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[celticgeek]

I said we should move the topic here.

[Melodic]

i wanna buy a rickenbacker 4003 a whole lot

[jwhouk]

Timex Sinclair ZX-80 with the 16K memory expansion module; Atari 400 with the BASIC cartridge; Mac SE with a 160 MB hard drive (!); Mac LC; Performa 6360 (which was the first one I actually bought); iBook Tangerine; iBook G3; and my series of Gateway PC's.

I have a copy on my Mac of - brace yourself - Word and Excel 4.0. That wasn't the first spreadsheet I ever used, though; I still have a converted spreadsheet from Lotus 1-2-3 that I use for calendar creation.

Oh, and I still long for an AfterDark screensaver for Windows XP-SP3.

[jwhouk]

Oh, and I got a 2-XL for Christmas one year. I learned quickly it was essentially an 8-track tape player.

[zadojla]

Ahh, this is better!  We knda hijacked the weekly thread.  Probably pissed off everyone under 40, and all the casual computer users.

Handheld electronic calculators (the HP-35) were not around for college students until I was in grad school.  I used a slide rule as an undergraduate.  I still have my Post lol-log Deci-trig.

And I also developed the ability to use a soroban, just to annoy my friends.

Now, I just use the calculator on my cell phone for any arithmetic I can't do in my head.  The fact that I can do arithmetic in my head astounds many younger folk.

[celticgeek]

Um, well, yeah:

Slide Rules

[KharBevNor]

Even though I'm relatively young, my father believed that it was important that my interest in computers was fed with something that would give me a slightly more fundamental understanding of how computers worked. Thus my first computer was this:



And a stack of books on BBC BASIC. I was actually quite in to computer programming for a while as a kid, and programmed a few basic text games and such, but I never made the leap to OOP, or anything more advanced than GW-BASIC actually, so I BASICally don't know jack now (herp derp). It was pretty fun to be able to write programs that caused the ancient computers in my schools IT department to display fake error messages, causing me to gain endless amusement from the fact that our 'IT teachers' didn't think to, say, press Ctrl+break (this was in the mid 90's, before every school grew a server room staffed with depressed 20-somethings with degrees in computer science who'd assumed they would be dotcom millionaires by now). 

[peterh]

Ah, the Beeb Machine! I remember that one fondly, although I never used it. Wasn't that actually the Acorn Atom?

[bhtooefr]

I'm 22, but I'm floating in a sea of retrocomputers, and grew up with 1 MHz and 128k RAM, so close enough, right?

Anyway, while I've never used an 8-bit Acorn (wrong continent for that - they did sell them here, but compared to the Apple //e (which had more RAM, more software - UK software didn't run properly on the US BBC B - and the BBC name meant little in the US) at the same price point, and the C64 (which had more RAM, more software, and better graphics and sound) at a significantly lower price point, it was a total flop,) the BBC Micro wasn't the Atom. The Atom was the predecessor, and the Beeb was the Proton.

(I do have a 32-bit Acorn, though - an Acorn RiscPC, with a 233 MHz StrongARM, with everything installed in an A7000 case (which means an autoranging power supply - plug it into US power, and it just works.) Got it from a guy who used to live in the UK, and did a lot of RISC OS development.)

[bicostp]

I guess I'll throw my hat in the ring for Resident Apple Old Fart.

Started out with an SE, then an SE/30, and eventually we went through a long succession of 68k and PPC Macs as my dad's work lent them or threw them away. I've still got the same old SE/30 we've always had, along with a grab-bag assortment of survivors and newer acquisitions, with boxes of parts, cables, accessories, peripherals, and floppies to go with them. There's a hard drive kicking around that has an archive of all our old stuff going back at least 20 years (I can't even find some of the old software online), a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge (which got the SE in the screenshot thread on the net), an original Newton Messagepad (in a Newton-branded leather case), and a "Powerbook XXXX" seed unit hanging around as well. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of magazines and books, a HyperCard box, a few manuals, and a box of Apple branded color inkjet overhead transparencies kicking around too.

[celticgeek]

And now for a little OLD Geek humor:

Jargon File

Gospel Of Tux

RFC 1149

RFC 1149 Implementation

[Jimor]

I score at least a couple geek points for knowing what that RFC is about without even following the links.

Commodore 64 was my first. I loved writing stuff in BASIC on that thing. The fact that it was easy to manipulate the architecture with a fairly complete reference manual was pretty cool. I wrote a machine language assembly program in BASIC, but never really did anything in the machine language itself.

