20 ms·
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)
- jruohonen 3y agoA great find! There is also some real wisdom regarding the warning they gave.
- ahazred8ta 3y agoThere are several retrospectives on Habitat in Vernor Vinge's tech anthology True Names.
- a1o 3y agoYou can do something like that over IRC without much fuss! As in IRC as a backend.
- sakjur 3y agoWhat strikes me about the system described by the article is that it predates IRC by a couple of years. I wonder if IRC could’ve been built on Habitat’s backend equally well as the other way around is easy to imagine.
- wmf 3y agoWasn't Glitch built on an IRC backend (which later became Slack)?
- DonHopkins 3y agoMicrosoft Comic Chat -- they had Jim Woodring do the comic book characters and environmental graphics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Woodring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Woodring https://www.jimwoodring.com/ https://www.jimwoodring.com/
- gattilorenz 3y agoAnd you can still use it, although it's probably a very... lonely experience: https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/18/teaching-an-old-irc-dog-some-new-tricks/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/18/teaching-an-old-irc-dog-...
- Animats 3y agoThat's famous. I knew those guys. What amazed me is that they were able to cram a graphical client into a Commodore 64. Now that was a cram job. I could see doing the world on minicomputer servers, but the client! Those early 2D metaverses not only predate the consumer Internet, they predate AOL. They were all superseded by things that looked more like the early web. Round 2 of that was when 3D Second Life was overtaken by mostly-text Facebook. Recently we had the Web 3 "metaverse" debacle. You can build it, but will they come? These things are fun, but they're a niche, like games.
- ben_jones 3y ago“You can build it, but will hundreds of millions of users come instantaneously in desired markets and earn billions in high margin ways with minimal support costs and in a way that is preferred by the majority shareholder?” Success exists outside the success criteria of Google and Meta.
- DonHopkins 3y agoStewart Butterfield developed a 2d massively multi player game called "Game Neverending": https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending It let users create and upload content like text and pictures, so it had a nice image uploader component and content management system. That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo bought. Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game) That didn't work out either, so he took the rooms based chat messaging back-end, and pivoted to an app named "Slack".
- Animats 3y agoDid not know that. Such a progression is not unexpected, though.
- notbeuller 3y ago
- mtillman 3y agoAlong these lines, my co-founder worked with Spielberg on an early virtual world for children with chronic diseases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbright_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbright_World. I'd be shocked if they didn't use some of these lessons from the Lucas ecosystem.
- luismedel 3y agoThis is great. I didn't know that Mutiny[0] from Halt And Catch Fire was based on a real service. [0] https://www.ryannelson.me/projects/hcf/ https://www.ryannelson.me/projects/hcf/
- CSMastermind 3y agoI love the subject matter of Halt and Catch fire but felt let down by the story telling.
- tsunamifury 3y agoYou felt let down by what is generally considered one of the best written shows of the 2010s? I say that because maybe you need to give it a second chance. Season 4 character payoff is some of the best tv ever period.
- bananaboy 3y agoPersonally I bounced off it pretty hard halfway through the first season. I really wanted to like it because of the subject matter but I found all the characters very unlikeable and unsympathetic. I didn’t find myself caring whether any of them succeeded.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoThat's exactly where I stopped. I really didn't understand why any of the characters were doing anything, and why I should care. The pacing was quite slow, I also didn't enjoy westworld for the exact same reason, so maybe i'm just not the right kind of person.
- fxd123 3y agoI enjoyed it but "best written shows of the 2010s" is an exaggeration
- tsunamifury 3y ago
- dannyobrien 3y agoNote that Randy Farmer is now the CEO of Spritely Institute, which is taking the lessons from Habitat and other work and applying them into the modern networking and social media context: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/
- shaunxcode 3y agoAwww that explains the habitat references in the irc channel! I mean I was happy about it but now it makes even more sense.
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822691 - April 2020 (1 comment) The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments) The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70180 - Oct 2007 (1 comment)
- dccoolgai 3y agoThis was later adapted into Club Caribe for Q-Link. I regard it as deeply unfair that only those of us born in a brief window of history got to experience the pure magic this represented at the time. It lit up areas of the imagination like nothing before or since.
- adamomada 3y agoEven if you were there at the time and had the equipment, don’t forget how expensive it was for someone to get on the service. I think it’s one of the main reasons (local) BBSes caught on: it was something to do with your $200 1200 bps modem that didn’t cost much
- mistrial9 3y ago.. definitely paid around $400 for a modem in the early 90s; 9600 baud with error correction and link safeties
- ghaff 3y agoEven relatively local BBSs could rack up the phone charges if you didn't have a very local dial-in. Intra-state long distance wasn't necessarily much cheaper than interstate. But the hourly charges by a service like Compuserve, especially at higher bit rates, were a lot.
- pastage 3y agoI racked up +$300 in monthly phone charges in my early teens, that was an early and hard lesson of the value of flat fees.
