
John Carmack on hacking Doom and Quake (.plan file from 1998) - mace
http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_1998.html#d19980204
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johnyzee
He mentions going away to stay at a hotel for a week doing research (only
leaving to get diet coke). That sounds pretty cool, does anyone have more
information about that?

I remember reading a similar thing about Bill Gates checking into a hotel and
disconnecting the phone for a couple of days to finish MS DOS before the IBM
deadline or something like that. Are hotels the dirty little secret to hacker
greatness?

Also, what was the 'trinity' game he was working on at that time? I have never
heard of it.

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pushingbits
Steve Yegge, too:

"I've often idly wondered what the ideal innovation environment is. I know
it's not at home -- staying up all night just to get some free time for
innovation doesn't scale well when you have a family and a day job. Home has
its share of distractions. And I know it's not in the office, at least not the
space we're in today.

Every time I let my thoughts wander on this subject, the same vision comes to
mind. I'm sitting in a comfortable armchair, in a large room or atrium that's
lit primarily by daylight coming through large windows. There are nice green
plants everywhere, including a large fern-ish looking tree (apologies; botany
has never been my strong subject) next to me. There are people coming and
going nearby, but their noise is white noise, and it's not terribly
distracting. I've been in this place a hundred times, in a hundred different
locations.

It's a hotel lobby."

<http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/innovation-101>

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barrkel
Funny. The primary things that come to my mind when I think of hotel lobbies
are: drafts, uncomfortable laptop wrangling, competition for power outlets,
and a vague wish that the maid service would just hurry up already so I could
get back into my room.

To me, hotels are a form of hell. The more expensive the room is, the more
expensive everything else is, and in particular the less likely that wifi is
free. A moment that sticks out: I recall a 400 GBP (800+ USD equivalent at the
time) laundry bill - bank paid, not out of pocket, but it was still an
eyebrow-raiser.

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ivenkys
This "I wind up catagorizing periods of my life by how rich my learning
experiences were at the time." is the true definition of a hacker.

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xal
I often lament the fact that the .plan format isn't credited more often as the
original blogging format. Finger and .plan was very common before 2000,
especially in the game industry and lots of hackers build their own
aggregators for it.

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johnyzee
Man. One moment he is donating an old Unix box to a local hacker or rambling
about obscure details of contemporary graphics cards, the next he is comparing
his F50 to his custom built TVR.

Now I know where the term 'rock star programmer' came from.

~~~
aaronz3
Not TVR, TR = Testarossa

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aaronz3
I enjoyed the drag strip stories more than any of it...