Next was an Atari ST, and I tried a few boardgame implementations in GFA Basic on that, though never completed any of them. My problem now is that I can't quite get my mind around OOP. I want my damn GOTOs! 

[bhtooefr]

Bah, let me know when RFC 2549 is implemented.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2549.txt

[benenator]

Wow, clearly I fail at being a nerd.  This feels like a fetus kicking out its knowledge in Morse code in comparison, but here it goes:

My first computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 25SX, with 2MB-4MB of RAM (IIRC) and a 40MB hard drive. Sadly, I wasn't allowed or able to open it up, and all the software I could throw at it at the time identified it as an IBM AT -- I only figured out what it REALLY was recently.  Wish it hadn't been thrown out -- all that was wrong with it was a broken floppy drive, and my idiot father thinking it was a software problem and formatting the hard drive so he could restore from 1.44MB FLOPPIES. 

I learned basic programing on that machine. GWBASIC, and a very little bit of QBASIC.  Also got a reintroduction to video games, and my first reason to explore teh Internetz: finding as many MS-DOS games as could fit on a 1.44MB floppy and sneak home behind Dad's back. Good times.  Moving on . . .

Oldest computer I've owned was a Toshiba TI1600 laptop with a monochrome LCD screen, an 80286 processor, 1MB RAM, and an (upgraded, woo-hoo) 40MB hard drive. Had a blast playing EGATrek and Anacreon on that thing -- only got rid of it because I accidentally broke off a wire leading to an indicator LED while trying (successfully) to fix the flickering video output to the LCD. Apparantly it was more important than just an indicator of whether the laptop had AC power, because when I tried to turn it on, I started to smell hot electronics and smoke. (Hey, I was 14. Had no tools to try fixing the new problem properly, knew nobody who could.)

Needless to say, I shut it off. 


Those computers are long gone, now. All I have left of them is the set of instruction manuals, and the carrying bag, from the laptop. But now I have an old 286-based motherboard -- that is, shall we say, recursively boxed -- and a Sears Video Arcade II that I did a vinyl-dye job on. (If you know what that is without looking it up, you win all the geek points. All of them. Permanently so if you get the reference I just made as well.   )




Not that I use it for anything but playing Defender and sucking at Pitfall. 

Now I have way too many computers, only one of which runs a Micro$oft OS -- the 2007-era dual-core machine that can actually handle it, for gaming. I'm a GNU/Linux user now, and very happy with it. 

I'm typing this from a 2001-era laptop (Pentium 3), running Arch Linux. Would be a 1998-era laptop (Pentium II, IBM Thinkpad 600E) if the backlight hadn't burned out and I hadn't broken the replacement as I was just putting things back together. >_<

[McTaggart]

I am way younger than you folks but even young people feel old some times. I was talking with a bunch of first years today about how games just feel like crap these days and it turned out that none of them had ever even played Quake 3. Quake 3. Or Counter Strike. All the staples of my highschool years that are pretty much a part of me are nothing but quaint little curiosities to them. Made me feel really old, and sad for them that they never played Quake 3.

[ackblom12]

See, I think that the games are crap these days argument is incredibly silly. As much as I loved playing Civilization 1, Pools of Radiance and many of those lovely lovely games I will not deny that alot of my love for them is pure nostalgia. The only thing I really miss from back in the day (same as you, it's really not quite so long ago as many posting) is that writers and developers had a lot more wiggle room for some serious experimentation overall.

Lord though, I don't recall what kind of computer our first one was. My mother was an early adopter because she is/was an accountant and bookkeeper and then jumped on the e-filing of taxes immediately when it became available a few years later. I remember being amazed at the HD in the 30s of Megs! DOOM then refused to install at some point because we didn't have enough HD space and I managed to convince my parents that the HD was failing and we needed a newer bigger one.

[McTaggart]

It's not that modern games are crap, it's just that the 'feel' of them isn't as good. Modern games have slower movement and it's harder to get a feel for exactly where you are. Quake 3 (well, CPMA) has the best movement and the best sense of pace and scale of any game I've ever played. I'll be honest in that my experience with 'modern' FPSes is TF2, Borderlands and MW2 but in the second two of those the movement is really treacly and in all of them the field of view is really claustrophobic (TF2 limits it to 90 degrees and Borderlands defaults to 75 with no easily accessible options to change it).

