You can actually play Habitat today. Randy Farmer, one of the developers, has an open source project called Neohabitat that has preserved the game. http://neohabitat.org/
This was brought back to working order with the help of Randy, Chip, Mist64, StuBlad, McMartin, and some other folks who hacked away until it was brought back to working order. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (themade.org) undertook this work as the first ever institutional preservation of an MMO, and everything was accomplished for $0. The MADE is about to collaborate again with Randy and Chip on preserving Electric Communities, EC Habitat, and the Palace. The Museum has acquired legal waivers to begin this preservation project, and will undertake a hack-day on site January 13, 2024. Join us and help bring back history!
Yes indeed. It's sources are already in a private GitHub repo, we just need to prune copyrighted things like fonts and libraries so we can open source it. That'll start in January.
Note that Randy Farmer is now the CEO of Spritely Institute, which is taking the lessons from Habitat and other work and applying them into the modern networking and social media context: https://spritely.institute/
O, this show, basically the Forrest Gump story of computing in the 80's/90's: the main cast somehow is a significant part or straight out inventors of every piece of technology of that timeframe: on-line gaming, social networking, online marketplace, dot com.
The acting is.. interesting: Lee Pace trying to channel Don Draper,
Scoot McNairy being Scoot, Kerry Bishé just doing a bit of over-acting
and Mackenzie Davis, well, she's cool.
Loved to hate that show in the first run.
Then streamed it 4 more times (playing in the background, but still): the accuracy of depiction of technology, startup issues regarding funding, liaisons and other ups and downs, personalities
in tech: thumbs up.
HACF is probably the most criminally underrated show in recent television history. Yeah the basic premise might be a Mad Men tech rehash, and yeah you kind of have to endure season 1 before you get to the good part, but the characters are so wonderfully crafted that I still think about them >5 years after watching it.
In the first season I thought "Oh, this company is supposed to be Compaq?" but then realized Compaq was one of many companies that all got the exact same idea at the exact same time. After that realization I saw the characters and their projects as tragic also-rans with a series of near-successes.
The first season was the weakest. Seasons 2-4 are some of the best television ever IMHO. Once they stopped trying to make it Mad Men with tech, they freed themselves up to succeed.
I liked the first season because the relationship between Joe and Gordon was realistic -- it was basically the relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Joe, like Jobs, was a slick charismatic character with little technical skill who piggybacks on the work of Gordon, as Jobs did Wozniak. The later seasons about Mutiny seemed to happen in a fantasy world that didn't really reflect the reality of the 1980s tech world despite the superficial resemblance of Mutiny to Habitat.
Sure, but, the relationship was symbiotic as it didn't seem that Gordon would have been able to build "the Giant" (PC) or other substantial project without the vision, push and the acquired funding (at ANY cost) from Joe.
This too (and I know I'll get flack for this one) seemed to be the case with Jobs and Wozniak, Wozniak is an undisputed genius on both hard and software level but Silicon Valley had and has very smart engineers, it was the two of them that were needed to make the magic happen.
The writing through the first season was pretty good, but also pretty mixed.
The general technology/corporate story arcs were pretty great, but a lot of the scenes they wrote for Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) were atrocious. The writers basically kept changing his fundamental character traits every episode. Lee's a great actor and did the best anyone realistically could with the material, but it was a complete mess in terms of the writers introducing constant character whiplash. And then the way Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) was written as a romantic arc with him, I'm not sure anybody could have cared less if they wound up together or not, or never talked again the rest of their lives.
I've heard the fourth season is spectacular, and I'd like to get back to it someday, but the first season really wasn't strong enough to keep a lot of viewers, including myself.
> You felt let down by what is generally considered one of the best written shows of the 2010s?
By “generally” I’m guessing you just mean yourself?
I thought the writing was pretty weak. They kept falling back on silly tropes to force some drama into the show rather than letting the subject matter itself be the drama. It very much felt like they “jumped the shark” right from the very first episode.
Very few of those characters were believable, let alone likeable.
I do agree season 4 is better, but and the reason why is because the dialled it back on the writing and focused a lot more on the characters. Which is what they should have done from the start.
The writing for me felt a lot more like they didn’t have confidence that the subject matter is interesting enough on its own. Which is a sign of bad writing, not good writing.
