LRT: Computers were invented for exactly two reasons: 1. To kill Nazis 2. To play tennis
And for most of their lifetime, we had run out of nazis
You could argue that the LRT implies it's actually three reasons, with "play Star Trek Games" being #3, but don't let's be silly.
Even Spacewar, the quintessential "first game" of space combat, predates Star Trek.
I'd argue that tennis is actually reason #3 and #2 is "be gay, do crimes"
But someone asked Turing "but Al, what are you gonna do after your 'compu-tor' device kills all the Nazis?"
Alan Turing, visibly sweating: "uhhh.... play tennis?"
"be gay, do crimes" was a lot easier in 1944 because being gay was itself a crime. It really cut out the middleman.
BTW, to address the joke about it not being based on star trek: it was actually mainly inspired by the Lensman & Skylark novels by E. E. Smith... And Japanese Tokusatsu films, like Godzilla?!
There's an alternative universe where he went mainly in on the Tokusatsu element and one of the first major computer games was Godzilla vs Gamera.
The shmup is set back decades, the fighting game becomes a critical part of video game history.
Instead of Space Invaders being a big milestone in gaming, it's the 1978 version of Street Fighter II, with little monochrome Ryus throwing beepy Shoryukens
I climb the Maida Vale mountain (in the center of London) and at the top, the clouds part and the voice of Charlton Heston speaks out, telling me to bring the law to the people.
"God?", I ask, eyes closed to not go blind from the magnificence.
"No, it's Alan Turing".
Short later I walk back to the people, who are (of course) making gold calves. You can't climb a mountain without everyone freaking out and deciding to get into making bovines out of precious metals. It's a real problem at the Everest base camp, I hear.
My hair's gone grey, my voice shakes, but I yell at the people for their bovine blacksmithery, and reveal the four holy commandments of Our Father Of Computing, Alan Turing:
1. Kill Nazis 2. Be gay 3. Play tennis 4. Enjoy Sci-fi
Really this is a decent basis for a worldview and guideline for life. It covers a lot of the bases, you know?
You gotta fight fascists when you find them. Explore your gender and sexuality. Stay active and make friends in the community. Believe in the future and the possibilities to make a world that's better and bigger.
BRB calling my agent to see if I can get a publisher to give me an advance on "The Turing Bible"
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It's a game where you have monster figurines fighting each other. Looks fun, I never got into it, because I burnt myself on Pokémon trading cards back in the day so I don't touch collecting games.
But it's a collectable game, that's the key thing: you buy blind boxes, and get random monsters.
It's similar to how Magic The Gather works with the booster packs, right?
stupid idea: A small 16bit DOS program that reads every sector of the hard drive in increasing order, and displays it on screen, in MDA or CGA 80x25 mode.
a sector is 512 bytes, so a 32x16 (plus another line for metadata) display can show the whole thing, and fits in any mode
and the purpose is: it's a stupid way to get data out of a PC.
Doesn't have serial? floppy? parallel? network? SCSI? modem? WHO CARES
if it has a display that do either of the basic IBM PC text formats, you can exfiltrate data by recording the screen with a camera
the main problem is that some of these characters look like each other which is going to make OCRing them off the screen not fun
So the latest LGR Blerbs episode is on the Keypatch AT, an interesting mid-80s device to add functionality to early PC keyboards. I was thinking I had another model of Keypatch and I thought I should go pull it out of storage...
It turns out, NOPE! What I have is a CXI Keyboard MATE, which is clearly a similar device, but not a Keypatch.
Keyboard MATE. I don't know why all of "MATE" is in uppercase. It's got the same set of scroll lock/num lock/caps lock indicators like the keypatch
Shout out to Google, one of the biggest software companies in the world, who can't properly size their buttons, so the "Download" button turns into "Down...ding" when you click it.
There are only three real problems in computer science: 1. Naming things 2. Cache invalidation 3. UI layout
really?
after not having seen my doctor all of 2020 and so far in 2021, you're gonna open up with THIS QUESTION?
I understand why they ask these questions but, like, I've got insomnia and ADHD and I'm on a bunch of stimulants and I've got digestive issues. they're basically asking "are you still foone?" [yes] [no]
the last one is especially annoying because I have poor apatite every day. but I'm pretty sure my psychiatrist isn't really worried about that, because I'm not forgetting to eat because I'm depressed, it's because PART OF MY DIGESTIVE SYSTEM IS MISSING