4 ms·
I wonder if the presence of other machines in the market made things like assemblers more well known in the UK. i.e. BBC Micros came with an assembler so it's
by Lio 4y ago
I wonder if the presence of other machines in the market made things like assemblers more well known in the UK.
i.e. BBC Micros came with an assembler so it's the kind of thing BBC users would tell CPC464 users about and they would then buy third party.
Why did the BBC Micro have an assembler? Well the people made it started out in a university setting with access to all sorts of things that they wanted on their small computers.
E.g. BBC Micros had networking before most other 8-bit machines simply because the original developers had used it in a research lab.
In other markets you might just be working on your own and so wouldn't know about things like networking because you wouldn't have an immediate need for it.
To quote William Gibson, the future is here already it's just poorly diffused.
- mkr-hn 4y agoIt was a short hop from picking up Castle of the Winds II at a dollar store to finding out about resource editors and win32 when I wanted to edit the images. The game itself was from 1993, but this was in the late 90s/early 2000s when you could Google stuff like this and land on programming forums. And likely a post from someone else who wanted to do the same thing. I still had to know about it. If I'd never found Rick Saada's experiment in win32 packaged as a game for a dollar, would I know about any of this? I wonder if the growing availability of the internet has closed the gap any.
- rep_lodsb 4y agoNot technically "win32", Saada wrote it to experiment with the new-at-the-time Windows 3.0 API (still 16 bit) while at Microsoft. It's now in the public domain and should run under Wine on Linux, as well as 32 bit versions of Windows: http://lkbm.ecritters.biz/cotw/download.html http://lkbm.ecritters.biz/cotw/download.html
- mkr-hn 4y agoI don't know why I remembered it as win32 from when he wrote about it. Anyway. I remember downloading a save editor from AOL's software center, so the stuff on that page brings back memories. I had a broken 10+ MB save from trying to get every item and explore every block in every dungeon. I'd pile stuff up by category in the middle of town.