Entries tagged 'history'

1177 B. C. : The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline is about the collapse of the empires in the eastern Mediterranean in the early 12th century B.C. There seem to have been several factors, but the evidence that a mega-drought that impacted the area in that time may have been the most significant seems to me to be growing. What is fascinating is how unknown this history is, and the ways it has to be pieced together from various archeological digs, studies of climate change, and trying to fit it together with the stories that are attributed to these times (like the exodus of the Old Testament). What are future historians and archeologists going to have to do to piece together how our current empires fall?

Dr. Brain Thinking Games: IQ Adventure was one of first two games produced by Knowledge Adventure based on the earlier Dr. Brain games from Sierra Entertainment. KA and Sierra had wound up under the same corporate umbrella, and the “games group” at Knowledge Adventure that I was part of developed them. Our group handled three projects at the time: IQ Adventure, codename “Dime,” Dr. Brain Thinking Games: Puzzle Madness, codename “Nickel,” and the corporate website, codename “Penny.”

IQ Adventure is a third-person isometric puzzle/adventure game which was written in C++, and we used the networking and graphics library from Blizzard Entertainment (another corporate sibling). I was the lead programmer. We did some strangely ambitious things, one of which is that the game levels weren’t just laid out by hand, but we had a map specification language that was used to generate variations of the levels. Here is an example map that I was able to extract from the files on the CD. I couldn’t tell you how it works, really.

During our early prototyping, we did have a way of building environments by hand to test out artwork and the interface. It was just a mode in the game engine that let you “draw” with terrain tiles or place others into the environment. I remember before the team doing the artwork had created our main character, I prototyped with just a little whirling tornado that moved around so I could work on things like the path-finding algorithm.

The whole game was very data-driven. There was a text dialog system that let you interact with the NPC characters that was HTML-inspired. The animations of Dr. Brain giving you instructions were lip-synced using a tool that Knowledge Adventure had developed for their whole line of titles, which meant it was just audio files and frame timings that drove an eight-frame animation set. All of the puzzles and in-game quizzes were rule-based so they would be different on every playthrough. (Sorry to our QA team!)

Here’s a video I found someone playing through one of the levels (or more, I didn’t watch the whole thing).

The multiplayer was pretty simple but I also don’t remember much of the specifics. You could chat with other players, and because this was aimed at younger users there was a basic attempt at filtering out bad words, and I believe all of the chat was logged and someone from the customer service team was assigned to review it regularly, or maybe only when someone complained.

I wish that I still had the source code for the game and even the original media asset sources. In the released game, they were all rendered down to a 256 color palette because that was how things were at the time. I think it would be fairly straightforward to bring the game up on current platforms. You could probably even do it on WebAssembly or something else cross-platform. Unfortunately all of the filenames get lost when extracting the assets from the CD, so even just sorting them out to build something else with them would be pretty tedious. (Then again, the original game may still just work on a more current version of Windows that can run 32-bit apps, since I don’t think there was anything particularly fancy about it.)

I believe that Puzzle Madness was developed in Acomplish, the in-house proprietary multimedia scripting language that I blogged about earlier.

The third game in the series (from KA) , Dr. Brain Thinking Games: Action Reaction, was a first-person puzzle/shooter, and that was partly funded by Intel in their effort to drive adoption of the Pentium processor. It was developed using the Unreal Engine. The bad guys in that game worked for S.P.O.R.E.: Sinister People Organized Really Efficiently, which still makes me laugh. (I am pretty sure the codename for this one was “Quarter” but I didn’t work on it and left the company while it was being developed.)

I was doing a little more diving into Linux history, and ran across this thread from the alt.os.linux newsgroup from April 1992 where Paul Allen (not that one) suggested that distributions (which didn’t quite exist yet) should be source-based.

Binaries considered harmful

I may be missing something really obvious here, but I just don't see the need for all these binaries. I'd rather just have sources.

The most significant Linux distribution that ended up operating this way is Gentoo Linux, which is still going after almost 25 years.

This thread is also where Linus tells the story of how he lost the code to fsck to a bug in the VFS code.

As I add (or re-add) features to this blog again, I find myself spelunking in some of the archives and hitting a lot of dead links. I was a little curious to see what the oldest still-alive link was, and it brought me to this very short link post from the year 2000 to this article by Greg Beato about a media startup called Verde.com that made me think of recent stories about The Messenger, a media website that went bust in under a year.

I have to hold back from digging into this sort of thing too deeply, or I start to wonder what happened to Scient, or Peek Garlington, and suddenly a day is gone chasing geese.

