
TetrisRant (1999) - farazzz
https://tcrf.net/The_New_Tetris
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lubujackson
Love the "crashing game is a secret not a bug" solution at the end too!

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Crinus
Yeah i remember reading something similar about a DOS game where the game was
crashing when you exited and the developers hexedited the DOS extender to
replace the crash message from 'Protection fault at blah' (or something like
that) to 'Thank you for playing the game' (or something like that) :-P.

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pjc50
"Thank you for playing Wing Commander"

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t0mbstone
Entertaining read! Kind of like a time capsule revealing what was going
through their heads at the time. From reading it, it's pretty clear that
shrooms and weed were heavily involved in the culture there at H2O.

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nmeofthestate
Damn, they come across as angry teenagers with supercar posters on their
bedroom walls.

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jkoudys
Some are good, but that Lupin guy... geez. I'd like to think I'm a lot less
elitist than I was when I was so (I assume) young, but he comes across a bit
"racisist" himself.

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ashleyn
This is an interesting snapshot of how racism seemed to be viewed at the time.
Reading this I get the impression that bemoaning black women's hair seemed to
be A-OK as long as you called her "african american". Can you imagine the
recall that would happen today if this leaked out?

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iforgotpassword
Rom dumping and illegal distribution was already going back than. If I
understand this correctly this was not obfuscated in any way and located near
the end of the rom. Fan translations of Japanese NES games should also have
been around by 99, so people already fiddled with those dumps. So I'm a bit
baffled by the intro text claiming the dev didn't expect anyone to find this
for a long time.

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umvi
I loved The New Tetris - specifically the power block mechanic (if you create
a 4x4 square out of assorted tetrominos you make a silver power block, if you
create a 4x4 square out of the same tetrimino you make a gold power block). I
keep hoping we will see power blocks come back in newer Tetris games...

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jkoudys
I'm making a trello card with a "reach goal" of saving things in 8.4 bits
right now.

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Thorrez
>25] Web pages that pop open other pages and windows and then disable your
'back' button.

I guess the web hasn't changed that much after all in 20 years.

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codesushi42
Right, but even worse since we didn't have multi tab browsers yet.

So much usage of early JS on the web was simply malicious, and JS had a bad
reputation for years. Many would even disable JS completely.

Amazing how AJAX was able to save JS on the web.

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isolli
How did AJAX save JS? I would be interested in reading about that!

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codesushi42
Mainly because updating a page without a refresh was novel. Then developers
began exploring how they could manipulate the page in response, using the DOM.

The need for DOM manipulation led to a lot of early JS frameworks--
scriptaculous, then eventually YUI and jQuery afterwards. The explosion of
clientside code in the browser also led to the V8 engine; before that, JS was
far too slow for web apps to seriously compete with desktop apps.

But before all of that, JS was hated by both end users and developers. It did
not have much use outside of dropdown navigation, image maps, and plenty of
malicious (or at least annoying) client-side hacks (alert box spamming,
popups, disabled back buttons, etc). It was not uncommon for users to have JS
completely disabled. You needed to design sites knowing some significant
percentage of users could not run your JS.

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fps_doug
The improvements in JS performance over time is crazy.

I was an Opera user (started with 5.x IIRC) and its JS engine was pretty slow.
I mean so slow that even in the early 2000s some pages with just a few
animations were annoying to use and better viewed in IE.

Then at some point they rewrote the engine from scratch and also implemented
JIT compilation to machine code. Opera might even have been the first browser
to do so. After that it was lightning fast, ahead of IE, Firefox and Chrome
before Blink/V8. If you use the last Presto Build of Opera today, those pages
that still manage to render at all and use heavy JS are painfully sluggish,
close to unusable.

Opera's JS engine rewrite felt like performance was suddenly IE times 10. Now
it feels like Chrome/Firefox are Opera Presto times 100.

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codesushi42
Wow. Just wow. What it must have been like to be a coder in the 90s. Your job
was your hobby.

Now the industry is full of crap kids who only studied CS for the money. But
the truly gifted engineers are the passionate ones who live and breathe the
craft.

Much respect for this time capsule.

~~~
codesushi42
I found out that the author died only two years later in 2001, and was only
29. Very sad.

