4 ms·

Why was Sierra called "On-Line" if none of their games were online games?

• jccooper 6y ago
  It started as a business software play called "On-line Systems". It seems doubtful that Ken Williams was considering actual networked software on Apple II at the time (though the machine could do it) but probably it sounded advanced and cool. In 1979 "on-line" would have been recognizably computery, but not mean much else to most people, who would never have seen a computer network. Says Jimmy Maher, who should know, On-Line Systems was "a name fairly typical of the vaguely futuristic, vaguely compound, but essentially meaningless names (Microsoft, anyone?) that were so common in the era." https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/
• jessaustin 6y ago
  "Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Most of their games reacted immediately to player input, so in that sense they weren't batch programs. This plausible explanation might not have anything to do with the actual reason for the name...
  • cperciva 6y ago
    "Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Computer scientists still refer to "online algorithms" as meaning "algorithms which process each input as it comes in". The obvious algorithm for "find the minimum element" is online for example, since you can stop at any point and say what the smallest you've seen so far is; however finding the median takes more work (you need to maintain two heaps, vs. simply collecting all the data and sorting it at the end).