Just saw this at Neil Gaiman’s blog Nature of Infection it is an introduction he wrote for Dr. Who book a few years ago. I was never a big Dr Who fan and while I do remember watching a few episodes when I was a kid I don’t think I ever got the hang of what was going on. (for example I only learned a few years ago what the TARDIS was). But I do believe I undestand what Neil Gaiman is talking about.
And I may have my own infections.
Written by Carlos on May 18th, 2007 with no comments.
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I guess I’ve been asked this question a couple of times, but recently a friends daughter asked the question and I got me thinking about this. So I decided to write down the story. It will be long and maybe boring so I’ll split it up in a few parts.
On Christmas 1983 my parents gave me a Commodore 64 (C-64). I remember dreaming about having a computer, and even remember trying to save money to buy a Sinclair 1000 which cost about $100.00 but never managed to raise that much money. (I was a kid in a small town in Mexico).
I remember that getting the C-64 was a complete surprise, I don’t think I even thought the Commodore (around $300.00) was in my family’s price range. And usually big gifts were meant to be shared by my older brother and me , but in this case the gift was clearly for me.
My parents got just the Computer no cartridges or storage it was probably 9 months before I saved enough money to buy the Datassette (C-64 used a Tape drive to store programs, no HD back then) and probably about 2 years before I could afford the Disk Drive (1541) . This meant that for a while I had to leave the computer on for days at a time, and that a lot of the programs I wrote (or typed from magazines and books) were never saved once the computer was turned off the programs were gone. (sometimes it took me days to enter the programs into the computer).
I did not know anybody who owned a C-64 so I had to learn everything on my own. One of my friends had a TRS-80 CoCo and another had a VIC-20 a few more had Apple IIe’s and our school also got a couple of Apple IIes but it would be 3 or 4 years until I meet someone who also had a C-64. And since I had so little money to spend I could not afford to buy any of the cool games that where out there for it.
I spend all the money I got from my parents buying Commodore 64 books and computer magazines (Compute! Gazette and Compute! being my favorites)
In all the years I owned the C-64 I only purchased 1 Cartridge (Simons’ BASIC) and two Games (Top Gun and The Pawn) the rest of the programs (mostly games) I typed from books or magazines or I wrote myself.
I once wrote a program for my sisters birthday that played the happy birthday song with and an animated cake. On some of the books I had I found two programs, one that displayed a cake and one played the Happy birthday song. I basically put both of them together so that they would run at the same time, It was probably one of the first programs I ever wrote.
Another program I wrote was a horse racing game. I found a game in a book that allowed you to bet on a horse and then it would randomly select a winner I doubt it was more than 20-30 lines of code. I modified the code to show the top 3 horses and to actually draw the sprites of the horses running on the screen (each horse being a different color).
I had the Commodore 64 Programmer’s Reference Guide and The Second Book of Machine Language I had other programming books but i recall going back to these books over and over. It took me months to get LADS to work (the assembler from SBML) while it took me a few days to type all the assembly code it took me much longer to find all errors I had in the code.
I think I spent time playing on (or with) the C-64 for about 3 1/2 years. On 1986 I moved to different city to go to Highschool and I stayed with my Grandparents, and while I took the C-64 with me I did not have a TV that I could use as a monitor so the C-64 was used very little. I did get a job and eventually managed to save enough money to buy a TV and Floopy Drive for the C-64. But I did no longer wrote programs. It was around this time here that I meet someone else who owned a C-64 and he I was finally able to play the games I had read about for years since he had a large collection of games and no longer used them. I have fond memories of spending hours playing Zork II and M.U.L.E. probably 5-6 years after they were famous.
To be continued…..
Written by Carlos on May 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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More Eye candy, Tobe sent me a link to Electric Sheep it is a video screen saver that is generated by harnessing the computing power of idle computers all over the world(similar to the SETI@Home project)
The program is named for Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which is loosely the basis of the Movie Blade Runner
Note: it takes a few minutes to run the first time you load it. But it is definitely worth the wait, a broadband connection is recommended.
Found this video on Youtube that was generated with electric sheep.
Written by Carlos on May 8th, 2007 with no comments.
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Ran into this the other day XaoS is a very impressive dynamic Fractal zoomer. XaoS also has a very cool tutorial/help system that explains what fractals are and how to use the program. Very easy to navigate and some of the included example are truly breathtaking. The program is very easy to use (Right click Zoom out, Left click Zoom in, Middle button drag) and has a ton of options and effects.
I used to play with Fractint way back and got close to doing my masters thesis on fractals. But have not kept up with it. I’m kind of sad to realize that the last version of Fractint was released on 9/9/99 much too long ago.
Here is a video of the deep zoom of the Mandelbrot set I’m not sure what program they used (XaoS , Fractint or something else)
Written by Carlos on May 7th, 2007 with no comments.
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I just ran into Astro Shorts a video hosting site (a Youtube for astronomy geeks). Has a lot of interesting videos (from NASA and other space).
Found this video called Powers of Ten. Starting at normal scale and then it will zoom out 10 times each 10 seconds, and then it zooms in to the sub atomic level.
Which reminded me of Nikon UniverScale , Hopefully it helps in puting things in their proper perspectives.
Written by Carlos on May 3rd, 2007 with no comments.
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