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Today I discovered an absolute gem from the past.
If you were around in 1984 you might have been super awesome and played core wars.
Core Wars is a programming game in which two or more programs run in a simulated computer with the goal of terminating every other program and surviving as long as possible. Known as Warriors, these programs are are written in an assembly language called Redcode.
Basically it's Counter-Strike/COD for programmers where you can fight in a team team, as a free-for-all, or one-vs-one.
What other cool things from the past might us youngun programmers have missed or not have an appreciation of?
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(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday October 25 2014, @07:59AM
Pretty much the entire "new frontiers"-era of computing..
But more specificially - soldering experience, making your own hardware, the entire demoscene, bbs:es, the day when it only took a week to get fully working and usable software.
Or at least those are the things I managed to glean from my older peers or had very brief forays into.
To elaborate a bit:
Soldering experience/Making your own hardware - Today just try to design a basic robot, and then somehow make it communicate with your computer (a usb-rs232 dongle is great for such things), however today it actually is harder to code for serial use than it used to be (at least on x86).
The Demoscene - This is threefold: in part it was to just come up with new ways to show off effects, in part it was about effeciency (slower computers make you more aware of just how many cycles you waste), and in part just to have fun with other geeks (even if it just was sitting and trying to explain an effect to someone coding in another language after you have been up for 48hours). Just for fun find a couple of friends/colleges and agree on that you will meet up in - say - two weeks for an evening of showing effects you have coded (specificy the computer running the demo precisly - and for each meetup go for a more primitive computer or limit something (ie: max size of binary, no specific libraries allowed, only single thread, run dosbox at a given cyclecount and limit people to that and so forth).
BBS:es/Writing useful software - There was something about these that caused a lot of people to at least write a basic terminal-program or bbs-software themselves, also was quite common for people to write their own drivers for communicating with the rs232 (or their own FOSSIL-driver). it still is great coding experiences (pick up a pi (so it doesn't matter if it gets rootet) and write your own telnet-bbs).
(Also, with regards to useful software - just try to write your own text-editor, and try to do it by handling as much as possible yourself and not relying on libs, it will force you to comtemplate how to solve lots of issues you've never thought of)
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday October 25 2014, @02:09PM
The demoscene is still going strong. One of my favorite examples is Reum Zeit by Subdream [youtube.com] which is a Mandelbrot octree renderer synchronized with a thumping eurotechno soundtrack.
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