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"Unheard of"??

Get off my lawn!!

The first inductees in any real gaming HoF should have been Spacewar, Star Trek and Nethack.

My ebooks don't have DRM and if they did, it would be trivial to remove.

name one computer program from 1965 that you can get running

Ever heard of emulation? Here is Spacewar! running on a PDP-1 emulator written in JavaScript

http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm

read the true story of tetris.

Alexey Pajitnov is the infringer here. he grabbed what three people have created together for himself, without giving them credit, leave aside their proper shares.

average street pimp has more ethics. it doesnt strike me odd that, the legal system is exploited most by aggressive exploiters to attack others, even though they should be the ones in defense.

I love it how simple-minded tech geeks, usually IT guys, programmers and even people who should know better like electrical engineers, think that the internet is more complex than the human body... Here we have ONE molecule, simulated for a lousy millisecond, and it took more than THREE MONTHS. How many molecules in the human body? Our body is performing a truly staggering amount of computation. Actually, every bit of matter is, everything including "inanimate" matter, it's really all the same. We just happen to be more complex.

I wonder how accurate this is? Information Processing in Human Body And when we do start uderstanding how the huge amount of molecules in one cell behaves, we can maybe start understanding how the huge number of cells becomes US. Including things like diseases and aging. Once that is done, hello life-extension! Isn't that more interesting than tin cans floating in a vacuum? I think so. But then again, I'm crazy; I think wanting to have more time is the same as wanting to have more space. It's humans exploring the universe, it's just that we need to live longer than we do if we think we really are going to explore the universe. After all, can a mayfly explore a city? It'll be dead in three days. That's us, in space.

Looking for info on how fast signals travel in our brains, compared to those in a electronic circuit, I found this interesting comparison of the brain vs a Pentium 4 processor: http://vadim.oversigma.com/MAS862/Project.html

I used to play the original tetris on a 386.

Really? I didn't know there were arcade emulators for the 386. Myself, I used to play the original Tetris in the campus game room.

Huh? It seems that the DOS version is the original, if you don't count the Elektronika 60 prototype.

How I miss the turbo button...

You can have it back with DOSBox, along with Tetris 3.12.

The original DOS version is actually available for FREE. It's worth loading up and enjoying old-school style.

oops forgot links http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1998/09/24/NEWS7742.dtl http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm

Tetris, developed by Alexey Pajitnov and originally published by samizdat, is a video game. All PCs with a CGA, EGA, VGA, or more powerful VGA-compatible video card have been able to run Vadim Gerasimov's port of Tetris to the PC, even if inside an old-PC emulator such as DOSBox.

My point is that sure, low-end PCs with an Intel GPU won't run Xbox 360- or PS3-level graphics, but they'll definitely run DS- or PSP-level graphics, and probably even Wii-level graphics. So if a game engine can scale down to the Wii, why can't it scale down to low-end PCs?

This is also a guy who screwed his friends over once he made the big bucks. Vladimir Pokhilko eventually killed his family and himself. Vadim Gerasimov who ported the original game to MSDOS and was one of the original developers did not receive any credit for his work.

I have been playing Tetris a lot lately on Nintendo DS and on Facebook and love it. However, I hate Pajitnov for not making this game more freely available. I used to play Tetris on a Korean gaming site netmarble.com (it was also available on similar site hangame.com). These versions were also highly addictive and had a huge userbase (easily over 10,000 users). They were shut down due to threats of legal action from the Tetris company... If Tetris were only released under the GPL...

From the real story of Tetris as told by Vadim Gerasimov (if Pajitnov is the father of Tetris, this guy is the overworked, unrecognized bastard child):

"Pajitnov's efforts to sell the games together failed. We decided to give our friends free copies of the games including Tetris. The games quickly spread around. When the freely distributed PC version of Tetris got outside of the Soviet Union and a foreign company expressed an interest in licensing Tetris, Pajitnov decided to abandon all the games but Tetris. The decision made Pavlovsky very unhappy and destroyed our team."

Pretty ironic that it was only through distributing free copies of Tetris at first that Pajitnov was able to successfully market this infamous game (and completely downplay the help of his buddies who helped him create and distribute it in the process).

From the blurb: "This means that a freeware Tetris installer would be allowed to load kernel drivers."

Point of terminology: Except for one PC DOS based prototype by Vadim Gerasimov, Tetris software is not freeware. Calling Quadra, Lockjaw, Bedter, or Emlith "Tetris" is just as incorrect as calling RC Cola or Coca-Cola "Pepsi" or calling GNU "UNIX", because it's not.

</anal-retentive>

Corrected: "This means that a freeware Soviet Mind Game installer would be allowed to load kernel drivers."

Personally, I can't get into these overly complex games. For a real nostalgia trip, try this implementation of the classic Robots game. It's automatically open source, because it's done in 100% pure JavaScript :-) Also, here is the original 1962 SpaceWar -- it runs on a PDP-1 emulator implemented as a Java applet. (Source code). Actually, I think the version that was more fun to play was the 1970's Cinematronics arcade game.