The children's maths/puzzle book "Nut-Crackers" (John Jaworski and Ian Stewart, 1971) had a slide rule printed at the back of the book - two strips each numbered 1-50 - to cut out and try out.
The authors commented "If you get really interested you can make much more accurate slide rules, or you can buy them for about £1." I fear not any more...
I too had a small web site with M4 around 1999/2000. Why M4? Because I'd learned enough of it to be useful/dangerous when wrestling with Sendmail, and it seemed to do the trick (at least when the trick was simply "be easier than manually editing lots of HTML files every time there's a site-wide change").
I suspect I was never doing anything complicated enough to encounter the gotchas mentioned by other commenters...
OMG all of the times I had to refer to that book count as amoung the worst times of my unix life. That is the Unix equivalent of a book of black magic that will forever curse your life once you dare to dip into it. Thank goodness I discovered qmail before too much damage was done.
Early in my career I came across an article that ended "If you want to make a lot of money as a consultant you could do a lot worse than rolling up your sleeves and getting a solid understanding of sendmail".
I don't think there's many. A bunch of the very large sendmail installs that I know about went to qmail pretty much straight away and the ones that remained were mostly people where were concerned about the fact that djb hadn't been at all clear about the terms of the qmail license. When exim was released they pretty much all migrated. It wasn't that long after that when linux distros started shipping with postfix so you're talking an extreme minority of boxes (machines which haven't been upgraded for 20 years, probably don't run linux, probably don't run any very high-traffic mail installation).
The thing is the stuff that used to be total black magic on sendmail (address rewriting, setting routes up etc) is all pretty straightforward on any of those other mail systems, so I'm struggling to see why you would keep a sendmail install around. If someone called me in to help them with their sendmail, pretty much step 0 would be to uninstall sendmail, install a reasonable MTA and go from there.
Sendmail seems to be a weird state of limbo. On the one hand their homepage still lists Usenet as the place to go for support and questions. On the other hand their latest release is from June of the year.
I get the feeling that are maybe 5 huge sendmail users still out there somewhere that still pay for support contracts and that is just about enough to pay for someone to turn out regular updates. But beyond that they have reconciled themselves with the fact that they are never getting any new users.
Usenet never went anywhere...You should try it :))
I virtually lived on Usenet between roughly 1996-2006 and hung around a bit for a couple more years after that. I can assure you that Usenet definitely went somewhere. Even by 2005 Usenet felt pretty deserted by everybody other than the warez scene.
I will concede however that I haven't logged onto an NNTP server for probably a decade, so perhaps Usenet has had a resurgence without anyone telling me.
(Personally I grew up on the British early 1980s Usborne BASIC programming books, now wonderfully available at https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books . My copy of "Computer Battlegames" - which I'd arbitrarily picked in the bookshop over "Computer Spacegames" - was the closest to the classic "BASIC Computer Games", which I never came across - not sure if it was more a US thing.)
Ahl's collection is more diverse: it has battle games, board games, sports simulations, economic simulations, even rudimentary demoeffects ("Sine Wave").
One of the variants of the Football (American football) game called "FTBALL" is particularly intriguing; you will notice that the playable team is Dartmouth. This game is traceable back to Dartmouth College, where and when BASIC was first developed by Kemeny and Kurtz. It was, as I recall, originally written by members of the Dartmouth football team as a way to have a bit of fun. The idea that someone who wasn't a scientist, engineer, or professional programmer could program a computer to some non-tech, non-business purpose was a huge mind blow at the time, and a major contributor to BASIC's enduring popularity.
I still have one IP address lodged in my memory from 25+ years ago - sable, the university's key Unix server for students, on which I learned so much about Unix and the 1990s Internet.
(I'm not sure if I'd faced DNS issues that meant I needed to know that - but it was a time when dialup ISPs told you what to manually configure for your DNS rather than it being automatically assigned, so it all seemed a bit chunkier.)
Interesting to see here how different people discover Bruegel... I did so through Michael Frayn's entertaining "Headlong", a caper about an academic unsuited to subterfuge who thinks he's discovered a masterpiece. (Some of the Goodreads reviews are less favourable on the slabs of research which the author provides - I found it interesting but admittedly have forgotten much of it since reading the novel many years ago...)
The BBC Microcomputer had an "Escape" key and a potentially misleadingly named "Break" key - but "Break" was actually more like a reset key (with CTRL-Break being a "harder" reset and SHIFT-Break prompting the computer to boot off a floppy disk).
But one nice feature was that if you were simply programming in BASIC and immediately typed OLD after hitting "Break", you had a chance of recovering your program if you weren't unlucky.
And the other feature which this comment reminded me of - at least some models of the BBC Micro had a hardware lock on the "Break" key, so with a small screwdriver you could turn a little piece of plastic to completely prevent the key being pressed!
(Prompted by a remark from one poster here that people don't comment much on blogs much nowadays...) What are people's views on how important having comment functionality on a blog is?
I have a low-readership blog published with a static site generator and without comments (I had instead invited comments on Twitter) - so it's been a potential to-do to add a comments solution but I always wonder if it's worthwhile.
For some data on the game size (based on my implementation and analysis of a BBC BASIC four-room game "MINI" which I referenced in another comment and won't self-promotionally spam again...)
The source code for MINI weighs in at 4.6 K, saved in the tokenised form used by BBC BASIC.
In comparison, the Inform 7 source is around 3.3K in size. But that isn’t executable - it can be run in Inform 7, or it can be compiled into a “story file”, of which Inform 7 supports two formats. In the older, more portable, Z-Code format, I got a blorb (package) of 406 K; in the newer, more sophisticated Glulx format, I got a blorb of 602 K.
And to actually play the story file, you need an interpreter - for example, Windows Glulxe, an interpreter for (as the observant reader might guess) playing Glulx story files under Windows, is a further 275 K. Inform 7 can also produce a story file and bundled Javascript interpreter for a version playable in a web browser: for MINI, this bundle weighs in at 1.1 MB.
For 8 bit computers I'd use Puny Inform. Much easier to develop and the resulting ZMachine V3 file will run everywere. Even on Game Boys and PostScript interpreters.
I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers, and I learned a lot about programming Acorn computers from Peter Killworth's "How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron". So to give Inform 7 a try, I implemented the mini four-room adventure from that book, and wrote a walk-through of how to do it quite neatly with the building blocks of Inform 7 here in case anyone's interested: https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-adventure-in-inform...
> In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers
Indeed. Adventure games were the most sophisticated games around. Companies like Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls ruled the roost. Teenagers like myself aspired to one day work there, which for me was a major reason to go and study AI (which was mostly parsers and tree walks at the time).
And then along came iD software. One day I walked into the shared computer facility of my university and everybody was playing Castle Wolfenstein and I remember thinking: o shit...
Fortunately AI did not turn out to be such a bad choice after all.
The authors commented "If you get really interested you can make much more accurate slide rules, or you can buy them for about £1." I fear not any more...
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