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Videogame History 101

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

Leapfrog writes "I found an interesting and useful site called The Dot Eaters which gives a pretty thorough history of the electronic gaming industry. I found it very informative. " (yes, Hemos and I got to San Jose. Lost baggage. Lost Nate. 6 hours late. But alive)

25 comments

  1. Long plane delays by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    6 Hour delay? Oh, you must have been flying Northwest!

  2. No Subject Given by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They ran the QNX os, a unix clone. I worked with a company that developed numerous programs for them, including "CoCo" ... An early precursor for irc. If you're looking for more on that system, I still remember a few things: cleacy@home.com

  3. That would be the Winchester Mystery House by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Painting here, forgot my account:

    Not really, unless you call across town reansonalby close... anyway, it's near Bascom and Winchester (sp?), take 280 to the south side of San Jose to find it, have fun Rob, i hope i met you there @ the Expo...

  4. Frys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have a distinct feeling they will go down to
    check out Fry's Electronics while they stay at
    San Jose! ;-)

  5. Bally astrocade and other tidbits. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It was the Bally Astrocade which first got me interested in computers. I played the maze game and the gunfight game on a friend of my father's machine. I was fascinated with how it worked and I wanted to program games. A year or so later our school district bought an Apple II+ which was drven from school to school and was only available at my elementray school two days a week. When I found out about basic I started programming and have never looked back. (The teachers used to think I was breakng the computer when I would get into basic.)

    It's interesting that just earlier today I was discussing that Bally system and their basic interpreter with my father..

    rich@richnut.com

  6. Real good video game history book by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If anybody really cares much about the history of video games (and more specifically, Nintendo) read the book "Game Over". Don't remember who it was by, but it was by far the best book I've found about video games and their past. Check amazon.com for many more reader recomendations I'm sure.

  7. It's Combat... and you can emulate it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Go get Stella from:
    http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bwmott/2600/
    (Linux port availabe)

    Then go here to get some ROMs:
    http://www.skyport.com/tatsquan/atari/Cartridges .html

  8. A few Icon details. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    80186es were (are?) used in a lot of embedded work.

    I hope they're Y2K compliant :-)

  9. Don't Pee On Anything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't worry about it, peeing on stuff here doesn't seem to be serious offense. I'm a student at San Jose State University, for a while we had one of our friendly homeless people peeing in one of our elevators in the engineering building.

  10. where's amiga ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The amiga played a fairly large part in shaping computer gaming history, too. A lot of the games that were released in america for the PC were originally developed on the Amiga -eg.
    Lemmings, Worms, Popoulous.
    See the recent amiga thread for details.

  11. Icon computer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well I don't know that much about what's inside of them but I do know my high-school only stopped using them in 1996.
    Dosen't technology move fast in schools.

  12. Spacewar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Any one know of a Linux version of that? That would make my computer complete.

  13. where's amiga ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There were thousands and thousands. quite literally. You could try one of the emulator sites for a listing
    www.classicgaming.com
    www.davesclassics.com

  14. lost baggage and nate? by John+Kozan · · Score: 1

    Did you sneak nate on the plane in a bag? Is that why he is lost too?

  15. A few more Icon details. by Eric+S.+Smith · · Score: 1

    I've always wondered why there isn't more webbed information about these things. They sucked and were cool at the same time...

