my own stuff for daily work.

Actually in Los Angeles, but they have offices all over the world. The home office is in Tokyo.

Usually one at a time, but sometimes they combine. Also, parts of the same task can be one or the other, so you may have to switch from fun (coding something new) to boring/annoying (writing unit tests) in a single day.

It really depends on the type of environment and work you are looking to do.

At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.

I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.

Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.

>> lifelong mix of sarcasm with sincerity, skepticism with optimism

Love this, perfectly said. Or, in the words of Don Martin, Thook Zak Splak KWOP!

Lovely excerpt that gives a good general overview of Mad history and highlights!

I was an avid reader as a child in the late 60s to early 70s. I eventually moved on to National Lampoon as a teen, but Mad will always glow in my childhood memory heart.

I still have a decent-sized collection of Mad paperbacks. Many (most, all?) were written by a single Mad artist/writer. My favorites of these were ones written by Don Martin and Al Jaffee.

I still have my original copy of "The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz", probably bought around 1970ish. Such a singular talent. Died pretty young (68), which is sad.

Sorry to pile on to the doom and gloom around this, but I have been at a bunch of companies that tried this and have never seen it work out well.

The problem is that building generalized, actually-in-the-real-world reusable UI components is really, really hard! Generalizing other people's use cases is very tricky without walking in their shoes.

Usually what happens is that a glorious, well-intentioned group within the company puts together a few very short-sighted, yet kind-of-good-looking components for a very specific use case and management sees it and says: "hey, why can't we use this in other projects?" The answer, of course, is that they weren't meant for that! They don't handle about 100 different things that would allow for expanded use in the company. One would need a dedicated team to make it so, which management really doesn't want to pay for.

Trust me, it only gets worse from there...

My advice is to build domain-specific LOB components for your business area and use a real 3rd-party solution for the underlying GUI lib. This actually has a chance of working out. Even doing this is way harder than it sounds lol.

I think that both viewpoints are correct. I would add that, importantly, the invention of photography changed the economics of picture ownership. No longer was it necessary to sit long hours and pay a ton of money to get a family portrait! Photographs were far cheaper, and to the untrained eye, "better" than the work of a mediocre portraitist. Of course, I would personally much rather have Ingres (for one) paint my portrait, but only the very wealthy could afford such a thing.

Just wanted to pop in to say I think she is a terribly underrated actor. Truly a gem. For my money, the only reason that The Shining has any stakes at all is because of her incredible performance! RIP, Shelley.

As others have mentioned, a centrifugal casting machine would have really helped here. I took quite a bit of jewelry making in college and all the lost wax casting we did was done this way. The force of the metal filling the mold at extremely high speeds gets rid of most, if not all, of the impurities/inconsistencies.

Wind up the machine, melt the metal in a small crucible, drop the pin and duck (lol). I was once sprayed by a small stream of molten brass at +/- 1700 degrees (poor mold with thin wall, later fixed and recast) and still have a scar 40 years later to prove it.

I saw Sun Ra back once back in the mid-70s in NYC. Easily the most memorable jazz concert I've ever seen. My recollection is not 100%, but what I do remember is the Arkestra lined up in a row of chairs facing the audience. There were 2 dancers female dressed in filmy clothes that were essentially circling the players and dancing around the stage. Sun Ra was basically directing the entire performance. I don't believe he was playing anything? (I could be mistaken there though. it was a long time ago) Maybe he played keys at one point?

The most amazing part were the solos. Sun Ra would point to each player in turn and each would stand and deliver the most blistering solo for about 5 minutes each, barely taking a breath. Then Sun Ra would motion to the next and this would continue until everyone had a turn.

The music was incredibly spacey and so good. "Space is the place"!

Yes! I absolutely lived in Think C for many years. You’re right though, it was on the way out by then, supplanted by CodeWarrior and MPW, which were both really good too.

Worked on a homegrown Mac wsywyg editor back in the 90s. Arrays worked perfectly. If you are assuming that files fit in memory, using BlockMove() was very, very fast indeed.

I can see if you need to edit multi-gig log files and things will not fit in memory, but for small files, array is totally fine.

There were other tricks that were done back then to keep the number of single char inserts down to a minimum while typing. Like reading chars into a small buffer during fast typing and then inserting all the keystrokes at once as soon as you had the time.

Yes, 6144x3456@60 was working, but not at 30bit, only 24bit. Sonoma fixes that part (for me)

I can verify that an M1-M3 Mac running Sonoma (14.1.1) the U3224KB supports 6144 x 3456 at 30bit (60Hz). Under Ventura this did not work. Seems fixed now.

Writing (and illustrating) an amateur novel is the most creative fun I've ever had. Highly recommended if you have a mind to try. (trained artist, but software developer by day)

I wrote one[1] about 5 years ago. It's amateur and too long, but it's my great American novel, for better or worse! It actually took 4 years, but so much fun! The most annoying part was getting it into a viable ePub. I ended up using Sigil, as it was the easiest to use at the time.

[1] https://darladarling.com (free ePub)

Seconded. This is great software sold the old-fashioned way: pay once and upgrade when you want to.

The lovely lack of mental friction around this model is something I miss dearly, as opposed to endless subscriptions. But this is probably because I am an old guy and haven't adapted to our new reality.

As far as KM goes, it's so well done. Very complete. Great for any one off key combos you want to add, but can do a ridiculous amount more. AND it's very well documented.

Sounds like a perfect use-case for a GoPro?

This is a really silly framing device wrapped around a decent high-level review of end-user focused dev environments.

Hypercard was hugely influential and very widely used. Yes, it ignored the internet, but that was inevitable based on its origins. Heck, 13 years isn't a bad run for any piece of software, especially one that crossed the no internet/internet divide.

The people that want to program will do so no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.

Many older word processors (the only ones I'm familiar with) used style "runs", which are simply an array of structs that contain startPosition, endPosition (or length) and then a bunch of style info in whatever way makes sense to them.

I worked on Ready,Set,Go! back in the day and also wrote my own styled editor for the Mac in the 90's.

One interesting thing about this is that you could use a lazy "adjustor" to remove duplicate or overlapping styles. No need to worry about it during typing or selecting. A low priority task could analyze the runs and fix them up as needed and no one was the wiser.

IMO, the hardest part about writing a word processor back then was font management. You had to construct width tables to be able to compose lines properly. This generally involved a bunch of poorly documented APIs and peering into opaque data structures.

To be fair, it would probably be a really nice toaster

As someone who has done a ton of drawing both on computers and off, the idea that this was drawn with mouse blows my fricken mind! I can't even imagine the patience needed.

As I recall someone saying once, "Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap." So true.