> This is an artifact of BASIC. It doesn’t really have an effect in C#. In BASIC, just as in C#, the randomizer could have been initialized based off the system time. If that was not an option, they should have taken advantage of the instructions prompt.
User inputted seeds were in a lot of classic text based, randomly generated games - by sharing the seed with friends, you could play through exactly the same game and see who did it better. Multiplayer!
I like how he blindly assumes that there was a "system time", or that there was a way to asynchronously poll for keyboard input. At least on the Apple II I grew up with, timekeeping required third-party hardware, and the only way to get user-input without writing assembly was INPUT, which paused the program until the user typed something and hit Return.
User inputted seeds were in a lot of classic text based, randomly generated games - by sharing the seed with friends, you could play through exactly the same game and see who did it better. Multiplayer!