• Welcome to BellGab.com Archive.
 

Old school

Started by Jinger Rat Snapps, April 23, 2016, 01:23:25 AM

Can anyine remember Pong?  I spent many hours infront of an old green screen TV playing that game.

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: Jinger Rat Snapps on April 23, 2016, 01:23:25 AM
Can anyine remember Pong?  I spent many hours infront of an old green screen TV playing that game.

Yes, it was the first video game I ever played and I still enjoy it sometimes...but you should really move this over to the video game thread...unless you mean this to be about all things old school.

jazmunda

Quote from: Jinger Rat Snapps on April 23, 2016, 01:23:25 AM
Can anyine remember Pong?  I spent many hours infront of an old green screen TV playing that game.

You can play it online here: http://www.ponggame.org/

Brody

I remember playing Atari while Baby Jessica was being rescued.

Auslandia

I remember when that allosaurus ate my fresh pterodactyl eggs

akwilly

I remember buying my mother maxi pads. They were the size of skateboards.

Auslandia

Quote from: akwilly on April 24, 2016, 05:25:22 AM
I remember buying my mother maxi pads. They were the size of skateboards.

"If pussy weren't meant to be eaten, why is it shaped like a taco?" --some girl on Facebook this morning. 

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: jaz on April 23, 2016, 02:07:52 AM
You can play it online here: http://www.ponggame.org/

Perhaps my connection's not fast enough but there's a horrible lag in this version that makes it not very playable.  :(

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: akwilly on April 24, 2016, 05:25:22 AM
I remember buying my mother maxi pads. They were the size of skateboards.

mattresses  ;)

Robert

Quote from: Dr. MD MD on April 23, 2016, 01:35:42 AMYes, it was the first video game I ever played and I still enjoy it sometimes...but you should really move this over to the video game thread...unless you mean this to be about all things old school.
If you do, we can exchange stories about programming under constraints where we had to be very resourceful.  In 1970 I programmed a Monrobot printing calculator to generate pseudorandom numbers for CWABL, the Citrablammatic Wizamadingy (or Computerized Winner) Automatic Baseball League, which was my classmates Marc Blank's & Alex Citron's simulation of the MLB season.  Marc Blank went on to become the macher of game company Infocom.

The Monrobot (the Math Dept.'s calculator in the basement) could be programmed with up to 64 steps, looping but not branching.  It had 2 "memory" registers, one of which was also an alternate accumulator that could be added to or subtracted from.  The regular accumulator could accept results of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  While "diamond" (common symbol on calculators at the time) would sum and retain the sum, "*" would sum and clear (to 0).  No, a numeric value could not be used instead of an operation step, but before starting the program, the calculator could have values manually loaded into the pair of memory registers and implicitly in the accumulator.

We (though maybe not Alex) had in the previous year taken a trimester of Computer Math (which was actually Fortran programming), and I'd taken a liking to the subject.  We had a keypunch machine in the Arts Dept. bldg., and sent the cards to Manhattan College to run the programs.  On my own, I read of a simple algorithm to generate pseudorandom numbers, which was to square a large integer, then truncate equally the high- and low-order digits to generate the next number.  If you wind up generating 0000, you're screwed, but otherwise it's not bad.  I used that algorithm as the basis of my Monrobot program.  I had to use some tricks to do the truncation, since it treated data as 8 sig-dig floating-point exponential.  To produce a "1", I divided the contents of a register by itself; to produce a "0", I subtracted a value from itself.  To generate a halt, I divided by the 0 so generated; I don't think I used that trick in this program, though.  It wound up taking up 63 of the spaces for the 64 programming steps.  Memory was volatile, so the program and its starting data had to be manually loaded every time.  It would accept a seed for the random number routine, and an integer for the upper limit to the random numbers, because whatever the routine generated would be printed out modulo that limit (i.e. 0 to n).

Robert

Quote from: akwilly on April 24, 2016, 05:25:22 AMI remember buying my mother maxi pads. They were the size of skateboards.
For a long time, those fit uniformly badly.  Then at one company someone got the bright idea of making a mold of a woman's crotch.  Everyone in the industry had been too squeamish to do it previously.

starrmtn001

Quote from: jaz on April 23, 2016, 02:07:52 AM
You can play it online here: http://www.ponggame.org/
Awesome Jaz!  Thank you for sharing. :-*

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: Robert on April 25, 2016, 08:45:41 PM
If you do, we can exchange stories about programming under constraints where we had to be very resourceful.  In 1970 I programmed a Monrobot printing calculator to generate pseudorandom numbers for CWABL, the Citrablammatic Wizamadingy (or Computerized Winner) Automatic Baseball League, which was my classmates Marc Blank's & Alex Citron's simulation of the MLB season.  Marc Blank went on to become the macher of game company Infocom.