I also came across this old post about the Los Angeles Times partnering with a technology company to launch an RSS reader application and got a little sad that I have never managed to work my way into a job that is journalism-adjacent. Not because I want to take the money and run, but because I think it is a space where I could tremendously effective given enough of a mandate to do so.

i am not sure what triggered it, but i started diving into the public record of my early involvement with linux via the usenet archives on google and collection at oldlinux.org, particularly the archives of the old linux-activists email list.

the first version of the linux kernel that i was able to run was 0.11. (the 0.10 kernel wouldn’t run on my machine because i still just had a monochrome monitor and mga video card.) at the time, the release consisted of two floppy disk images. the “boot” image went in first and was the linux kernel. once the kernel was loaded, you had to pop in the “root” image which had a basic collection of utilities that you could use to install the system.

there was no networking support in the kernel yet, so “installing” to a hard drive basically consisted of setting up a couple of partitions for the kernel and root disk, and copying things into place. there was a utility called “mtools” that could read DOS-formatted disks or partitions, but what i often did was just dump tar files to a floppy from DOS and read them back after rebooting into my linux partition. eventually you could bootstrap your way into having some sort of serial communications so you could use a modem to dial out and transfer files with something fancy like kermit. (i think we had hardwired serial connections in our dorm rooms at harvey mudd college when i first started working with linux.)

at the time, there were no other distributions. gcc had been ported and you could download the binaries and then start compiling anything else you could find. people would upload things they had compiled to tsx-11.mit.edu and nic.funet.fi, the two hubs of linux distribution. my first mail to the linux-activists list was saying that i had ported unzip and zoo and some other things to linux. (which probably did not involve much porting, really.)

i don’t have records of how this happened, but somehow i volunteered to take over maintenance of the “root” image from linus, and so the official release of linux 0.95 was a boot disk (kernel) from linus and a root disk from me. there was an INSTALL shell script which you could use to get things set up on a hard drive partition. we did a couple of releases that way, and then distributions kind of rapidly filled the space, starting with mcc interim linux.

Distribution Service

Linux has been written entirely by volunteers who have been working on their own time, and I don't think that should change. I also don't think it's fair that someone take what has been written for free by people and try and sell it to turn a buck (i.e. make a living doing so). How fair is that to those of us who contribute our time freely?

i am not sure when it shifted, if it was gradual or sudden, but i do not agree with what i wrote back then (1992!) about the fairness of someone building a business on what someone else has given freely. that has always been a central tension in what became known as the open source community, and you even see it coming up in current discussions about the training data used by generative “AI” systems.

(also, another quote: “I cannot see Linux being a full-time thing for anyone at this point, really.” oops!)

if you have ever checked out a science fiction book from the los angeles public library, odds are good that there is a bookplate inside the cover with the name “irving l. sepkowitz.”

irv sepkowitz died in 1992, and was a television executive. he was involved in negotiating to keep larry hagman on dallas after the infamous “who shot j.r.?” cliffhanger.

he was also a prankster during his days at ucla. one of the pranks he was involved with was dropping 500 pounds of manure on the tommy trojan statue. a comedy screenplay award, the SEPPI, was named after him, and so is sepi’s, a submarine shop near the ucla campus.

i’ve been poking around in the historical archives (pre-1985) of the los angeles times. here’s an interesting factoid: “los angeles was the first city in the united states to entirely abandon gas for street lighting and replace it by electricity, which was done january 1, 1888.”

and here’s a great blurb from the august 10, 1886 “briefs” column: “officer fonck brought in a man, last night, from los angeles street, who was dead drunk, and so filthy that it caused the officer to lose his four-bit dinner.”

one of the reasons i’ve been digging around is that in this obituary for james pulliam, i noticed that the writer claimed there was some renovation of the central library that was completed in 1987. i thought this was obviously wrong, because the two fires in the central library were in 1986, and the renovation of the library was not completed until 1993. looking at the articles where pulliam is quoted in 1979, they are about a renovation project that was never done. charles luckman, another los angeles architect, had proposed a renovation that would have added two new wings to the library, and had elevators in the central rotunda. the city council killed that plan in september 1979, and plans for the renovation that did happen did not start to gel until a few years later.

the person with the times who first responded to my correction appears to be on vacation for a few days, so maybe they’ll correct the obituary after my latest volley. (or not, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a very big deal.)

this piece in the new york times looks at how people appear on the news are getting out their side of the story, and one thing it astutely points out is that an advantage that organizations like the discovery institute or people like me have is that our content doesn’t disappear inside a pay-for-access archive after a few weeks. for the foreseeable future, you’ll be able to come back to this entry to see what i’ve said. this article is something i linked to in the los angeles times almost five years ago (here). the link doesn’t even offer to sell me the article, it just wants me to contact their archive department who may or may not be able to figure out what the article actually was. as a counter-example, here’s a new york times article where i’m offered an archive copy of the article. and here’s an even older one that is still freely available.

i ran across this little anecdote while digging up more information adelaide hasse, an assistant librarian in the los angeles public library’s early days (from a biography of adelaide hasse):

“Hasse also had contact with Melvil Dewey. While trying to seek support for publishing her grand series, Index of Economic Material in Documents of the States of the United States, correspondence indicates that Dewey arranged a meeting with Hasse at which he acted inappropriately. As it turns out, Hasse was one of several women toward whom Dewey’s behavior was less than appropriate.”

the actual circumstances are murky, because hasse had no interest in having them dealt with publicly.

working on a secret project, i ran across “at the pleasure of the board: women librarians and the los angeles public library, 1880–1905,” an excellent article about some of the early city librarians of the los angeles public library system.