"The story begins unambiguously. A group of IBMers, working on a secret project to build a personal computer, flew to Seattle in August, 1980, to see if [Bill] Gates could supply them with an operating system. He couldn't -- and referred them to [Gary] Kildall [of Digital Research Inc.] When they showed up at DRI's offices the next day ... the company's business manager ... refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement.... [IBM] did get together with Kildall ... a short time later, but they couldn't reach an agreement. At around the same time, [IBM] saw Gates again. [IBM] and Gates both knew of the operating system [Tim] Paterson had built at Seattle Computer Co.... "Gates said: 'Do you want to get [QDOS], or do you want me to?' [IBM] said: 'By all means, you get it."' Gates bought Paterson's program, called QDOS, for $50,000, renamed it DOS, improved it, and licensed it to IBM for a low per-copy royalty fee."
Tim Paterson, the man who created DOS, the operating system that dominated the computer industry between 1981 and 2000, has an occasional
blog that provides a fascinating history of the microcomputer industry:
Is DOS a Rip-Off of CP/M?;
The Contributions of CP/M;
Design of DOS;
The First DOS Machine;
IBM PC Design Antics; and
All Those Floppy Disk Formats…
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Jul 9, 2011 -
77 comments
Game programmer and designer Mike Dailly has been
making games since he was 14, back in 1984. It was then that he met
David Jones,
Russell Kay and
Steve Hammond at the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, a group that gathered at Kingsway Technical College in Dundee, Scotland. These four chaps would go on to form
DMA Design, home to
Lemmings and
Grand Theft Auto,
amongst other games. Dailly has been sharing stories and materials from the archives of DMA, including
The Complete History of DMA Design,
The Complete History of Lemmings (
previously),
GTA prototypes,
graphics and
early game design docs (when it was called "Race 'n' Chase"), and more....
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 24, 2011 -
16 comments
Open Tyrian OpenTyrian is a port of the DOS shoot-em-up Tyrian (
previously). The port uses
SDL, making it easily cross-platform. Builds are available for Windows and Mac OS X [... and] for Android, Amiga, Dingoo, Dreamcast, DS, GameCube, Gizmondo, GP2X, GP32, Nokia Internet Tablets, PSP, PS3 Linux, Symbian, Wii, and Wiz
posted by kid ichorous
on Jan 8, 2011 -
21 comments
You are in a warm, dark, comfortable place. This has been your place since you became aware that you are alive. It's almost time to enter a different world now.
In 1986, Activision published a roleplaying computer game called
Alter Ego. Unlike the action and fantasy titles that ruled the day, this game simulated the course of a single ordinary life. Beginning at birth, players navigated a series of vignettes: learning to crawl, reacting to strangers, getting a first haircut. The outcome of each scenario subtly influenced one's path, and with every choice players slowly progressed through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
Graphically minimalist -- one's lifestream is represented by simple icons, and the scenarios are all text -- the game was nevertheless engaging, describing the world in a playful, good-natured tone tinged by darkness and melancholy. And it had quite a pedigree; developer and psychology PhD
Peter Favaro interviewed hundreds of people on their most memorable life experiences to generate the game's 1,200 pages of material. Unfortunately for Dr. Favaro, the game didn't sell very well. But it lives on through the web --
PlayAlterEgo.com offers a full copy of the game free to play in your browser, and the same port is available as a $5 app for
iPhone and
Android.
More: Port discussion group -
Wishlist -
Vintage review - Original game manual (
text or
scans)
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 31, 2010 -
46 comments
TheSmartAss.info's suite of Java emulators allows smooth, in-browser playback of literally
thousands of old-school video games:
517 Atari titles,
148 for DOS,
636 Game Boy games (and
410 for Game Boy Color),
2,019 (!) NES titles,
238 GameGear games,
802 Sega Genesis titles, and
284 for the Sega Master System. Highlights include
Space Invaders,
Frogger,
Galaga,
Pitfall!,
Super Mario Bros.,
The Legend of Zelda,
Metroid,
SimCity,
Zero Wing,
Duke Nukem,
Sonic the Hedgehog,
Aladdin,
Earthworm Jim,
Pokemon, and
Metal Gear Solid. Use
the search function to find your favorites! You can also register an account to save games on emulators that support it. Make sure to check the purple bar below each game for control info and links to alternate emulators in case the default one is buggy or slow.
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 30, 2009 -
54 comments
A revolution is the solution We talked about how
Ebaum's World sucks before in the Blue, but it's looks like things have been taken a step futher with Eric Bauman's latest theft of an animated GIF of Lindsey Lohan. While script kiddies have already been concentrating on wiping Ebaum's World off the net completely, the latest swipe from
ytmnd.com (NSFW?) has caused a 'massive' DoS war against Bauman as this wonderful writeup from
Vitalsecurity.org explains.
posted by daHIFI
on Jan 9, 2006 -
59 comments
Last night
Hosting Matters (and their related resellers) was taken down by a DoS attack attributed to Al-Qaeda. This attack not only disabled the
intended target but took down some 3000 sites for a significant period of time. Is this an example of
cyber-terrorism or some kid with a script?
posted by cedar
on Oct 17, 2003 -
48 comments
I generally give little thought to how the Internet works, as long as it does work. Well, on Monday, 9 of the
13 "root servers" that manage traffic on the Internet were
hit with a denial of service attack for about an hour. You can see the spike in traffic on one of the servers in
this graph. All this made me think about the fragility of the Internet and what I would do with myself if the Internet got knocked out, say, for a matter of days. Maybe I would finally learn to cook something besides pasta... What would you do?
posted by epimorph
on Oct 23, 2002 -
37 comments
D-O-S attack disables RIAA site. Do you think someone's trying to make a point about one group lobbying for the power to shut down individual's computers if they SUSPECT them of doing something they don't like, and another group ALREADY having that power?
posted by thunder
on Jul 30, 2002 -
25 comments
Germany Plans Infowar Against Websites? So, Wired News reports that German Interior Minister Otto Schily has said publicly that Germany should stage denial-of-service attacks on right-wing websites housed in other countries. AOL versus Germany as WWWIII/InfoWar I?
posted by bclark
on Apr 9, 2001 -
6 comments
They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.
Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?
(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they
could extradite him.)
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Apr 19, 2000 -
18 comments
DoS Attacks for Fun and Profit - It looks like the list has expanded quite a bit this week... enough that the FBI is going to hold a press conference today at 11
PST. This is almost enough to argue
against unlimited bandwidth for the average consumer. I hope they track the bastards down; not only does this impact the future success of eCommerce ventures, but it lends to stereotyping the technically elite as potential closet-evildoers.
posted by othermatt
on Feb 9, 2000 -
1 comment