    • They were originally built by Cemcorp, the Canadian Educational Microprocessor Corporation. Unisys bought either the Icon or the whole company at some later point.
    • They were, with few exceptions that I knew of, diskless workstations. They got everything off of a central file-server, called the Lexicon. This was the weak link: turn on 20 of them at once and prepare to wait 15 minutes for them to all get the OS loaded. A small square in the upper right corner of the screen flickered when the machine wasn't just hanging, but was, rather, actually talking to the Lexicon.
    • There was an actual danger of files being left open on the Lexicon if you turned off an Icon while it was in the middle of doing something. Pretty bad.
    • The original beasts were pretty much all metal construction, except, of course, for the plastic keys on the English/French keyboard, and the rubber bumper on the front.
    • They had some kind of primitive sound synthesizer built in. When starting up, they'd say "dhtick," and there were some educational games (Speak Face, anyone?) that would talk. Ours often greeted you when you logged in: "Hah-low!"
    • They did indeed run QNX, with optional GUI shells over the command line. The first, called Ambience, was a pointy-clicky menu system. A later creation, which arrived, I think, with the Icon II, was called ICONLook. It tried to look cooler than Ambience (not hard), but was at least three times as slow. There was also a GUI file-manager that you could start up from the command line, called House. The command line was a reasonable place to be. There were various commands with odd names that corresponded to what we'd expect on a Unix system (the best was probably the delete command: "frel," for "file release"). The languages were all Watcom. The OS was buggy.
    • There was a text editor, a simple word processor, and then something more complex called WPro that you used if you felt cool. The text editor took good advantage of the trackball, and had a cut-and-paste clipboard system that held more than one thing at a time. There was a flat DBMS called Watfile.
    • Some programs took advantage of the networked nature of the machines to let you chat with others or play games against each other. Well, actually, two did, that I know of. We didn't even have e-mail, which is pretty grim. Perhaps it was available and we just didn't have it.
    • While watching the machine crash, or waiting 10 minutes for a program to load, you have lots of time to think of abusive names for it. Useless ICAN'T is my favorite. "Oh, no, it's loading ICAN'T-Look!"

    Some years after they appeared in my school board, a I saw a What's New item in Popular Science about them. I've never met anyone from outside of Ontario who's ever heard of the things, though.

    I wish I had the manuals...or any other information about them.

    --
    Mind the Gap
  16. Microsoft Blunders by iota · · Score: 1

    I noticed this under the Timeline section of DotEaters for 1983-1984...

    "Microsoft demonstrates its new product Interface Manager, later to be renamed Windows. It is later revealed that the windows appearing to be running different programs were simply a graphical kludge."

    Sound familier? Microsoft's up to the old tricks...


    iota

  17. 80186 by John+Campbell · · Score: 1

    I think the HP-48 series of calculators uses the 80186, too.

  18. Icon computer? by substrate · · Score: 1

    OK, its not a video game, but its been annoying me for a few days. In high school in about 1982 I took computer science. The machines we used were Icon's or Ikon's or something. They were a networked system possibly unix based. I _think_ they ran on a 68000 processor. Has anybody heard of them, have any info on them or know of a web page on them?

  19. Computer Space by kabloie · · Score: 1

    I actually got to play that game at the 'Ice Chateau' in Spfld IL. Big blue sparkly molded box with a really crappy game inside! I guess I'd already been playing Space Invaders and Asteroids and was used to a good interface. If I remember, your aim direction constantly spun around your ship, so there was an added timing trick which was really hard to get used to in 1 or 2 games.

    That crappy blue box is probably worth more today than ever!

    -k

  20. 101? by Jacco+de+Leeuw · · Score: 1

    What is this? Binary code?

    --
    -------
    Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
  21. dig the by SuperGeek · · Score: 1

    Lost Baggage
    Lost Nate
    Came Alive
    6 Hours Late

    well shit, ya're a poet and ya don't even know it

    Isn't that a Haiku? Probably not..

    =)

    Oh gawd, I should get some sleep now

  22. Don't Pee On Anything by Seumas · · Score: 1
    Don't you guys dare pee on anything important down there in San Jose. We don't want to see you get yourself banned for a decade like Ozzy did when he urinated on the Alamo in Texas.

    Although it would make one helluva Slashdot article...

  23. TANK! by wilkinsm · · Score: 1

    I loved tank for the 2600. Especially with Invisable Tanks and Bouncing Balls.

    The site seems to have miss the TI system - and its tape deck based games (though it does mention the adam...) Is is too new?

  24. Dot Eaters by ManBeast · · Score: 1

    One point about emulation is that for some people it is to help them relive their glory days of gaming. With old arcade classics like Asteroids, Discs of Tron or old systems like ColecoVision and such. With all this UltraHLE/N64 emulation press, it seems emulation has gotten a bad stygma of piracy and such to it which it doesn't deserve.

    --
    ManBeast Emulators Unlimited http://www.emuunlim.com
  25. Ahh Robby how i miss you by chris_c · · Score: 1

    I had a nes with that really cool robot, i think his name was robby, he would help you out in games (though i think only one game was released for him :(), the coolest bit was the fact that he had a pair of sunnies in case your screen was too bright. That was class.