The Adventure begins again

Colossal Cave Adventure was the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation).

The advent of ADVENT

A marvellous thing has just occurred. Colossal Cave Adventure, the original progenitor of the D&D-like dungeon-crawling game genre from 1977 and fondly remembered as ADVENT by those of us who played it on PDP-10s, is one of the major artifacts of hacker history. The earliest version by Crowther and Woods (sometimes known as 350-point Adenture)… Continue reading The advent of ADVENT

PSA: “E-Shielder Security” and “CyberSec Buzz” are gangs of idiotic scum

This is a public service announcement: E-Shielder Security, describing itself as “leading importers and suppliers of high end electronic technology solution systems” is a gang of idiotic scum. Yesterday they posted a Hacktivists on the rampage in 2017, which largely reproduced my Hacker Archetypes post. They did so in obvious ignorance of who the hackers… Continue reading PSA: “E-Shielder Security” and “CyberSec Buzz” are gangs of idiotic scum

Hacker Archetypes

There’s a book about martial arts called On the Warrior’s Path that tries to understand the differing psychologies of martial artists through the lens of half a dozen archetypes – Seeker, Ronin, Tribal Warrior, and others. I have not yet read the book, but my friend and regular A&D commenter Susan Sons reports having found… Continue reading Hacker Archetypes

Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.12

Latest version, as usual, here. New stuff: Note just how crazily heterogenous the six-bit character sets were. FTP. Ctrl-V on Unix systems. A correction about uu{de|en}code. Timeline updates for ’74 and ’77. The pace of submissions continues to slow.

Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.11

The newest version of Things Every Hacker Once Knew is only a minor update. There’s material on SIGHUP; six-bit characters on 36-bit machines; a correction that XMODEM required 8 bits; and why screensavers are called that. New submissions are ramping down; I don’t expect to need to issue another update of this for some time.

Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6

The newest version is here. I think it’s stabilizing. The rate of comments and submissions has been dropping. Changelog: How VDTs explain some heritage programs, and how bitmapped displays eventually obsolesced them. Explain why the ADM-3 was called “dumb” even though it was smart. There’s also a mention of RS-323 on network gear. Still nothing… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6

Friends of Armed & Dangerous party 2016!

This year’s meatspace party for blog regulars and friends will be held at Penguicon 2016 On Friday, April 29 beginning at 9PM 10PM. UPDATE: Pushed back an hour because the original start time conflicted with the time slot assigned for my “Ask Me Anything” event. The venue is the Southfield Westin hotel in Southfield, Michigan.… Continue reading Friends of Armed & Dangerous party 2016!

Too clever by half

The British have a phrase “Too clever by half”, It needs to go global, especially among hackers. It can have any of several closely related meanings: the one I mean to focus on here has to do with overconfidence in one’s intelligence or skill, and the particular bad consequences that can have. It’s related to… Continue reading Too clever by half

This may be the week the SJWs lost it all

This may be the week the SJWs lost it all…or, at least, their power to bully people in the hacker culture and the wider tech community. Many of you probably already know about the LambdaConf flap. In brief: LambdaConf, a technical conference on functional programming, accepted a presentation proposal about a language called Urbit, from… Continue reading This may be the week the SJWs lost it all