October 2nd, 2007
Faster than a speeding calculator
I still think my ZX Spectrum* is rather super.
It’s a motionless box that can still do things that I can’t.
Though we’re both fond of monochrome images.
* Geek notes: I had a +2A, and my parents allowed me to get one game with it, so long as I bought and practiced a book on programming too. I pinpoint that as the moment that I started designing and making video games, and also the moment when I knew that I would spend many, many hours playing them.
Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction story describing, well in advance of its invention, a desktop calculator (including the fact that it would have a red LCD readout) and published it simultaneously with a nonfiction instructional text on how to use a slide rule.
I love to read all the great quotes about computers.
I am only 23, so I grew up with them and I am used to having home PC’s around, but I am still sometimes stunned by the amazing abilities of them and the associated tech.
Like my MP3 player, several hundred hours of music in a box smaller than a pack of smokes.
I can’t wait till we have nano-computers, that will be impressive.
My first computer was a VIC-20. The first game I wrote for it was called “Checkerguy”. There was a character-drawn assembly line with a little character-drawn guy standing beneath it. Hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds would come rolling down the line and you had to press a button to drop them in the right slot or else they’d roll off the edge and bonk your guy in the head.
The games I program these days are a bit more complex than that. I just made a new release of GH2 and am swimming in all the bug reports. For some reason the phrase “my love, my hate, and all of my sorrow” keeps going through my head.
Awww, reminds me of my old Commodore 64. Those were the days, eh?
According to Moore’s Law, “The complexity
for minimum component costs has increased
at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year”.
That means we are half as slow now than
we were last year! Um… I think…
Asimov is another of my heroes… I particularly like the way he mixed fact and fiction; blurred the boundries of science fiction… and all that without a god.
Ben, I think I was on the cusp. Back in the early 80s, computers, were still in their relative infancy, as was I. They needed a lot of care and attention to do pretty much anything, and they certainly couldn’t be trusted to be on their own… not that I think they should now.
Joseph, remember; ‘Is it a bug or is it a feature’… and ‘If you love what you do, it’s bound to break your heart some days’.
Vic-20. Very cool.
As was the Commodore 64. Some of the best games I’ve ever played were on that machine.
The interesting thing about Moore’s Law is that it represents an example of what the next FFU book is about – a singularity.
It’s explained reasonably well here:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
There are plenty more singularities though… some of them can already be found in these very strips.
I’m only 14, so i don’t know much history-wise about computers. I do, however still have my first ever computer of my own, a little clio. i spent ages playing solitaire and writing stories on it. Back then, i’d never heard of the internet.
the only other thing i know about computers is that I.T gcse sucks. big time. but that’s not the computers fault.
When I was in elementary school we used Apple II computers that at that point were PAINFULLY out of date. Then in middle school they finally put some decent computers in labs that we almost never used and that trend continued until I graduated.