richardjdare

11 ms·

1.
by richardjdare 3mo ago
Its fascinating to me. I grew up in the UK home computer scene of the mid 80s-early 90s. After this, the Frutiger Aero aesthetic seemed to me redolent of the total corporatization of what previously seemed a much more human and approachable
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by richardjdare 10mo ago
For me what's inspiring about lisp machines is not any particular implementation detail, but the very idea that working with a computer can be this immersive, holistic experience where everything is accessible and workable through a si
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by richardjdare 2y ago
Mark created Blitz Basic on the Amiga, and then Blitz3d, BlitzMax and Monkey programming languages on the PC. He also published several games including Guardian and Gloom on the Amiga. I got my start with Blitz on the Amiga, after it was fe
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by richardjdare 2y ago
I've had a similar problem trying to renew my Apple developer account. Had it for over 10 years. I had an email a few weeks ago telling me it could not automatically renew (same bank details that worked fine last year). Nothing I could
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by richardjdare 2y ago
I agree, why do so many think that an immersive computer environment that makes the full power of the machine ergonomically ready-to-hand is some kind of retro thing? It sounds like a futuristic improvement to me. 40 years ago we had bicycl
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by richardjdare 3y ago
Personally, there were many things going on with the Amiga that I really enjoyed, things that have diminished or been left by the wayside as computers developed. I don't just mean technical stuff, I mean ergonomic and social aspects to
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by richardjdare 3y ago
Yeah, I distinctly remember the exact issue of the magazine that previewed it. ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990 [1]. It featured Wing Commander and several of the upcoming new VGA graphic adventures with scanned, painted artwork and quali
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by richardjdare 3y ago
Yes, I grew up on the Amiga and think about this a lot myself. I think the Amiga occupied a sweet spot in the history of computing. You could kick out the operating system and hit the hardware directly like an 8-bit machine, but you also ha
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by richardjdare 3y ago
When I got that leaked Genera image going in Linux I felt like I'd found a crashed UFO. It was incredibly inspiring and I don't think its true at all that we have surpassed it. Why do I still have a clunky character-mode terminal
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by richardjdare 3y ago
heh, also at that time, there was little else to scratch that itch, other than going back to Frontier: Elite 2 on an emulator or something. That's how I got into Noctis all those years ago.
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by richardjdare 3y ago
yes, I was a keen follower of the demo scene in the 16 bit days. not so much the C64, but the Amiga, and then the mid-late 90s PC scene. Back then, it wasn't so much about limitation, though size-coding was always a thing. It was about
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by richardjdare 3y ago
I've always struggled with these notions that the self, or individuality is some kind of construction, or a matter of linguistics or political economy or whatever. I can comprehend Buddhism denying the existence of a self at other leve
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by richardjdare 3y ago
There's a good book on these kinds of dreams from a Jungian point of view: "On Dreams and Death: A Jungian Interpretation" by Marie-Louise Von Franz. It can be hard going though, as it is a book about death. The Jungian persp
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by richardjdare 4y ago
There was another Jünger piece[0] on HN a few months ago. It was written by Jessi Jezewska Stevens who wrote the foreword to the new edition of "On the Marble Cliffs" discussed in today's article. [0] https://news.
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by richardjdare 4y ago
For me, the appeal is not so much that Emacs is customizable, but that it's basically a live coding environment for working with text, seamlessly integrated with all the usual functionality of a text editor. I often write short program
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by richardjdare 4y ago
lol I'm English and have lived amongst football fans my whole life. Yet I have always felt that even if I spent a year studying football, learning the history, the techniques of the players, I would never be able to hold a convincing c
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by richardjdare 4y ago
I use Emacs now but I used Textpad ( https://www.textpad.com/home ) for a long time. It's a very light editor with syntax highlighting and large file handling.
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by richardjdare 4y ago
I sometimes recommend Borges (Labyrinths) and Kafka (The Trial, Short Stories) to tech people looking to get into literature.
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by richardjdare 4y ago
I only spent a few years in Mac-land when I was working on an iPhone game, but having grown up on the Amiga and being blown away by Symbolics Genera, I seek out and suppport such visions of personal computing. It's like we're goin
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by richardjdare 4y ago
Similarly, one of the things I often do is imagine the finished result. I habitually pretend I am demonstrating the software to friends (or rivals!) I walk them through it, and explain it in my imagination, imagining their positive reaction
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by richardjdare 4y ago
When I upgraded from an Amstrad CPC to an Amiga in 1989, I gained access to a higher level of abstration, like you said. Unlike the Amstrad, the Amiga had a GUI and a proper command line. But unlike the information kiosk-esque devices of to
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by richardjdare 4y ago
My Amiga back in the day had a very snappy gui. But I remember it took 1 minute for a 512px jpeg to decode using FastJpeg which was written in assembly language, and I'd leave my computer running all night to draw a mandelbrot set or p
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by richardjdare 4y ago
When I worked in QA many years ago I was just as much a coder as I am now. As a self taught programmer from an unpromising background I tried to take the route that was most accessible to me. I wasn't the only programmer or artist in t
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by richardjdare 4y ago
The end of an era. I used the iPod Touch to develop and use iOs apps without spending money on an iPhone. It was a relatively reasonably priced gateway into the Apple app ecosystem.
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by richardjdare 5y ago
The thing is, in many cases "Roguelike" is not a helpful description. It's like calling Megaman an "R-Type-like" because it's a side scroller with a beam-up weapon. The things that make Megaman what it is, have
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by richardjdare 5y ago
There is a cheaper "Readers Edition" of the Red Book available. Also, Jung's student Marie-Louise Von Franz wrote a bit about Jung's later ideas in her books, "Number and Time", and "Psyche and Matter&quot
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by richardjdare 5y ago
I'd like to see such a device, but unlike the Pi, or specially contrived educational environments, the 8-bit home computers were the centre of a growing market for games and software, seemingly only a few steps away from your first att
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by richardjdare 5y ago
The Capitalism series is good. I may be wrong but I believe it was actually used to teach business. From oldest to most recent: https://www.gog.com/game/capitalism_plus https://www.gog.com/game/cap
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by richardjdare 5y ago
I failed my 11 plus and ended up at a high school where they didn't even tell us about university. At school, I found bullying and sadistic teachers completely overwhelmed the educational aspects; my only goal was to get through each d
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by richardjdare 5y ago
I like Emacs because it's a live programming environment focused on the editing of text. As far as I know, there is no other editor with this capability. Sure, they all let you write "plug-ins" but none of them let you do you

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