Oolite Bulletins

maik wrote:

Yes, scissors is what I used, too. Never saw a good reason to spend DM 5,- or whatever it was on that floppy disk cutter.

Laziness, mostly. And that you could be sure to cut the right amount of material from the correct place - and not cut yourself with the scissors while doing it.

Commander McLane wrote:

maik wrote:

Yes, scissors is what I used, too. Never saw a good reason to spend DM 5,- or whatever it was on that floppy disk cutter.

Laziness, mostly.

Yep. I think I only got into programming because I thought that computers should do the dull work that I was too lazy to do.

maik wrote:

I think I only got into programming because I thought that computers should do the dull work that I was too lazy to do.

That is exactly the reason I got into data processing computing IT. I had a sudden insight at school that a computer is 'a spanner for the brain'. That is, just as a simple tool helps the labourer do more manual work by being a lever (which I would argue is second only to fire as the top invention of all time), so the computer should do the drudge work, the repetitive actions, the mindless activity, freeing the human's brain to concentrate on the exceptions, the problems and ways to do the job better.

I shall never forget one office we part-automated where one young man's job was to:
- go to Sharon's out-tray and take the contents and put it in his in-tray;
- remove an item from his in-tray;
- stamp it with today's date;
- put it in his out-tray;
- when his out-tray is full, put the contents in Tracey's in-tray;
- go back to start.
That was his job, 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. I would rather starve than do that as a job. When we put in a computer-based ordering system, they transferred him to the sales team where he was keen, motivated and happy. I'm really proud of that.

I still feel that way now. If you want to see me get angry, point me at a computerised arrival / departure monitoring system, or over-protective childish censorship disguised as a nanny-filter, or taxpayer's money being used to pay for systems to secretly monitor people who criticise the government, or hidden cameras that check people are working or any other form of technology that oppresses people or is there to make people work harder. At least the slave driver had to wield a whip or cudgel and could be revolted against and turned upon.


Those years of reading sf as a child inspired me with a view that by now we should all be living a life of idle luxury with machines and computers and robots doing the work while a select few choose to work to do the few jobs that remain in healthcare, management, planning, repairs, design, etc. University study would be free to all, as would all sports and recreational facilities. It's not working out, is it? And where's my bloody flying car, eh? That was supposed to be delivered by 1999.

SandJ wrote:

maik wrote:

I think I only got into programming because I thought that computers should do the dull work that I was too lazy to do.

That is exactly the reason I got into data processing computing IT. I had a sudden insight at school that a computer is 'a spanner for the brain'. That is, just as a simple tool helps the labourer do more manual work by being a lever (which I would argue is second only to fire as the top invention of all time), so the computer should do the drudge work, the repetitive actions, the mindless activity, freeing the human's brain to concentrate on the exceptions, the problems and ways to do the job better.

I shall never forget one office we part-automated where one young man's job was to:
- go to Sharon's out-tray and take the contents and put it in his in-tray;
- remove an item from his in-tray;
- stamp it with today's date;
- put it in his out-tray;
- when his out-tray is full, put the contents in Tracey's in-tray;
- go back to start.
That was his job, 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. I would rather starve than do that as a job. When we put in a computer-based ordering system, they transferred him to the sales team where he was keen, motivated and happy. I'm really proud of that.

I still feel that way now. If you want to see me get angry, point me at a computerised arrival / departure monitoring system, or over-protective childish censorship disguised as a nanny-filter, or taxpayer's money being used to pay for systems to secretly monitor people who criticise the government, or hidden cameras that check people are working or any other form of technology that oppresses people or is there to make people work harder. At least the slave driver had to wield a whip or cudgel and could be revolted against and turned upon.


Those years of reading sf as a child inspired me with a view that by now we should all be living a life of idle luxury with machines and computers and robots doing the work while a select few choose to work to do the few jobs that remain in healthcare, management, planning, repairs, design, etc. University study would be free to all, as would all sports and recreational facilities. It's not working out, is it? And where's my bloody flying car, eh? That was supposed to be delivered by 1999.