Games aren't nearly all crap these days, but they're slower and more constricted in general.

[steveb]

First machine I used was the commodor pet.
First machine I owned was a Memotech MTX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX essentially the same spec as the japanese MTX systems but came out slightly earlier and made near oxford. It had a great little Z80 emulator in the ROM that let you single-step through machine code.

Now my first supercomputer was the Cray-1s.  

[KharBevNor]

A new games versus old games argument would be a thread in itself!

I have to say that, as someone who cut his FPS teeth on Unreal Tournament, Half Life mods and later Battlefield 1942 and mods thereof, I definitely do think there's something very different about modern FPS games I've played. Partly this may be to do with control schemes (I will eternally consider mouse+keyboard the best way to play games of this type), but there seems to me to be an overall sense that I am somehow not actually in control of my character completely, in some weird way. I think this is partly to do with attempts at realistic physics (something that concerned designers of late 90's FPS's about as highly as love for his fellow man concerned Stalin), but also to do with a distinct shift in emphasis on how games are patterned. It seems to me that the incredible graphics of modern games are increasingly leading designers down something that resembles a slightly more thoughtful version of the almost universally dreadful 'interactive movie' games of the mid nineties. You're not quite on rails, but there's a definite idea of flowing between setpieces, which some may think improves a game. Personally, I know that many people heavily praise the fact that FPS games these days are far more narratively engaging and highly plotted than more traditional fare. I take a slightly more equivocal view. Always, when I have played games, I have been constructing a narrative in my head that gives my character (or civilisation, or whatever) some sort of motivation or story. To a degree, too much plot can actually erode this, or rather, not enough of the right sort of plot. I'm sort of rambling now, but I guess the problem is not so much plot as linearity. If a game is to have a detailed plot, it should not be linear, because that makes for a boring game. It's kind of related to how I became disenchanted with WoW because I realised that at the highest levels the game was basically a set series of tasks; there was very little room for my character to be invidividualised. I'm not sure I see the appeal in games (this is particularly something I've noted in what I've played of the Modern Warfare series) which are essentially just movies that you have to jump through hoops to see the next part of.

[Jimor]

I've given some thought on how to unrail a narrative. While I don't have the answer, I have been working on developing a method of being able to change details within a continuity that would be accounted for throughout the storyline. It still limited to a generally linear plot structure for now, but I think it may offer clues on how to tackle other ways of varying a narrative.

Of course, the "easiest" way is to offer branch points to the story. This is what the old "choose your own adventure" books did. But even they cheated. The math of branching gets messy really quickly, offering a reader 10 choices during the story for example, means that there would have to be over a thousand different endings written. So what they usually did was fold most of the threads back into another branch (or simply pruned a lot of branches with "rocks fall, everybody dies").

Video games have their own ways of creating the illusion of choice. Most of the FPSs may let you choose to fight your way through the railroad yard, or the warehouse, but in the end, you still end up at the checkpoint at the water tower. Another way is to let you go quest for 5 different clues before you can move on. You can go find them in any order, but again, until you get them all, you can't get past whatever chokepoint the game drives you to before letting you through to the next chapter.

An MMO like EVE is interesting in that each player essentially creates their own endgame goal. But I still find the lack of an underlying narrative drive unsatisfying. Before I had run into EVE, I had written up a short blue-sky proposal for a space-based MMO that created extra content for players as they reached the edge of known territories. It also featured player-created goals, but I was imagining something a little more structured than what I later found in EVE.

Ultimately what we need to do is give the computer the tools to build a story around the player's actions. Build the world, then let the player's character wander around and interact with NPCs until they trigger enough pieces of a puzzle for the computer to synthesize a quest. Use meta-structures like the 3-act story arc to hang details off of. Use my system to let player choices resonate and interact with story details up and down the line.

I don't really know how this can be done, but we've pretty much conquered the visual aspects of being able to deliver on the promise of putting the player into their own movie. We just have to figure out how to let a story truly evolve out of their actions.

[KharBevNor]

I would guess that we can't yet do both simultaneously. Part of the reason for the slickness of modern graphics is how much scripted and even pre-rendered stuff there is going on. You can generate random scenery in, say, an isometric strategy game, but it becomes infinitely harder in a 3D environment with bump-mapping and such.

