I just finished reading Ready Player One → Geek flashback

8 responses to “I just finished reading Ready Player One → Geek flashback”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 17, 2014 at 7:02 am

   I highly recommend the book: The metaverse creator in Ready Player One is Halliday: "a god among geeks, a nerd über-deity on the level of Gygax, Garriott and Gates." That floored me. Gygax – of course, for D&D. Gates, well, not sure. But Garriott… Major props for that alliterative troika. I first met Garriott when we were teenagers; he was the programmer behind Ultima, the cool cat who called himself Lord British. Here are some reunion memories: Garriott could have been Halliday, with his trove of clues… And just like Perzival in the book, I felt compelled to take a screen shot of his early work…
   Even today, his “Britannia Manor” boasts an observatory, secret passageways and dungeons.

   Reply
2. 

   bfinney

   Apr 17, 2014 at 11:43 am

   That really brings back memories. I still have my original TRS-80 Model I and all of the software for it, including lots of cassettes like this. I bought that machine 35 years ago, and taught myself how to write software with it. Not easy since there was no internet, I had no-one to turn to for help, and I was 12. The only help available was magazines and news-letters to see what everyone else was doing with computers. There were so many companies offering computers of every shape and size to home hobbyists. Each one trying to build a personal computer that the masses could use. What an amazing and exciting time it was.

   Reply
3. 

   scleroplex

   Apr 17, 2014 at 3:32 pm

   my first was the Sinclair Spectrum 48K 🙂

   Reply
4. 

   bike-R

   Apr 17, 2014 at 4:50 pm

   Had the TIMEX TOO along with the TR-99A Texas Instruments, BTW watch the HISTORY of Sci-Fi on BBC America this Weekend, ….. http://www.bbcamerica.com/real-history-of-science-fiction/

   Reply
5. 

   r o s e n d a h l

   Apr 17, 2014 at 8:12 pm

   If you haven’t read them yet, you might also enjoy "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez (a great AR future, though a bit over the top near the end) and "Avogadro Corp" by William Hertling (about the singularity happening at a thinly veiled Google).

   Reply
6. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 17, 2014 at 9:07 pm

   [https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosendahl] — thanks! I recently bought Daemon at Elon Musk’s recommendation… and I suspect he will want to read that second one! From the fB discussion, I was reminded that I also want to read Hannu Rajaniemi’s quantum series. bike-R: My first programming experience was on the TI-58C, which my Dad brought home in 1977 from Texas Instruments. It was mostly an exercise in entering known programs, like Battleship. But I first experienced a fondness for open source code examples as a way for newbies like me to learn how to program… which carried forward to BASIC on the Apple ][ and HTML in 1995 for me.

   Reply
7. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 18, 2014 at 9:45 pm

   My son just showed me a peek into the future, with the low-res Apple ][ graphics of Minecraft.

   These time-lapse movies show the creation of intricate 3D worlds, built block-by-block by scores of contributors. These are not loaded constructs from MCEdit, but architectural marvels, manually built voxel by voxel.

   And they get paid for their work. The largest of the Minecraft Hunger Games servers need maps and 3D-renderings to explore, and they hire FryeUK, who contracts the work out to the virtual teams.

   After the time-lapse of the build, the video switches to a virtual walkthrough of the new creation, with better rendering of shadows, block fusing, and depth-of-field focal point changes.

   The figures jumping up and down at the end are the avatars of the builders.

   One of the 41 projects on the playlist shared the detail that it took 2.8TB of Raw Footage recorded over 7 days with two camera perspectives, and more than 50 people participated in building.

   When viewing in HD, it’s best to go full screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXXAmpfjOiA&list=PL6C732E31C7...

   Another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCylwSw48MQ&list=PL6C732E31C7...

   Reply
8. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 26, 2015 at 4:45 pm

   And now it is to be a movie, directed by Spielberg… Can’t wait!

   Reply