That all said, there were some good moments. But on the whole it just wasn’t great. However there isn’t many shows based around this subject so I guess some geeks try to convince themselves that the show was better than it actually was. But each to their own I guess
It’s generally well regarded. Here’s a recent list (4 Oct 2023) by The Hollywood Reporter that puts it in their top 50 of the 21st century so far (#17).
It felt like a soap opera that just happened to take place around 3 decades of computing. The characters were all mary sues that just magically had whatever attributes were needed at the moment. I was half expecting someone's evil twin to come out at some point.
I don't know what 'dog-whistle insults' even means in this case; but ignoring that, I thought the show sucked, too.
In my case I think it's an aversion to specialized marketing. I hated Silicon Valley, too; I think it's a lack of distance from the topic which makes me overthink the thing rather than just having fun with the story.
But with HACF I didn't just dislike the topic, I thought the acting was corny and stiff and I thought that the characters were unmotivated throughout the thing, with motivation being replaced with pseudo-historical anecdote. I thought the actors were poorly cast, and I feel like they did a bad job 'convincing' me of anything.
"Of course they're doing the thing, that's who Z is!" isn't compelling enough for me to enjoy it and suspend my real personality from interjecting criticism during the watch.
But who cares what I think : i've been out of lock-step with the crowd for a few years w.r.t. media consumption. Amazon/Netflix/Disney/whoever, AMC in this case shouldn't be considering what I think when toting their bags of money to the bank.
Personally I bounced off it pretty hard halfway through the first season. I really wanted to like it because of the subject matter but I found all the characters very unlikeable and unsympathetic. I didn’t find myself caring whether any of them succeeded.
I felt the first season primarily mimicked The Soul of a New Machine. Taken from that angle, I found it quite good.
Amusingly, when I read that book, I mistook it for fiction. Kidder's narrative non-fiction style was so detailed I assumed it couldn't have been from notes or interviews.
My thoughts exactly as I was reading the publication. Also, had an instant flashback to the girls buying dubious XT machines off of the back of some shady truck!
Along these lines, my co-founder worked with Spielberg on an early virtual world for children with chronic diseases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbright_World. I'd be shocked if they didn't use some of these lessons from the Lucas ecosystem.
This was later adapted into Club Caribe for Q-Link. I regard it as deeply unfair that only those of us born in a brief window of history got to experience the pure magic this represented at the time. It lit up areas of the imagination like nothing before or since.
No offense to its visionary creators, but to be candid, Club Caribe and Habitat were unappealing to me as a teen, kinda dull in the same way bad VR experiences are to this day. Skimming the paper, it was indeed mostly for the reason highlighted at the top of the paper, I didn’t have great interactions when I visited. The tech alone wasn’t of interest for more than 5 minutes. Straight up text message boards on a topic of interest were better.
The one cool thing from QLink that I miss was chat rooms where the host could control a MIDI playlist taken from endless archives of such things which played in the background while you (text) chatted. I never saw that imitated in the internet era which I always thought was a bit of a shame. Shared discovery, sharing, affinity for music, now there was an enhancement to the otherwise silent experience of BBS-dom. I consider the loss of that capability a sad victim of the MPAA/Napster/RIAA wars. I still think there’s a Spotify/competitor feature hidden there…
Even if you were there at the time and had the equipment, don’t forget how expensive it was for someone to get on the service. I think it’s one of the main reasons (local) BBSes caught on: it was something to do with your $200 1200 bps modem that didn’t cost much
Even relatively local BBSs could rack up the phone charges if you didn't have a very local dial-in. Intra-state long distance wasn't necessarily much cheaper than interstate.
But the hourly charges by a service like Compuserve, especially at higher bit rates, were a lot.
My grandpa disowned me after running up $300 on qlink and another $300 in phone charges to BBSes when I was 12. I talked to him briefly on the phone twice after that in the next decade or so before he died and he never got over it.
Gibson is of two minds about this. He's said he's bemused when people come up to him at a book signing thanking him for inspiring them to get into computing as a career (seemingly ignoring the problems of Neuromancer's future), but on the other hand he's said that people who say Neuromancer was dystopian forget that most SF writers in the 1980s doubted that there would be a 21st century society rather than a radioactive wasteland, so from that perspective Neuromancer was optimistic.
Chip was the first real software engineering mentor I ever had. He taught me about simplicity and the importance of getting software to work first and foremost.
He also imparted the sage wisdom that premature optimization is the root of all evil.
What amazed me is that they were able to cram a graphical client into a Commodore 64. Now that was a cram job. I could see doing the world on minicomputer servers, but the client!
