tkb's comments

The children's maths/puzzle book "Nut-Crackers" (John Jaworski and Ian Stewart, 1971) had a slide rule printed at the back of the book - two strips each numbered 1-50 - to cut out and try out.

The authors commented "If you get really interested you can make much more accurate slide rules, or you can buy them for about £1." I fear not any more...

I too had a small web site with M4 around 1999/2000. Why M4? Because I'd learned enough of it to be useful/dangerous when wrestling with Sendmail, and it seemed to do the trick (at least when the trick was simply "be easier than manually editing lots of HTML files every time there's a site-wide change").

I suspect I was never doing anything complicated enough to encounter the gotchas mentioned by other commenters...

Sendmail - "The Bat Book"

Jeff Atwood had a piece in his "Coding Horror" blog about this project: https://blog.codinghorror.com/updating-the-single-most-influ...

(Personally I grew up on the British early 1980s Usborne BASIC programming books, now wonderfully available at https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books . My copy of "Computer Battlegames" - which I'd arbitrarily picked in the bookshop over "Computer Spacegames" - was the closest to the classic "BASIC Computer Games", which I never came across - not sure if it was more a US thing.)

I still have one IP address lodged in my memory from 25+ years ago - sable, the university's key Unix server for students, on which I learned so much about Unix and the 1990s Internet.

(I'm not sure if I'd faced DNS issues that meant I needed to know that - but it was a time when dialup ISPs told you what to manually configure for your DNS rather than it being automatically assigned, so it all seemed a bit chunkier.)

Interesting to see here how different people discover Bruegel... I did so through Michael Frayn's entertaining "Headlong", a caper about an academic unsuited to subterfuge who thinks he's discovered a masterpiece. (Some of the Goodreads reviews are less favourable on the slabs of research which the author provides - I found it interesting but admittedly have forgotten much of it since reading the novel many years ago...)

The BBC Microcomputer had an "Escape" key and a potentially misleadingly named "Break" key - but "Break" was actually more like a reset key (with CTRL-Break being a "harder" reset and SHIFT-Break prompting the computer to boot off a floppy disk).

But one nice feature was that if you were simply programming in BASIC and immediately typed OLD after hitting "Break", you had a chance of recovering your program if you weren't unlucky.

And the other feature which this comment reminded me of - at least some models of the BBC Micro had a hardware lock on the "Break" key, so with a small screwdriver you could turn a little piece of plastic to completely prevent the key being pressed!

(Prompted by a remark from one poster here that people don't comment much on blogs much nowadays...) What are people's views on how important having comment functionality on a blog is?

I have a low-readership blog published with a static site generator and without comments (I had instead invited comments on Twitter) - so it's been a potential to-do to add a comments solution but I always wonder if it's worthwhile.

For some data on the game size (based on my implementation and analysis of a BBC BASIC four-room game "MINI" which I referenced in another comment and won't self-promotionally spam again...)

The source code for MINI weighs in at 4.6 K, saved in the tokenised form used by BBC BASIC.

In comparison, the Inform 7 source is around 3.3K in size. But that isn’t executable - it can be run in Inform 7, or it can be compiled into a “story file”, of which Inform 7 supports two formats. In the older, more portable, Z-Code format, I got a blorb (package) of 406 K; in the newer, more sophisticated Glulx format, I got a blorb of 602 K.

And to actually play the story file, you need an interpreter - for example, Windows Glulxe, an interpreter for (as the observant reader might guess) playing Glulx story files under Windows, is a further 275 K. Inform 7 can also produce a story file and bundled Javascript interpreter for a version playable in a web browser: for MINI, this bundle weighs in at 1.1 MB.

I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers, and I learned a lot about programming Acorn computers from Peter Killworth's "How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron". So to give Inform 7 a try, I implemented the mini four-room adventure from that book, and wrote a walk-through of how to do it quite neatly with the building blocks of Inform 7 here in case anyone's interested: https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-adventure-in-inform...

I believe many of his books (at least, those which I picked up, I know he wrote many more) were collections of his Scientific American "Mathematical Games" columns.

And as a bit of trivia - when Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel Escher Bach) took over the slot in the early 1980s, he renamed it to the anagrammatic "Metamagical Themas".