- 01100011 3y agoMy grandpa disowned me after running up $300 on qlink and another $300 in phone charges to BBSes when I was 12. I talked to him briefly on the phone twice after that in the next decade or so before he died and he never got over it.
- ulrischa 3y agoWow it was way ahead of its time! While we now have many online virtual worlds, Habitat did it when the internet itself was still in its infancy. It laid the foundation for many of the online multiplayer games and virtual spaces we see today.
- DonHopkins 3y agoHabitat had pie menus, and the Japanese version let you "bow" and perform other gestures and animations by stroking in different directions.
- DonHopkins 3y agoAlso by the authors of Habitat, Randy and Chip, presented at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure, by Chip Morningstar, June 1993. "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
- enahs-sf 3y agoChip was the first real software engineering mentor I ever had. He taught me about simplicity and the importance of getting software to work first and foremost. He also imparted the sage wisdom that premature optimization is the root of all evil.
- juliangamble 3y agoThis was written to a target audience who had all read Cyberpunk novels and imagined it as the future. See the references: [2] Gibson, William (1984), Neuromancer, Ace Books, New York. [3] Bruce Sterling, ed. (1986), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Arbor House, New York.
- mnky9800n 3y agoI would not wish neuromancer upon the future.
- bisq 3y agoI think the world of neuromancer would be an improvement over what awaits.
- mnky9800n 3y agoi look forward to having sex with your body while you are comatose collecting an hourly rate for the privilege.
- cmiller1 3y agoAhh, the classic Sci-fi author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Do Not Create The Torment Nexus
- jhbadger 3y agoGibson is of two minds about this. He's said he's bemused when people come up to him at a book signing thanking him for inspiring them to get into computing as a career (seemingly ignoring the problems of Neuromancer's future), but on the other hand he's said that people who say Neuromancer was dystopian forget that most SF writers in the 1980s doubted that there would be a 21st century society rather than a radioactive wasteland, so from that perspective Neuromancer was optimistic.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davexunit 3y agoYou can actually play Habitat today. Randy Farmer, one of the developers, has an open source project called Neohabitat that has preserved the game. http://neohabitat.org/ http://neohabitat.org/
- pbjtime 3y agoI fuckin love crowdsourcing
- VonGuard 3y agoThis was brought back to working order with the help of Randy, Chip, Mist64, StuBlad, McMartin, and some other folks who hacked away until it was brought back to working order. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (themade.org) undertook this work as the first ever institutional preservation of an MMO, and everything was accomplished for $0. The MADE is about to collaborate again with Randy and Chip on preserving Electric Communities, EC Habitat, and the Palace. The Museum has acquired legal waivers to begin this preservation project, and will undertake a hack-day on site January 13, 2024. Join us and help bring back history!
- smolder 3y agoI had forgotten all about The Palace. Very cool. (I assume you mean the visual chat client by that name?)
- bullen 3y agoThe real lesson is that the game media/medium does not lend itself to linear stories inherited from TV, that inherited from film, that inherited from theater. Games should only be multiplayer. Real-time action multiplayer. And they should NEVER have cutscenes. They also can't have music (except live) because 3D sound is paramount. And they should be open-source or source-available so we can improve and modify them. Habitat said all that and I think the article didn't but... you know... down votes without comment incoming!
- epolanski 3y agoThat's your personal take. I too believe gaming should be more about humans interacting, but there's millions of people out there that disagree and value the story of games.
- bullen 3y agoPeople expect comments to not be a personal take? Linear things destroy your mind, because you become a passive consumer. Producing is the only meaningful purpose in existence, but not for someone else, for yourself. Now it's too late, people are used to sitting on their ass and be entertained and pay for that by "working" for an "owner". Down votes without comment! Get off that couch and into a chair with a keyboard and mouse, then download a compiler and get cracking! It's not hard once you figure out that only Windows and linux can do it. And only linux on Risc-V is meaningful in the long term. We only explored 10% of the action MMO so far, PUBG has been the limit with it's janky controls and buggy/slow performance. Imagine a 1000 player 3D Mario, it's totally doable. Just do it!
- hoc 3y agoThat poor characterless tree.
- plexxer 3y ago> Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive -- some would say "toy" -- home computer to support user interaction > There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology -- developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64 The authors seem to have some opinions on the venerable C64.
- gopher_space 3y agoI remember it being popular to dislike Commodore but I can't remember why I looked down on the platform Psygnosis used to blow my mind.
- dredmorbius 3y agoI happened to note the use of the term "avatar" to refer to players' in-game representation. This pre-dates the 1992 date cited by the Online Etymological Dictionary (based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). I'm curious if there are earlier references which might exist, either up to the game's introduction in 1985 or perhaps even earlier still? <https://www.etymonline.com/word/avatar https://www.etymonline.com/word/avatar>