Jokes and Humor

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
FB_IMG_1615819277489.jpg


Jim
 
Yes Ben, I got to the end of the internet but that was when the internet wasn't up yet. I forget what they called it (linknet??) but at that time there only a few universities and colleges connected. At that time South Africa was the last spot on the net and I could only circle back from where I had been. I was using my TRS-80 that I bought in 77 or 78??? IBM compatibles were just becoming a thing. I waited for the 286 chips before changing over.
 
Neb said:
Yes the days before browsers...

We would ftp an index of websites and look for interesting documents then ftp the file to read and then ftp our replies.

I was gifted a Unix system 4 manual when the AT&T system manager retired. It had a chapter that spoke of dialing in and listed baud rates of 60... and some sites have a 1800 baud...

The book itself was a hardcopy of the "man" command.

I was working for DEC (DEC, Texas Instruments and Xerox invented Ethernet) and had access to the internet and VAX's to use as I chose.

Sea Story Time!

While working second shift for a couple years when my son was young, I would spend any time I was not out on a service request learning to program and use computers. A fellow engineer had figured out how to run a Star Trek game written for a pdp 11 in compatiblity mode on a VAX.

He asked"Ben, why do you waste your time studying that software stuff when you can play games?"

After a few minutes and fewer words I figured out what file was tracking his Star Trek game state, copied it to a safe space and captured another copy a few seconds later. After quick binary compare I located the offset of the"time remaining" value and changed it to "-1".

Copied my file over his and he never had a game timeout on him.

I skip other stories for now but do you remember the phrase;

I got to the end of the internet.

?

Ben
Click to expand...

I have problems wwith my lapyop, just learned how to use keyboard in 1998 to write email to son in Iraq. I was busy raising kids and helping to raise kids up till then.
 
SheepDog said:
Yes Ben, I got to the end of the internet but that was when the internet wasn't up yet. I forget what they called it (linknet??) but at that time there only a few universities and colleges connected. At that time South Africa was the last spot on the net and I could only circle back from where I had been. I was using my TRS-80 that I bought in 77 or 78??? IBM compatibles were just becoming a thing. I waited for the 286 chips before changing over.
Click to expand...
Trash 80s

I wrote a version of snakes to run on that.

Ben
 
We all did. I think that was part of the mandatory learning for motion. I also wrote an asteroids game and started my idea for "Time Space Cube" which ended up waiting for the 286 so I had enough room to build the program. That was the last text based RPG I ever wrote. When I finished it I was working in C on a 386 with 4 floppy drives, a Zip drive, two hard drives and 64 meg of RAM that I used as a drive to save parameters on. It turned into a behemoth and when I finally finished it all the RPG were visual and nobody was interested in a text base game. It had virtual intelligence to move if you waited too long, it was a non-repeating randomly generated 8x8x8 grid where a completed room vanished and the grid changed to cover the empty space. You couldn't pause the game, you couldn't map it, and the contents of the rooms and characters were all randomized at the beginning. If you reached the last room a blank room that if it was the only one you were presented with a question. If you learned what the game tried to teach then you knew how to win. If not you were forever lost in the time space cube. Of course it disappeared when you exited and then you got to start with a brand new game the next time. There was one cheat... If you got to the blank room before you emptied all the other rooms you could answer the question and win - whether it was the first room or the last but the question was only asked if the blank room was the last.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top