johnhattan

Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.

There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended up, so I definitely could've won that challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.

Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM XT's.

While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.

I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.

The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.

Ahh, thanks for the link. The webcam covers I'd seen in the past were just removable plastic stickers, and I was having a hard time visualizing what counts as "thin".

One of the photos shows them be about as thick as a credit card.

I remember a conversation I had with my daughter in the car when she was starting out with algebra...

Me: Is 9.999... the same as 10, or is it just really close to 10?

Kid: Really close. It never gets all the way there.

Me: Well then how close? What do you get when you subtract 9.999... from 10?

Kid: (pause) An infinite number of zeroes. . .and then a one. . .wait, you can't do that.

Me: Right. You just have an infinite number of zeroes. Which is zero.

Kid: (pause) Oh, that's mind-blowing.

According to the blog post, one of their tasks is to release a version of the build tool that will work locally.

If it's a "correct" maze with exactly one way to get from any one square to any other square (as Eller's mazes are), then it doesn't matter where your entry and exit points are -- there's always one solution for any entry/exit pair you choose.

It was published in 1922, and the author died in 1945. Seems like that book is PD by any measure.

According to the article, it looks like Gutenberg adds a layer of "let a lawyer sign off on it", presumably to keep them from getting sued out of existence. Is that the case for Worm Ouroboros?

Yes I did. I just wanted to relate my personal experience with it. Sometimes I'll see an article about something new just to discover that it's actually for an update that's a couple of weeks away. In this case, I just wanted to verify that it's working as advertised.

Just tried it. Looks like the latest Windows update installs a stub that sends the Windows app-store to the Python installer page if you type "Python" from the command line.

FWIW, the publisher for the MS app-store Python is "Python Software Foundation" and it, far as I can tell, is just ordinary Python and not some MS-only weirdness. It adds start menu links to the Python REPL and the IDLE tool.

There's a good free audiobook version on librivox.org

I'd love to try out some old 16-bit and/or MS-DOS games on it. But I don't see a way to copy files into its sandbox. Anyone had any luck doing this?

That's always my problem when I look at lisp for game programming. If I say "I want to write a standalone 3D iPhone game using C#", there are plenty of sites that'll show me exactly what tools are out there, how they work together, and how to write/debug/package a complete game.

With Lisp, I often end up in the weeds looking at tools and tech that may or may not still be supported. I have a hard time figuring out a well-established set of tools that'll get me a first-class playable game in Lisp.

If anything I'm going to watch this game jam just to see what everyone's using and how good the results look.