Dwarf Fortress intends to work something like the way you're saying. The last dev arc bought in and strengthened basic, bare bones RPG style questing for Adventure Mode. The next arc is the long awaited Caravan Arc, which will create trade routes and economic interaction between various civilizations and add yet more story potential.

I think DF is actually a good example of how you don't necessarily need the computer to tell you everything. DF creates a narrative by simply having a system so complex emergent phenomena create something new every time you play. Maybe in ten years time, we can have that kind of back-end complexity married with some decent graphics. The biggest problem I think, from a game-design perspective, is that the more you open up a plot and don't fold branches back in, the more you risk creating a situation in which it is impossible to complete the game. Most games want to avoid this, at least permanently.

[snalin]

You have some games with a lot of complexity and at least partially random environments that's also quite good looking. First of all I'm thinking of Mount & Blade, which has a pre-made world, and not too many different kinds of quests (30, maybe?), but the mix of randomness and choice makes it pretty awesome, and it's such a great, great battle system. You kinda have the story evolving from players actions simply because how the different kingdoms are shaped depends so much on who you support, who you make lead, where and why you attack, etc. If you could make something with crossover of the best parts of, say Minecraft, Mount & Blade and Dwarf Fortress, that'd be a really great game.

[benenator]

Derailed topic is off the tracks. 

I'm still waiting for a remake of Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, only with modern graphics, guards that aren't all clones, actual traveling characters, yadda yadda. And an engine that doesn't choke on even the most modern of hardware when you have every enhancment installed and running. 

That game was perfect. The towns were part of the overworld (unlike the sequel, Oblivion, without mods), it had a million sidequests and locations to discover, and a detailed set of plots.

Did the main plot seem unimportant? Of course -- the Big Bad's plot was an Ancient Conspiracy. But it made sense!

*rant rant rant swing-swing*

[ackblom12]

I don't know if perfect is a word I'd ever attach to any of the Elder Scrolls game, but Morrowind was definitely better than Oblivion in most respects. Except combat. Fuckin' hell the combat in Morrowind was terrible.

[snalin]

If Morroblivion is ever finished, and supports Morrowind mods, then you're pretty much there. There's mods that add random characters that gives the world a bit more feel of being lived in (even if the game is much better at that that than Oblivion), and even if they're not ideal, that can be fixed. And has probably been since last I checked.

[benenator]

I don't know if perfect is a word I'd ever attach to any of the Elder Scrolls game, but Morrowind was definitely better than Oblivion in most respects. Except combat. Fuckin' hell the combat in Morrowind was terrible.

Agreed -- there were only two non-technical things I liked better in Oblivion than in Morrowind: ACTUALLY HITTING the target, and being able to cast magic with a weapon out. Although I could've understood having to put the weapon away for magic until I was a certain level in that magic school (~30 or so). 

If Morroblivion is ever finished, and supports Morrowind mods, then you're pretty much there. There's mods that add random characters that gives the world a bit more feel of being lived in (even if the game is much better at that that than Oblivion), and even if they're not ideal, that can be fixed. And has probably been since last I checked.

I've downloaded and used gigabytes of mods, and Morrowind is indeed awesome with them, to the point that I can't stand to play without at least Better Bodies or something similar. I've used the declone guards mod, I liked the random characters mods, and I even tossed in one or two of the better romance-character mods.

The problem lies with the game engine and the following-character AI. At the highest settings I can configure with Morrowind Graphics Enhancer, and all the fancy lighting, shadow, and enemy AI distance settings, I get around ~15 FPS. On an ATI RadeonHD 4350, with the newest drivers, IN WINDOWS XP OR 7.

With the highest possible settings in Oblivion, everything hums along around 50fps or better, IIRC.

Thus why I'd love a Morrowind remake by Bethsedea, with the Oblivion engine or similar. Morroblivion sounds great, and so does OpenMW. But Bethsedea ultimately has the copyrights and trademarks, so even a replacement engine with only replacement textures/meshes/etc. will still be an infringing game.

Won't keep me from playing it of course, but it's still a worry.

[snalin]

As far as I remembered, Bethesda made the point about copyright infringement, and pulled it from their forums. The project is still going strong at morroblivion.com. Since it's fan driven, it'll be impossible to kill the mod, although banishing it to obscurity could be done by shooting down all official pages. It still lacks dialogue and quests. Those will be a bitch to mod in, since you'll basically have to bring morrowinds system into the oblivion engine. That means making massive changes to the oblivion engine itself, and that's beyond the scope of your run of the mill modder.