Watcha doing?

[ProDeo]

On one of hard disks I rediscovered a game I played ~12 years ago and also became popular by my grandchildren. It's a nice shooting game, good graphics, fun story and I started to play it again.

Story from the website -

Chickens. For centuries we have oppressed them, grilling, roasting, stewing, and stuffing them in buns. We should have known the time would come for us to pay. And it did.

Intergalactic chickens invaded Earth, seeking revenge for the oppression of their earthly brethren. They came out of nowhere, and everywhere. It was only you who managed to repel the invasion, and saved humanity from an eternity of servitude.

Then, things got serious. The intergalactic chickens assaulted the solar system and tried make sure that every planet was inhabited exclusively by chickens. Yet again, it was you who took the world's fate in your ketchup-stained hands and saved the day.

But it isn't over yet. Once more, it's time to don your non-stick egg-repulsing helmet and fight for our ancestral right to omelettes. Only you can make a difference. Will you succeed? Will the future of chicken burgers be secure? Or will you end up as part of the menu in a galactic chicken restaurant?

http://www.interactionstudios.com/ci3/careertable.php

After all these years I am still at place 6 as "opi", the pet name of my grandchildren.

[tango]

Ha, that reminds me of the time I resurrected an old computer so I could play Grand Theft Auto on it again. I honestly have no idea whether it would run on my current computer. I used to run it under Windows 98. It was kinda fun driving a tank around the town - it doesn't matter if the traffic ahead stopped when you're driving a tank, and if the police come out with a road block that doesn't matter either.

[Sojourner]

In the late 80's through the mid-90's, I was a fan of the King's Quest and Space Quest games. I had the entire series of Roger Wilco adventures, and it was quite a transition from the cheesy graphics of Space Quest 1 and 2  to the more sophisticated versions (by 90's standards). Nostalgic stuff.

[Sojourner]

I played the games on my first computer: a Tandy 3000 NL that Radio Shack foisted on me. That baby had a massive 40 Mb hard drive and a 286 processor that screamed along at a blazing 12 MHz. In that pre-Windows era, I learned to get things done using MS-DOS commands. The technology then seems comical by today's standards.

[tango]

I played the games on my first computer: a Tandy 3000 NL that Radio Shack foisted on me. That baby had a massive 40 Mb hard drive and a 286 processor that screamed along at a blazing 12 MHz. In that pre-Windows era, I learned to get things done using MS-DOS commands. The technology then seems comical by today's standards.

40MB hard drive? Newfangled nonsense....

It seems comical to compare technology then to now but back then if you wrote software you had to do it properly. You couldn't just assume you could take up as much disk space as you wanted, you couldn't assume there would be enough memory, and you had to contain bloated code or it wouldn't run.

[Cloudwalker]

Waiting for the mechanics to finish with my car.

[tango]

On the topic of hard drives I added another dead one to my collection. It was a 250GB parallel ATA drive that was once hosted in a simple NAS. Now most of it is in the trash, the magnets are stuck to an old water pipe and the platters are mixed up with the platters from some other drives. I keep thinking there's some scope to do something cool with a bunch of old hard drive platters but I'm not sure quite what.

Having passed the strong magnets over the platters several times and then mixed them all up I'm confident the data is mangled.

[Sojourner]

In a few years, such platters will be little more than relics of the past. I've always been fascinated by computer technology, and am amazed by the pace at which it's advancing. The computational power of CPU's and the capacity of hard drives has proliferated exponentially to bring us to the era of the supercomputer, and the crown jewel known as the Frontier. On the cusp of futuristic quantum, nano, and biological computing, what now seems like science fiction will soon become reality. Combined with AI, what is not even conceivable right now will become achievable. And that potential is at once both exhilarating and unsettling--and I believe, a harbinger of the time of the end.

[tango]

In a few years, such platters will be little more than relics of the past. I've always been fascinated by computer technology, and am amazed by the pace at which it's advancing. The computational power of CPU's and the capacity of hard drives has proliferated exponentially to bring us to the era of the supercomputer, and the crown jewel known as the Frontier. On the cusp of futuristic quantum, nano, and biological computing, what now seems like science fiction will soon become reality. Combined with AI, what is not even conceivable right now will become achievable. And that potential is at once both exhilarating and unsettling--and I believe, a harbinger of the time of the end.

Even now it seems like it's getting harder to get a regular magnetic hard drive unless you want an enormous great thing. I remember holding off on an SSD because they topped out at 1TB and even one that size was hugely expensive. A couple of years ago I put a 4TB SSD in my laptop for something like $400.

The way technology is advancing is unsettling. My concern is that so many people seem to sleepwalk into a dystopian nightmare. In 1984 people were forced to have telescreens, in 2024 it seems people can't get enough of the technology that listens to them and watches them, and relays what it sees and hears to some unknown server to be processed by persons unknown and stored in locations unknown.

[ProDeo]

In the late 80's through the mid-90's, I was a fan of the King's Quest and Space Quest games. I had the entire series of Roger Wilco adventures, and it was quite a transition from the cheesy graphics of Space Quest 1 and 2  to the more sophisticated versions (by 90's standards). Nostalgic stuff.

Ah, yes, King's Quest and Space Quest, I liked Space Quest better, those were the days.

My first home computer was the TRS-80 from Tandy (1980), just 16Kb memory, with cassette tape to store information. It took 5-10 minutes to load a (chess) program. All of that for 2600 dutch guilders, about $7000 nowadays.

[Sojourner]

Ah, yes, King's Quest and Space Quest, I liked Space Quest better, those were the days.

I was partial to Space Quest as well, and ended up getting the entire series. Only thing with SQ was, you had to save your game frequently in case you got killed, so you didn't have to start over. But yeah, I miss those days too. (There are websites available to play most of the original games online for free, but I haven't checked it out).

My first home computer was the TRS-80 from Tandy (1980), just 16Kb memory, with cassette tape to store information. It took 5-10 minutes to load a (chess) program. All of that for 2600 dutch guilders, about $7000 nowadays.

As I said, my first was a Tandy 3000 NL, which I bought on credit at Radio Shack (and probably paid 3 times more than it was actually worth). I was a complete newbie, but learned on my own quickly. I was thrilled when I finally got Windows, and was able to point and click to get things done instead of typing all those DOS commands. Yeah, that was a simpler time I look back on with fond remembrance.

[tango]

The early days of Windows made it easy to use point-and-click but you still needed to fiddle with all the DOS startup files to configure stuff. Then came Plug-and-Pray, and things went downhill from there....

[Athanasius]

Nothing quite like booting into Win 3.1 from DOS

[Sojourner]

It was definitely a long road getting to where we are now. I still remember the sounds of my dial up modem booting up, and connecting to a BBS for the first time. It's laughable compared to the speed and capabilities we have today.

[Cloudwalker]

Will be going to Drama Ministry rehearsal soon.  We will be doing an Alice in Wonderland tea.  I'm playing The March Hare.