5 ms·

The Real Novelty of the Arpanet

• danwills 6y ago
  Gives me a chuckle to see "Conway's Game of Life" in the "games available" list. You can certainly call the meta-activities like collecting patterns or building a big thing like a Turing machine in GoL hugely fun and game-like, but the 'simulation' itself really isn't a game under most definitions. The GoL scene (nor hashlife) didn't exist back in ARPANET days though, so I guess the 'games' bucket would have still seemed most appropriate. There's still no recognised creative genre for this kind of set-it-up-then- let-it-solve type of media afaik! (demoscene is closest) but I think (and hope) it's gradually emerging.
  • jrwr 6y ago
    Check out Screeps a MMO strategy sandbox game for programmers - you program your units in javascript that is ran on the server.
• gumby 6y ago
  An excellent essay, one which brings back many memories of the 1970s.
• KineticLensman 6y ago
  It's an interesting perspective; that the real novelty wasn't people interacting with remote software (mainframe timesharing already did this), but remote software-to-software interaction. I hadn't thought of it like that before.