retroNET - Vintage Culture/Websites/Software

You've probably heard of the famous 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' story. It claims that a programmer on the original Wing Commander was stuck getting an error message when the game unloaded its memory during a quit. Pressed for time, instead of fixing the issue he simply hex edited the memory manager's error reporting to print 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' instead. A funny and relatable story!

...

Wing Commander I fans, meanwhile, have been understandably cautious about the anecdote and particularly the included screenshot. For one thing, Wing Commander I's default install direction isn't c:/wc1 and the game doesn't actually print "Thank You for Playing Wing Commander!" when you quit. Is the story even real?

...note burning a hole in his pocket from Christmas and found a Casio RD-10 “card radio” on sale and grabbed it. He’s long-ago lost that one, but he was able to find a new old stock one and shows us the little gadget in the video below.

• Visionaries:
  Vannevar Bush
  Douglas Engelbart
  Alan Kay
  Ted Nelson
  Bret Victor

versus

• Regressives

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29790209

I love this art. I photocopied it this afternoon and figured you'd might like it.

The "teapot protocol" got brought up today at work during a discussion about response codes. It reminded me of the coffee cam, which actually led to the April fools joke in discussion.

I'm assuming this is in the scope of this community since Newgrounds was founded almost 30 years ago, tho I did notice posts here focus more on the small we than on bigger websites, so sorry if this post is perceived as inappropriate.

Newgrounds is a site for posting art, animations and games where I've had an account for a few years and I quite enjoy it. Since last year it's been becoming more pressing about asking for donations and morphing into a kind of "premium" model, where only donators get access to some stuff. I'm feeling a bit conflicted because I tend to shun sites with this model, but I also kinda understand that it might be necessary since hosting all that content probably costs a lot. But then again, it must have been costing a lot for a long time, and this comes up surrisingly close in time to the enshittification of Twitter and Reddit. Does anyone have any thoughts? Or maybe some more background knowledge about why Newgrounds has been making these decisions now in particular?

I want one so badly. I never see any for sale, not even in pieces.

Alternative Invidious Link

Here's a preview from the introduction of the article:

This ended up leading me down a series of wild rabbit holes where I found:

• Encrypted files which I was able to crack to discover their secrets
• A gift a dad in Thailand had made for his two and a half year old son, but didn’t want published online
• Somebody’s email password
• A secret biography of Chet Baker
• A file called worm.exe which held quite the surprise
• A host of extremely random images and files
• 56 previously unknown Winamp skins hidden inside other Winamp skins!

I love when the computer goes

*click*

mmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Alternative Youtube Link