Those early 2D metaverses not only predate the consumer Internet, they predate AOL.
They were all superseded by things that looked more like the early web.
Round 2 of that was when 3D Second Life was overtaken by mostly-text Facebook.
Recently we had the Web 3 "metaverse" debacle. You can build it, but will they come?
These things are fun, but they're a niche, like games.
It let users create and upload content like text and pictures, so it had a nice image uploader component and content management system.
That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo bought.
Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun stuff.
My company makes us use slack - started during lockdown - as an electron app. I don't know it's history or its user culture, but for me it has been a wretched experience all around and I wish we'd have just stuck with email, or jabber or whatever. Slack has a faux corporate friendliness that makes me feel like I'm in some corporate "we're having fun and a potentially pizza" dental appointment with a therac-25 rigged to make X-rays on flayed kittens. I don't ever want my software to say "oops" and I certainly don't want my business software to offer more ways to "engage" with irrelevant content.
Glitch was really fun! My wife and I still joke about "Yellow Crumbs" every so often. I'm really pleased to see our profiles are still hosted on the website[0] in perpetuity. Was nice to see all my shared screenshots are still up on there... awesome :)
“You can build it, but will hundreds of millions of users come instantaneously in desired markets and earn billions in high margin ways with minimal support costs and in a way that is preferred by the majority shareholder?”
Success exists outside the success criteria of Google and Meta.
> Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive -- some would say "toy" -- home computer to support user interaction
> There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology -- developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64
The authors seem to have some opinions on the venerable C64.
I happened to note the use of the term "avatar" to refer to players' in-game representation. This pre-dates the 1992 date cited by the Online Etymological Dictionary (based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). I'm curious if there are earlier references which might exist, either up to the game's introduction in 1985 or perhaps even earlier still?
Wow it was way ahead of its time! While we now have many online virtual worlds, Habitat did it when the internet itself was still in its infancy. It laid the foundation for many of the online multiplayer games and virtual spaces we see today.
The real lesson is that the game media/medium does not lend itself to linear stories inherited from TV, that inherited from film, that inherited from theater.
Games should only be multiplayer. Real-time action multiplayer.
And they should NEVER have cutscenes.
They also can't have music (except live) because 3D sound is paramount.
And they should be open-source or source-available so we can improve and modify them.
Habitat said all that and I think the article didn't but... you know... down votes without comment incoming!
Linear things destroy your mind, because you become a passive consumer.
Producing is the only meaningful purpose in existence, but not for someone else, for yourself.
Now it's too late, people are used to sitting on their ass and be entertained and pay for that by "working" for an "owner". Down votes without comment!
Get off that couch and into a chair with a keyboard and mouse, then download a compiler and get cracking! It's not hard once you figure out that only Windows and linux can do it. And only linux on Risc-V is meaningful in the long term.
We only explored 10% of the action MMO so far, PUBG has been the limit with it's janky controls and buggy/slow performance.
Imagine a 1000 player 3D Mario, it's totally doable. Just do it!
> People expect comments to not be a personal take?
Some comments are factual; corrections, links, additional information, etc.
But people do expect HN to be polite, and "that's your personal take" is the polite way to say "you're a loony ideologue who sees everything through bi-color (BW) lens".
I did work on that in 99-01, so much has happened since then. Have you done anything else than protocols? We failed spectacularly.
Massive Multiplayer is hard to do research on, you can not whip something up and have 20k players evaluate it for you. Just getting 10 people to consistently test something is hard. I guess we could work on improving the MP of generic games like Minecraft/Minetest and skip the game logic.
Though they may look similar, overlapped in developement, shared key staff and infrastructural pieces, Maniac Mansion and Habitat had very different renderers and user interfaces.
MM used sprites for animating characters (severely limiting the number in a location at once) and it used characterset remapping for scrolling backgrounds and magic slipping maps to provide a sense of depth.
Habitat was a 2.5d renderer where every forground object was seperately rendered each frame and every background object was rendered each state-change. Any objects could be in front/behind any other objects at any time. Sprites in Habitat were used only for UI elements: The speach-bubble "quip" and the proto-pie-menu/cursor for commands.
Huh, I always figured they shared a lot more underlying tech based on the images I've seen! Especially given that I remember hearing the maximum number of avatars in a single location was eight. My entire experience with it was like a half an hour looking over the shoulder of someone logged into Club Caribe and various magazine articles, though.