Maybe the line from "The Matrix" correct - to paraphrase: "we tried to five you a utopia, but you revolted, you preferred this nightmare."

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Maybe the line from "The Matrix" correct - to paraphrase: "we tried to give you a utopia, but you revolted, you preferred this nightmare."

I was never very keen on Asimov's Multivac that did everything - including the thinking and planning - for us. He sometimes came across as politically naïve in his writing - who did he think would specify Multivac's parameters? Not us freshly-washed masses but some bunch of gits in charge who 'know best' and like the status quo just as it is.

Is it really thirty years of the BBC Micro?

I'm tidying my old C: and found some old executables:





The executables are dated 17th December 1987. (The most recent saved game is dated 27th March 1991.)

The line-drawn version 73,632 bytes, the shaded version needs an extra 944 bytes.

Don't you wish YOU had a powerful computer, with at least a 6 MHz processor?

Edit: I had to go and check that ... 72K ... yep.

Urgh - I've just released that (my parents) bought me my first computer 31 years ago.

The infamous...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

This one I got 29 years ago and was the host of my first Elite experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron

With Elite: Dangerous tempting me to pledge to a kickstarter project for the first time ever, i've gone a bit giddy and pledged to another one too! It's a project to write a book about Ocean software http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/477 ... tro-fusion i imagine a lot of us played their games as we were growing up and might be interested in some behind the scenes info, the project is already funded and closes this Friday. digital copy of the book is £10, proper book £25
here's quite a neat modern remake of their music from the Rambo game with modern synths and some songstress going oooo aaah etc
http://www.remix64.com/track/visa_roest ... nd_larsec/

Griff wrote:

With Elite: Dangerous tempting me to pledge to a kickstarter project for the first time ever, i've gone a bit giddy and pledged to another one too! It's a project to write a book about Ocean software http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/477 ... tro-fusion i imagine a lot of us played their games as we were growing up and might be interested in some behind the scenes info, the project is already funded and closes this Friday. digital copy of the book is £10, proper book £25

Nice find Griff - as I still own my C64 I still own a great raft of original Ocean Games software - including my first game ever "Daley Thompson's Decathlon" - between Ocean and US Gold (and Epyx in a close 3rd) my childhood (11 onwards) was spent in my bedroom!

I binned mine although i seem to have kept some of the tape covers from a few of my favourite games, not the tapes just the inlays. And for some mad reason, i've thrown away all my C64 elite stuff apart from the manual and the ship ID chart, i didn't even keep the dark wheel

Griff wrote:

I binned mine although i seem to have kept some of the tape covers from a few of my favourite games, not the tapes just the inlays. And for some mad reason, i've thrown away all my C64 elite stuff apart from the manual and the ship ID chart, i didn't even keep the dark wheel

<tuts loudly and shakes head sadly>

I used the Ocean sort code for sprite sorting when throwing more than 8 sprites at the screen. I've still got a lot of my development work on disc somewhere. I used the cassette recorder/player from an Acorn Electron to play the C64 tapes, which were then recorded as WAV files and converted to TAP files for WinVICE.

Also use xa65 assember on the PC, although I haven't done any coding with it for over 4 years now. That was a little demo I threw together that included, split sprites, no borders (including side-borders), scrollers, copper bars, sprite stretching, fire routine... I also used Rob Hubbard's Monty on the Run as the background music, which I also have as source code.

woah, that sounds amazing! proper programming! I never got any further than typing out 'game listings' from the magazines (and you usually had to buy the next months issue to get the corrections to the mis-prints). There was some cool stuff, an early Jeff Minter game called Rox64 i think, and one of his where you had a load of his 'ancipital' goatman characters running along on conveyor belts that you had to adjust so they all 'ran on the spot' sort of. Hours of fun!
Did you get any 8-bit era games published Tricky or is it strictly demo scene coding you're in to?

I had the tape version of Elite on the BBC model B. What I do remember was the annoyance upon reading the manual when coming across items which were available only for the disk drive version. This included military lasers and some ships including the Krait.