The Monrobot (the Math Dept.'s calculator in the basement) could be programmed with up to 64 steps, looping but not branching.  It had 2 "memory" registers, one of which was also an alternate accumulator that could be added to or subtracted from.  The regular accumulator could accept results of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  While "diamond" (common symbol on calculators at the time) would sum and retain the sum, "*" would sum and clear (to 0).  No, a numeric value could not be used instead of an operation step, but before starting the program, the calculator could have values manually loaded into the pair of memory registers and implicitly in the accumulator.

We (though maybe not Alex) had in the previous year taken a trimester of Computer Math (which was actually Fortran programming), and I'd taken a liking to the subject.  We had a keypunch machine in the Arts Dept. bldg., and sent the cards to Manhattan College to run the programs.  On my own, I read of a simple algorithm to generate pseudorandom numbers, which was to square a large integer, then truncate equally the high- and low-order digits to generate the next number.  If you wind up generating 0000, you're screwed, but otherwise it's not bad.  I used that algorithm as the basis of my Monrobot program.  I had to use some tricks to do the truncation, since it treated data as 8 sig-dig floating-point exponential.  To produce a "1", I divided the contents of a register by itself; to produce a "0", I subtracted a value from itself.  To generate a halt, I divided by the 0 so generated; I don't think I used that trick in this program, though.  It wound up taking up 63 of the spaces for the 64 programming steps.  Memory was volatile, so the program and its starting data had to be manually loaded every time.  It would accept a seed for the random number routine, and an integer for the upper limit to the random numbers, because whatever the routine generated would be printed out modulo that limit (i.e. 0 to n).

You're story reminds me of a professor I studied with who, before getting into academia, worked for NASA as one of the programmers of the Apollo 11 lunar lander. He used to blow our minds when he told us how little memory they had to work with for that task. They were still talking in word units back then but I think the total memory was equal to 2KB. Miniscule by today's standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

You might also find this man's stories entertaining, as he also started off programming calculators before there were home computers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjHC9hOhesE

ziznak

Quote from: Robert on April 25, 2016, 08:48:36 PM
For a long time, those fit uniformly badly.  Then at one company someone got the bright idea of making a mold of a woman's crotch.  Everyone in the industry had been too squeamish to do it previously.
hmmmm wonder what that job is like?... Vagina Mold Maker... could you then title your self a Vagina-ista or ... something fun with the word "vagina" in it?

BobGrau

Quote from: ziznak on April 26, 2016, 08:26:36 AM
hmmmm wonder what that job is like?... Vagina Mold Maker... could you then title your self a Vagina-ista or ... something fun with the word "vagina" in it?

If you wait long enough, pretty much any vagina can make mould.

Hog

Quote from: akwilly on April 24, 2016, 05:25:22 AM
I remember buying my mother maxi pads. They were the size of skateboards.
At one time, they required a belt to hold them in place, one end attached to the front of the belt, the opposite end attached at the back.

Those would be a bitch to get passed the TSA.

peace
Hog

Robert

Our keypunch had some primitive programming capability too.  No electronic memory to speak of, but the fields of the last card you punched could be read and then fed back with alteration (such as incrementing) to the card currently being punched.  That was intended to allow you to punch a numeric sequence in the first 6 rows, so that if anyone dropped a block of cards on the way to the computer and had to pick them up from the floor, they could be sorted.  However, the feedback thus allowed also made for other possibilities.

We still use mimeograph here in Japan,,, see we are not so evolved as you think and we do not have sex robots like I heard the other night

Quote from: Jinger Rat Snapps on May 02, 2016, 06:49:27 PM
We still use mimeograph here in Japan,,, see we are not so evolved as you think and we do not have sex robots like I heard the other night

Probably works great for printing up Sumo wrestler pamphlets and Rakugo pamphlets.

Robert

And yet, as you can see in the Windows 10 thread, Windows mystifies me.  But then, it's easier programming from scratch to a level you understand than it is to work with a program you had no hand in and does things of which you're dimly aware at best.

Powered by SMFPacks Menu Editor Mod