top | item 34546621

(no title)

FatActor | 3 years ago

That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.

discuss

order

justinlloyd|3 years ago

One man's snark is another man's war story. There was no code review because video game development, and arcade video game development was the epitome of the Wild West and the lone cowboys who had late night coding sessions trying to figuring out how to shave 173 bytes from the build by changing JMP absolute (three bytes) to BEQ/BNE relative (two bytes) without suffering a page boundary cycle penalty so they could squeeze the game into two 8K PROMs instead of two 16KB PROMs. The primary concern in arcade game development was "does this bug make the game crash or visually glitch?" and "will the player get free time?" and if the answer was "no" to both of those, the bug was relegated to WNF (will not fix). QA in most companies really was Bob on the assembly line who put little dayglo stickers on the inside and wrote his initials under below the line that read "Q.C."

FatActor|3 years ago

> One man's snark is another man's war story.

This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.