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Episode 15 Notes - Playing Colossal Cave

Oct 23, 2019

One of the things that makes Colossal Cave Adventure such an fantastic game is that there are so many ways to play it. The game has been ported to just about any computer you can think of, and that development activity isn't limited to the past. There are quite a few recent web-based ports of the game engine. One my...


Oct 20, 2019

Colossal Cave Adventure is one of the most influential video games of all time. Originally written for the DEC PDP-10 mainframe in 1975 the game has not only spread to just about any computer out there, but it has inspired the entire adventure/RPG genera. In this episode we are going to look at how Adventure got it's...


Episode 14 Notes - Creeping Towards Viruses

Oct 9, 2019

Computer viruses in 2019 are a real threat, but that wasn't always the case. In fact, some of the earliest viruses were not even that real. A perfect example of this is The Scarred Man, a sci-fi short story written in 1969 by Gregory Benford. First published in Venture Science Fiction in 1970, The Scarred Man includes...


Oct 6, 2019

Computer viruses today pose a very real threat. However, it turns out that their origins are actually very non-threatening. Today, we are going to look at some of the first viruses. We will see how they developed from technical writing, to pulp sci-fi, to traveling code.

I talk about The Scarred Man by Gregory Benford...